The Pillars of Eternity II beta finally received its third update this week, after almost two months of increasingly unnerving silence on that front. It's almost certainly the final update before release, and so it was crucial for many backers to see that it resolves their issues. And indeed it appears that the game is in much better shape now. Changes include the addition of many passive abilities to increase build flexibility, allowing single-classed characters to take two abilities at every power level to make them feel less inflexible compared to multi-classed characters, reduced spell cast durations, increased penetration values, and also much-improved performance. Furthermore, the attribute overhaul from the first beta update has been rolled back, replaced with a relatively minor additional benefit for the Resolve attribute - reduced duration of hostile effects.

Yesterday we got to see some of those changes in action in a Q&A stream with Josh Sawyer. At this point in the game's development, I can't say that there was anything incredibly new in his responses, but the stream did give us our first actual look at non-beta content, including companions. It's set in the Old City, a dungeon located under the slums of Neketaka, and is pretty combat-heavy and spoiler-free.


A transcript of the stream is available here courtesy of Fereed from Reddit. There will be another Q&A stream before release, and there's also a proper Fig update coming soon.