Pillars of Eternity 2 devs accidentally added turn-based combat this week

The developers of Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire, the best RPG of the year, temporarily added turn-based combat to the game this week before hastily removing it—but not before players grabbed screenshots and gameplay footage.

Reddit user raggnarok first flagged the new combat mode, which was added on Thursday and removed a few hours later in a hotfix. In turn-based combat, each character could move a limited distance and perform one action per term, raggnarok said. You can see two of their screenshots below, one showing combat in action, the other showing a save game that has a "turn-based mode" marker on it (click the icon in the top-right to fullscreen),

You can also watch some footage of combat in the turn-based mode here.

Developer Obsidian Entertainment hasn't yet commented on the mode, so nobody is quite sure what to think, but perhaps it's working on a full-blown turn-based mode and pulled the trigger prematurely. Such a mode would completely change the balance of combat and, I suspect, require a full-scale rework of many skills and spells.

Alternatively, this might mean nothing: perhaps it's something Obsidian was working on at one point and then abandoned. Let's wait and see.

For more on why Deadfire was the best RPG of the year, read Andy's review here.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.