While we do have a certain big RPG release to look forward to this week, I'm still sort of pining for Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity, which was delayed into the first quarter of 2015.
Luckily designer Josh Sawyer and Youtuber Jesse Cox sat down to play an extended session of the fantasy RPG recently, and you can check out the results here.
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Before you jump in, you should note that there are some minor spoilers for the first few mission areas here. Nothing too drastic, but if you want to jump into the game sight unseen when it's fully released, you may want to give this a miss - most of the content on display hasn't been shown before.
This time around Obsidian showed off the Wizard class, as well as the very imposing 'fire godborn' race. Wizards are ranged damage-dealers, as you'd expect, but at such low levels there's not really any space to dig into their more interesting skills. Still, there's a few combat situations and a nice look at some of the levelling up options. We also meet one of the first hireable NPCs, an elven wizard. This stuff is like catnip for me.
So the game looks great, but my one worry is that even in this short stream you can see a few bugs here and there - the Backer Beta has been notoriously buggy, and Obsidian aren't exactly known for polished final products. Hopefully the team can clear some of that up by the time the game releases in February 2015. Pre-orders for Pillars of Eternity opened up recently.