Following Beast of Winter, Pillars of Eternity 2’s next DLC is Seeker, Slayer, Survivor, a completely different type of adventure that places players into a gladiatorial arena fighting for the glory of Galawain, god of the hunt.​

The Seeker Survivor Slayer DLC was shown off at Gamescom 2018, and we were able to discuss the ideas behind it with the expansion’s director, Brandon Adler.

“It’s heavily focused on combat, we’re trying to play around with that,” Adler says. But he makes clear that this isn’t just a standard arena mode: “The fights are not just ‘grab a bunch of creatures, throw them in an arena and have a fight’. One of the fights is two wizard brothers that are fighting each other, and they both cast different types of magic. They put giant wards on the ground to protect themselves from their brother’s magic, and so you jump between those wards whenever you’re trying to avoid spells.”

The DLC’s title is drawn from the three forms of fights that you’ll conduct within the arena: seeker, survivor, and slayer matches.

“All the fights have a little puzzle to figure out,” Adler explains. “In seeker type fights you have to find something special about the fight, like a set of spiders with regenerating properties where and you have to figure out which is the queen spider [who you must defeat] so you can take out the others.”

Survivor fights are, as the same suggests, about staying alive through a series of enemy waves. Slayer fights are tough in a different way: “they’re big hard creatures that kill you quickly and you have to kind of smash and grab,” Adler explains.

While arena combat is the focus of this DLC, don’t expect to be confined to the walls of a colosseum. “There’s still a lot to go and do,” Adler says. “There’s lots of other places you’re exploring to go and find artefacts to bring them back.”

These artefacts are sacrificed within the arena in order to summon each suite of fights, and so the exploration elements are just as vital to the experiences as the arena fights themselves.

“The DLC takes place on a pretty big island, so there’s all the random encounters and lots of scripted interactions and storybook scenes scattered around, too,” Adler adds. “It has a full story that you’re exploring just like Beasts of Winter.”

“The island itself has been calling competitors, and it’s made the animals and the natives full of bloodlust,” Adler explains. “And so the Watcher is trying to figure out what is going on and what kind of connection it has to the greater story of Pillars.”
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Since work on the main Pillars of Eternity 2 base game wrapped, studio design director and RPG legend Josh Sawyer is no longer involved in the core creative direction of the game’s post-release content. But that’s not to say he’s not a key member of the Pillars 2 crew; while he’s not the captain of the paid-for DLC expansions, Sawyer is still a guiding hand on the game’s free DLC God Challenges.

Talking to us at Gamescom 2018, Sawyer explains the idea behind these top-level challenges: “They are special modes where, for example, in the Berath challenge, any character that is knocked out for six seconds dies.” Think of these as mutators or modifiers for your campaign that alter the core rules of the game, making progression just that little more tricky.

And Berath’s challenge isn’t the toughest by any means. “Magran’s challenge is even crazier. You can’t slow the game and you can’t pause the game, so everything has to be played with real time without pause and the AI system, which is really hard,” Sawyer says.

The game is soon to patched with the first two God Challenges in update 2.0.1 – Abydon and Skaen – and further gods, including Berath and Magran, will be added over time. “We’re planning on introducing a God Challenge for every god, and that’ll all be through our free DLC,” says Josh, indicating that there will be 11 challenges for the 11 gods in the Pillars pantheon.

For those who had been worried that Sawyer stepping away from the leading role would affect the game’s long-term quality, it appears that there’s little to be concerned about. “I’m the design director of the studio so I’m helping out on other projects, but I do wanna make sure Deadfire continues to get refined and features new content,” Sawyer says. “Even for people who don’t get the DLC, because I think people appreciated that in Pillars 1 that we kept supporting and trying to add things through our patches over time.”

Keep an eye out for the first challenges to be added to the game later this month.​