The Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire beta has been out for just over two weeks, but it hasn't taken long for the community to identify the things they don't like about it. Just two days after the beta's release, Josh Sawyer had already published a tweetstorm responding to the most common complaints, regarding the game's diminished spell selection for traditional casters, combat speed, the removal of general talents, and other issues. Most people would have been happy to get a new version with just those issues addressed, but Josh had further plans. This Tuesday he published another tweetstorm announcing his decision to experiment with abandoning the concept of the Might attribute (an iconic and oft grognard-lamented element of the first game), replacing it with a more traditional Strength attribute affecting only physical damage (including ranged) and moving spell damage to Resolve in order to make that attribute more attractive. This decision proved so controversial that Josh had to follow up with an extended blog post explaining his reasoning.

It may not be a coincidence that with all of this happening, Obsidian decided on rather short notice to run another Pillars of Eternity II Q&A stream this weekend. The special guest this time was Brian Heins, formerly the project director of Tyranny, now revealed to be a senior designer on Deadfire with the conclusion of that game's development. With the beta now in the wild, the questions asked in this stream were more on point than in previous Q&A sessions. In addition to clarifying some of the game's known issues and recently announced changes, Josh and Brian also revealed new plans to tweak the incentives for resting by removing or reducing the maximum health penalty imposed by injuries. One thing not mentioned in the stream is when this ambitious new beta update is coming out. You can watch the whole thing here:


For those of us who don't have time to watch, the great Fereed has once again come through with a transcript of the Q&A stream. I wonder if these are going to be more common now.