Josh Sawyer says RPG players expect to be 'built different' — and Pillars of Eternity 2 deliberately broke that illusion

Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire director Josh Sawyer has opened up about one of the game's most divisive design choices — the ending where players discover they were never able to stop the god Eothas in the first place. Speaking on The Examined Game podcast, Sawyer reflected on why that decision landed badly with some players and why he stands by it anyway.

Deadfire's central plot follows the reawakening of Eothas, a god who is essentially unkillable by mortal means. Sawyer says the game telegraphs this clearly, but players still expected a way through — because decades of RPGs have trained them to believe the protagonist can overcome anything. "Players are very conditioned by a lot of RPGs to expect, like 'Yeah, but I'm built different,'" Sawyer said. You can influence the fallout, make meaningful decisions, and soften the damage, but stopping Eothas outright was never on the table. For a vocal portion of the playerbase, that felt like a broken promise.

Sawyer's intent was to interrogate the very concept of protagonist power. In the world of Pillars of Eternity, the gods are deeply selfish entities who manipulate mortals constantly — and Eothas does exactly the same thing to the player character, regardless of how powerful they've become. The design philosophy extends beyond divine politics: "You shoot lasers out of your eyes and you're bulletproof, but mass starvation is not a thing you can punch your way out of," Sawyer said. Some problems are structural, human, systemic — and no amount of RPG protagonist energy resolves them. It's a thematic argument that Deadfire makes more boldly than almost any other game in the genre.

Deadfire remains a polarising game partly because of this ending, but it also has a devoted fanbase who consider it one of the best written RPGs ever made — it currently sits at number 40 on PC Gamer's Top 100. Sawyer's comments won't convert the disappointed crowd, but they do make clear the ending was a deliberate artistic statement, not a development shortcut.