With Xbox RPG Avowed Waiting in the Wings, Obsidian Has Updated Pillars of Eternity

ign.com:

Obsidian has surprised its fans by releasing an update for the near nine-year-old role-playing game Pillars of Eternity.

The update, spotted by GamesRadar, does not add new content to the game, but makes a number of important bug fixes.

Obsidian released the isometric RPG in March 2015 as a spiritual successor to the Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale series. The developer raised over $4 million on Kickstarter to build Pillars of Eternity two years before. IGN’s Pillars of Eternity review returned a 9/10. “Obsidian (and its Kickstarter backers) have done it: Pillars of Eternity is one of the best RPGs since Baldur's Gate,” we said.

Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire followed in 2018, but low sales appeared to have dampened prospects for a third game in the series. Why, then, would Obsidian return to Pillars of Eternity now, while it's busy with the upcoming Xbox RPG Avowed, The Outer Worlds 2, and the ongoing Grounded?

Perhaps Obsidian is seeing renewed interest in Pillars of Eternity following the release of Baldur's Gate 3, which appears to have sparked something of a revival of the cRPG genre as well as boosted Dungeons & Dragons.

It seems unlikely Pillars of Eternity 3 is in the works, of course. Last year, Obsidian's studio design director Josh Sawyer said he would make Pillars of Eternity 3 but only if the game had the kind of monster budget the phenomenally successful Dungeons & Dragons RPG Baldur’s Gate 3 enjoyed: "I think if it truly was an unlimited budget, I think I would try Pillars 3 because I know what the budget was for [Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire], which was not a whole lot and I have heard from multiple people what the budget was for Baldur’s Gate 3, and I’m not gonna talk about numbers, but if I got that