Pillars of Eternity has been an incredible success for Obsidian Entertainment and has even helped to continue the revival of the isometric CRPG genre. Now the first expansion, The White March Part 1, is on the way featuring a lot of great new content.
Pillars of Eternity The White March increases the level cap, adds two new characters and adds beautiful new areas to explore.
Obsidian Entertainment and Paradox Interactive showed a demo of the new features that'll be included in the newest expansion to Pillars of Eternity. New areas inspired by Icewind Dale replete with alluring snow-covered environments. There are of course new dungeons to explore and fortresses to raid with hordes of ogres infesting the new areas.
The two new characters being introduced are integral parts of the story. Zahua is a monk from the Tacan that embodies the spiritual ideals of his people. He's addicted to hallucinogenic drugs as part of his belief system and also self-inflicts pain in order to achieve enlightenment. He's an incredibly powerful character with a lot of back story to discover.
The Devil of Caroc is the other new character and is a bronze golem who actually has the soul of a convicted murderer within her. Having let a passing army through her town, Cold Morn, during the Saint's War, her actions led to the destruction of everyone she knew and held dear. She's been seeking revenge on those that destroyed everything she loved.
Fans have been very receptive to the scripted interactions that were in the base game, so more of those interactions are going to be included in the expansion. Scripted interactions are an expression of basic outcomes through interacting with a sort of dungeon master, choosing an option to pursue when presented with an opportunity that isn't easily translated in any other way in game. Say you find a hole in the ground that you can hop down, the game transitions into a cool illustrated screen with a number of actions you can choose. The result of that action is based on the rolling of dice and leads to other choices and eventually a final outcome.
Something that was perhaps missing from the original release of Pillars of Eternity was an easy way to script the AI of your party. Now you'll be able to easily set
More choice is also going to be added. There's going to be a lot more ways for completing quests. It's not all about killing everything, unless you want it to be. You can sweet talk your way out of situations or even take a completely different approach. The idea is to help introduce more open environments.
And of course little enhancements are included throughout. More easily to manage party AI lets you select to either be aggressive or not at the click of a button, making it far more simple to manage your entire party. There's no longer a need to micromanage the AI stance. A higher level cap, multi-class talents to improve character progression and soulbound weapons that give have different powers and and attributes to make for stronger attacks and the chance to perform certain abilities.
There's no hard release date for the expansion yet, but it's coming soon and will include update 2.0 with plenty of other "quality of life improvements" as well. If you're a backer and already purchased the first part expansion, you'll also be receiving the second part of this expansion.
