Do you remember Pillars of Eternity? While Obsidian might be best known for Fallout: New Vegas and their latest title, Avowed, older PC gamers might remember them from their CRPG days. Obsidian was a pretty strong mark of quality, though often relegated as the follow-up team. Before Fallout: New Vegas, Bethesda’s follow-up to Fallout 3, Obsidian developed Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords and Neverwinter Nights 2. Taking to Kickstarter in the early days of crowdfunding, Obsidian managed to raise money to make an RPG in their own world and found quite a bit of success in that. And here on its 10th anniversary, Obsidian is still supporting Pillars of Eternity.
Creating a world and place setting that evoked the imagery of the Infinity Engine, best known for its use in older Bioware titles, Pillars of Eternity was a fresh CRPG experience when it released 10 years ago. While no genre truly dies, Japanese RPGs had finally found their 3D footing in the early 2010s and you wouldn’t be wrong for thinking the Western RPG was on its way out. Obsidian took to Kickstarter in 2012 and asked the gaming community if anyone still wanted these old-school relics of the past. The community responded, raising nearly 4 million dollars out of the $1,100,000 initial goal. 73,986 people said, “We want this and we’re willing to put our money where our mouths are.” An impressive feat, and although, sadly, they had to take to Kickstarter to get this project going, it was heartening to see so many people had faith in Obsidian at the time.
Pillars of Eternity Patch 1.3.8.0.87535 is Live!
I love that I get to share this news because it speaks to how much a developer cares about their titles when they’re still releasing patches after so long. To put it into perspective, Pillars of Eternity isn’t even the most recent Pillars of Eternity game in Obsidian’s library, with Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire, the critically acclaimed follow-up to Pillars of Eternity, releasing in 2018. Likewise, just last month Obsidian released their latest big RPG, Avowed, which just got its major 1.3 patch two weeks ago. While fans of the game have noticed the patch, if you check the patch notes thread on the Obsidian forums, would anyone notice if they left the game as is? It’s 10 years old! I’m not going to list all of the patch notes, there’s quite a bit in there. But the General Fixes & Platform Support section is quite interesting.
- Mac users may now access the latest updates and bug fixes without issue.
- Resolved a longstanding issue where the game would boot to a black screen on systems using Turkish and certain other non-Latin-based language settings.
- GOG Achievements should now unlock correctly.
- Kickstarter and Backer rewards on Steam and GOG are once again granted properly to new players.
- Steam Linux users: support is now live and will be maintained in future patches.
- Epic Games Store users will now properly receive their Royal Edition digital rewards.
- Saved games now sort by most recent activity, regardless of save type (Manual, Auto, or Quick).
These are some pretty huge fixes for a 10-year-old game. Especially one with no multiplayer functionality. The two things that stand out most to me are the Mac version patch parity and the support for a Linux version. After Microsoft announced it’d start charging for features in Notepad, I finally threw in the towel and switched over to Linux full-time. As you can imagine, as a gamer and someone who writes about games professionally, this has its challenges. I’m incredibly grateful every time a developer works on Linux support. The patch notes are quite extensive and fix a lot of long-standing bugs that Pillars of Eternity has had.
A Promise of Things to Come
Along with the patch notes for Patch 1.3.8.0.87535 comes a little extra gift on the Obsidian BlueSky account. Despite being a 10-year-old game, Obisidan is working on a new Turn-Based Combat mode for Pillars of Eternity.
Not just improving the existing experience but adding new game modes. Incredible work, Obsidian. Again, this seemed so unnecessary and I imagine the community is just so grateful for the patch. You can view all the notes in the thread on the Obsidian forums, or on the Steam patch notes.
