The Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire crowdfunding campaign on Fig is cruising right along, and now sits at nearly $2.1 million dollars on a $1.1 million goal, with 21 days remaining. In the latest backer update video (which you can watch even if you're not a backer), game director Josh Sawyer went into detail about how Obsidian is handling multiclass characters: What the term means, how it will work, and what sort of advantages and disadvantages those multi-talented types will bring to the party.
Each character in Pillars of Eternity 2 will have the option of choosing a primary class and a sub-class, and will be able to advance and alternate between them at will. You can mix and match classes as you like, but two will be the limit: Sawyer said that it starts to get "muddy" once you start dealing with three or more classes for a single character.
With the help of a whiteboard, he also explained how Obsidian aims to avoid the pitfalls that sometimes plague multi-class characters. Pillars 2 will use a system of class-based "power levels" and "power points" to determine a character's advancement, with the goal of giving them a consistent "power efficacy range" of about 75-85 percent of a comparable single-class character. A seventh-level fighter/mage, for instance, will have a power level of three in its primary class, compared to a power level of four for a level seven single-class fighter or mage.
"We hope overall that this system is giving you a lot of very cool class build options. If you just want to make a character that you think is a cool concept, you're not going to get hamstrung or wind up with a dead-end, non-viable build," Sawyer said in the video. "And if you're a min-maxer, and you're already looking at this math, you very certainly can min-max the heck out of this. So we're hoping that it appeals to people that are a little more on the less-hardcore side, but also the min-maxers as well."
The Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Fig campaign runs until February 24.
