Trivia / Pillars of Eternity

aka: Project Eternity

• Acting for Two: Edér, Aloth, and one of the Player Character voice sets are played by Matthew Mercer.
• Career Resurrection: By the devs' own admission, the success of the Pillars crowdfunding campaign saved the company from going the way of its predecessors Black Isle and Troika.
• Dueling Games:
  • Pillars of Eternity and Torment: Tides of Numenera were both Kickstarter funded spiritual successors to old-school CRPGs, specifically Planescape: Torment. Unsurprisingly, Planescape: Torment team members like Chris Avellone worked on both. Downplayed in that both teams have wholeheartedly endorsed each other's projects, and Obsidian made a point of directing their backers to donate to Torment as well.
  • Also, with Divinity: Original Sin, as both are tactical, isometric RPGs with old school sensibilities that feature open-ended tasks and shy away from hand-holding. Both also draw comparisons to Baldur's Gate II.
• Dummied Out: In the original Kickstarter pitch, Cadefund was planned as a recruitable companion. She seems to have been replaced with Durance in the release version.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Several concepts for the basic story date all the way back to Black Isle's unproduced Baldur's Gate III project, called The Black Hound, from before Interplay folded. Still set in the Forgotten Realms but somewhat removed from the previous BG games' Bhaalspawn Saga, it was said to have been a semi-sequel to Icewind Dale. At one point, future POE director Josh Sawyer was working on a personal mod for Neverwinter Nights 2, to be entitled The Black Hound. The latter fell by the wayside until the idea was revisited as the basis for Project Eternity, with the first inn of the game being named the Black Hound (as well as the Black Hound player pet being found on the upper floor), in honor of the game finally seeing the light of day.
  • Two of Chris Avellone's companions, Durance and Grieving Mother, were initially much, much darker and had their backstories intertwined together: after the reveal of her actions regarding the Hollowborn, Durance hunted down the GM and tortured her mind, body, and soul, with Mother using her power to return the favor, and the Watcher having to danger mental dungeons to find out their pasts. Due to a combination of miscommunication, some of the staff finding their backstories too dark, and being over budget and short on time, their stories were separated and the elaborate dream sequence dungeons were cut in favor of more straightforward static scenes with exposition dumps. About the only thing remaining of this early version of their backstories is stuff in the official guide.
• Working Title: The game debuted on Kickstarter as "Project Eternity"; the title wasn't publicly finalized until over a year later.

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