Paradox Interactive had a 15 minute slot on Twitch's E3 broadcasting schedule today. That slot ended up being filled by none other than Josh Sawyer, who quickly got down to showing off some Pillars of Eternity: The White March gameplay footage. Seven minutes of it. And you thought they were just going to show a stupid trailer.



Interesting takeaways:

• According to Josh, the expansion pack (both parts) is supposed to take a total of six months to develop, although it's unclear if that timeframe is still relevant now that it's been split.
• The expansion starts out in a village called Stalwart which is besieged by ogres. It is not another megadungeon.
• New UI features include new targeting circles and a hit chance display.
• Yes, the expansion is directly inspired by Icewind Dale. It'll have lots of winter variants of existing monsters, and some new ones too.
• In what may be a first for the genre, the expansion will have optional level scaling. It will ask if you want the encounters scaled to your level - which may be a good idea if you go there late in the game, as otherwise they might be too easy.
  
• Obsidian are implementing a limited form of multiclassing, by allowing you to learn weaker versions of other class' core abilities. Those are the "multi-class talents" we read about earlier.
• The reason there's no release date yet is that Obsidian decided to add more areas to make the expansion longer. But we already knew that was going to happen.

Also, there are ogres with bazookas. Just saying.

Update: A new Kickstarter update for the Pillars of Eternity: Lords of the Eastern Reach card game has revealed the identities of two of the expansion pack's companions. They are the Devil of Caroc, a robot-like "rogue construct", and Zahua, a monk. There's also a third companion that they're not allowed to reveal yet. Perhaps he'll be in the second part of the expansion?