Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity turn-based combat mode is almost here

Earlier this year, the Obsidian Entertainment-developed role-playing game Pillars of Eternity celebrated its 10th anniversary. At the same time, the developer revealed that it will be returning to the classic title with a major new patch, plus a completely different combat system later. Now, it's almost time for that turn-based combat mode to land.

At launch, and for the past 10 years, Pillars of Eternity has been a real-time-with-pause experience, letting players fight large numbers of foes while planning things out using the combat pause mechanic. Soon, an almost fully featured turn-based combat mode will be available in beta form.

"This is a big undertaking. This has been a lot of work primarily from Nick Carver and Jesse Bureno. Special shout out to Kurt Decker, who's also been adding a lot of work of his own recently," said Obsidian Studio Design Director John Sawyer. "This turn-based mode is something that we wanted to do because turn-based mode was received so well in Deadfire. That being said, there were a number of very reasonable criticisms of how turn-based mode was implemented in Deadfire."

The new mode will be a toggle found in the isometric RPG's settings menu, inside the Difficulty section. The studio is planning to make this a button on the HUD in a later update as well, letting players switch between real-time with pause and turn-based combat systems in between encounters while playing.

Taking in the lessons learned from Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire, Obsidian has made these changes to the original game's new turn-based combat system:

• Unbound Turns: All turns are now influenced by a character’s overall speed, improving the value of Real-Time with Pause attributes and mechanics.
• Smarter Free Actions: Actions like swapping weapons, drinking potions, or enabling modals are now free actions. Each free action is limited to one per turn per type for balance.
• Faster Pacing: Combat lethality has been significantly increased for both enemies and players to keep battles tense and impactful.
• Mode Flexibility: You can choose Turn-Based Mode alongside difficulty when starting a new game — or swap freely between Real-Time with Pause and Turn-Based Mode in the game options. We’re also investigating a direct HUD toggle for even more convenience.

Pillars of Eternity's new public beta featuring the turn-based mode will kick off on November 5, with Steam and Xbox on Windows players being invited to try it out.

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Posted Tuesday 4 November 2025 at 12:51 pm AEST (my time).

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