Oh hell yes: Pillars of Eternity 1 and 2 are getting full-fat gamepad support and you can try it right now

Reader, a confession: each night, before I retire to my chambers, I light a small votive candle. Bowing over it, I clasp my hands and beseech the ghost of Josh Sawyer (who is not dead) to return to the Pillars of Eternity games and add the weirdly-decent gamepad support they got on console to their PC iterations. I am an old man who wants to play them on my Steam Deck, and the existing Steam Input templates just don't quite cut it for me.

My prayers are answered. In an announcement yesterday, Obsidian declared that now is the time of the Pillars of Eternity and Deadfire: Controller Support Public Test. Both PoE 1 and 2 have ongoing Steam betas that will allow you to play with full, start-to-finish controller support. You can opt into them and try the new feature for yourself by visiting each game's properties and opting into their respective November 4 beta versions.

Being betas, they're a touch buggy right now. Indeed, one of Obsidian's very first notices to players in the public test's announcement is "This is a public test, so please expect bugs", but I'm nevertheless impressed by the limited time I've spent mucking around with the games on Steam Deck.

There are a couple of misaligned gamepad prompts here, a very slight amount of awkwardness with the analogue movement there, but frankly my main takeaway is 'Dang, it's kind of wild how well these isometric CRPGs adjust to non-keyboard-and-mouse support'. Which, yeah, is how I felt about the console versions too.

The public test runs until November 25, and the devs will use the data gathered to iron out wrinkles like those I just listed for a full release.

It's not all about gamepad support, by the way. Just, you know, mostly. Obsidian also announced patch 1.3.10.0 for PoE 1 and patch 5.1.0.0 for Deadfire. In PoE 1's case, the patch mostly smooths out some minor niggling bugs with the UI and the game's recently implemented turn-based mode.

Deadfire's patch is meatier: that game's older turn-based mode has been rejigged to integrate the improvements from PoE 1's turn-based mode. Characters no longer take a single turn per round (instead, they move as much as their initiative allows), lethality has been greatly increased—that kinda thing.

I'm a die-hard real-time-with-pause guy, so it's all fairly academic to me, but PoE 1's turn-based innovations got a lot of plaudits from players who were very hopeful they would end up ported back to Deadfire. My friends, this one is for you.

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