RPG legend Josh Sawyer doesn't think Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire's launch would have been any better for following the same early-access model as Baldur's Gate 3, even if he admits Obsidian's approach wasn't "perfect."
Pillars of Eternity and its sequel, Deadfire, both had backer betas – exactly as the name suggests, granting early access to eligible backers of the RPGs. In a new video on his YouTube channel (below), Sawyer, the director of both games, is asked if he'd change anything about the backer beta process if he could do it again.
Sawyer notes that game balance wasn't the "primary focus" of the betas, but rather the "overall experience," with the devs at Obsidian hoping to get a grasp of how players felt about everything from "how quests work," to "how dialogue is presented," and the character builds they can make.
"My approach for our backer betas was to use side content," he says. "Things that the player was going to see at some point during the game, toward the middle, not necessarily a load-bearing part of the game. Important, but if it wound up being a little bit of dip in quality because we started early and had to iterate on it a lot and the players in the beta saw it a ton, it wasn't going to really dramatically impact the overall experience and perception of quality."
Sawyer notes that despite the benefits the backer beta brought, "the big miss for us was we really did not have time to do balance passes for Veteran and Path of the Damned" difficulties in Pillars of Eternity 2.
"There were a lot of things to tune and that just didn't get the attention," he continues. "That's my fault. And we did patch that within about two weeks of launch, and we did have to play a lot of catch-up on it. I don't think it's the worst thing in the world, but I would have preferred that we had prioritized that earlier in retrospect. That's on me. And it wasn't really about what the backer beta did, it was about how I had people use their time toward the end of the development cycle."
He then points to Larian Studios' Baldur's Gate 3, which released an early access version of its first act in late 2020, almost three years before the full RPG launched. "I would say that even if we had used, let's say, the beginning of the game," he says. "So, as an example, Baldur's Gate 3, their backer beta, if I recall correctly, was more focused on the early game. And I still think we would have had the same issues, because a lot of the issues were evident because they got magnified over the course of the game.
"The later you get in the game, the more the balance gets out of whack just because there are more numbers inputting into the system. Obviously, you can say that it's evident even in the early game, but I still think we would have run into the same problems if I had prioritized things the same way," he continues. "I don't think shifting the focus or where it went would have made it turn out better.
"And also – and this is not a slam against BG3, but just a sort of recognition – at launch, a lot of people really did not speak fondly of how the third act of BG3 was balanced, and that's probably because a ton of people saw the beginning of the game, the early game, and then the mid-game got a lot of testing. And as is very common in game development, something slipped through the cracks and they later addressed it."
Moving forward, then, even though Sawyer says "I don't think that the way that we ran the backer betas on Pillars 1 or 2 were perfect," he notes that "I also don't think they were terrible or anything." He concludes: "I think I would make better choices about how I spent our resources toward the end of development, though."
