The Decade’s Hardest-Working RPG Creator May Borrow From Final Fantasy
Put a grid on it.
Obsidian Entertainment just released the best role-playing game of the year so far, and the team has another promising game on the way. But while we know what 2025 has in store for the prolific Xbox Games Studios developer, its design director gave fans an idea of what they’d like to work on afterward.
Josh Sawyer, the director and lead designer of Obsidian’s Fallout: New Vegas and Pillars Of Eternity, spoke candidly about the studio’s future during last weekend’s L.A. Fires fundraiser Twitch stream. As first reported by PC Gamer, Sawyer revealed that Obsidian is interested in making another game set in the Pillars Of Eternity universe, but this time a tactical RPG in the vein of Fire Emblem or Final Fantasy Tactics.
“Pillars: Tactics is a thing that a lot of people would like, a lot of people at the studio would like to work on; there are a lot of people that like tactics games,” Sawyer said. “The difficulty is figuring out a scope of it, in terms of ‘how many people?’ and ‘what sort of visual quality are we going for?’ and ‘how big is it?’
All of these risks, he went on to explain, are related to finding “a scope of development where it feels like it could actually make money,” as “tactics games have a very enthusiastic fanbase, but that fanbase is not humongous.”
Obsidian’s concerns about balancing a passion project with the harsh realities of releasing a successful game is an eternal struggle for modern developers. However, there are few studios more qualified to branch out into such a promising idea.
A hypothetical Pillars: Tactics would further expand the growing Pillars Of Eternity universe.
For a decade now, Obsidian has been a master of making compelling titles that don’t have an unwieldy scope. From Pentiment, a beautifully written game that started as a passion project for Sawyer, to The Outer Worlds, which condensed the best parts of Fallout: New Vegas into a replayable adventure, and now Avowed’s lean fantasy adventure, Obsidian’s RPGs buck the “bigger and longer is better” trend that often balloons budgets.
As Avowed showed many players (including myself) for the first time, the Pillars Of Eternity universe is riveting. Its mish-mash of colonial-era technology, fantasy magic, and political intrigue between opposing factions have made me a fan. As risky as a tactics game might be, the quality of the stories that can be told in the universe has already been made evident.
A tactics game would be the perfect way to ease right back into the world of Eora without Obsidian having to develop another game as detailed as Avowed so soon. So long as Obsidian retains some player choice and compelling companion relationships, Pillars: Tactics would further refine the franchise. Seeing how Obsidian had managed to boil down genres players love into fantastic, focused experiences makes me very interested in this tentative follow-up.
So long as I have compansions as cool as the ones in Avowed, I’m all for a tactics game set in the Pillars Of Eternity universe.
Such a game would also whet players’ appetite for the inevitable Pillars Of Eternity 3, a game Sawyer has also said Obsidian wants to make, as long as the studio can get a budget as big as Baldur’s Gate 3. Given today’s climate of layoffs and studio closures, I’d typically wince at any developer who wants to make a massive blockbuster. But if any team deserves the right to dream about a mega-project with a titanic budget, it’s probably the developer that’s been making frugal bangers for well over a decade now.
For now, however, Obsidian is enjoying the success of its latest release. Game director Carrie Patel told Bloomberg that the company is happy with how Avowed has sold so far, and even shared the fact that she’s hopeful for expansions and sequels. That’s another promising sign for players entranced with Obsidian’s fantasy world.
