Hope Springs: Pillars Of Eternity Expansion Out This Month
Jog on
A few months ago, Obsidian Entertainment teased out a total non-release date for its first expansion to the RPG Pillars of Eternity [official site]. With only a "Coming Soon" label tagged on to the end of its announcement trailer in June, things have been fairly quiet in the time since. Until now, anyhow. The White March - Part I will be coming out on August 25th, the team announced at Gamescom this week. As we mentioned before, it's bringing with it a level cap increase, new companions and abilities, new areas to explore, and a new storyline.
You can watch those bullet points in CGI trailer form below. The base game is apparently quite good, says RPS' Premier Jaded Northerner Adam Smith. He describes Pillars as an "open-character" rather than open-world RPG, which sounds fascinating. Here's what he says about it:
"Pillars of Eternity is a free-form game. It’s heavily scripted of course, as much about story as RPG systems (and story IS, perhaps, the ultimate RPG system), but it offers a model of “open” gaming that runs against the trend of open world adventuring. There's plenty to do in Obsidian’s latest and you're likely to end up with a sizable log of ongoing quests, but the emphasis is always on your approach to those tasks and side stories rather than the sheer quantity of them.
"It's an open character game rather than an open world game, and where the structure of many modern RPGs might ask 'Which of the 5,000 available quests do you want to tackle next?', Pillars is usually asking a more ambitious follow-up question: 'How do you want to tackle it?'"
