Josh Sawyer, design director at Obsidian, says their studio lacked the experience and infrastructure to make the same leap as Larian with turn-based gameplay.

PCGamer asked Sawyer about the rise of turn-based combat over real-time with pause (RTWP) in modern RPGs, and why that shift happened. It raised the question: how did Larian successfully reinvent the franchise with turn-based combat, while Obsidian stuck to its original approach?

Sawyer explained that fans of Pillars of Eternity might have been upset if RTWP had been excluded. The tension between nostalgic Kickstarter backers and the studio’s ambition to push forward was something Sawyer explored in his 2016 GDC presentation. Ultimately, Obsidian added a turn-based mode to the sequel, Deadfire, through a major post-launch update.

“It was never our tech”

“I have always preferred turn-based to RTWP. Especially with Deadfire, I think we did a good job making RTWP more accessible, but I’m glad that turn-based is coming out on top. Hopefully, one day I’ll get to work on a turn-based RPG,” Sawyer said.

“I don’t want to say they got away with it in Baldur’s Gate 3, but they pushed through because Larian already had a turn-based engine, and we didn’t,” he continued.

“We did South Park: The Stick of Truth, but besides that, we’d never really made a turn-based game. We couldn’t claim it was our engine or that it was built for turn-based. Larian had that technology, and I think people trusted them more because they loved Divinity. Divinity: Original Sin 2 sold incredibly well. So if you liked that, you knew what to expect,” he concluded.

Hopefully, Obsidian will one day build a fully turn-based RPG of its own.

Source: PCGamer