worked out how everything flows, I
passed it over to a writer,” he says.
“In this case it was Megan Starks,
who was the writer for this area, and
she did a great job. She gave the
pirates of Fort Deadlight a lot of
personality, and she had suggestions
about the characters that would
inspire me to develop different kinds
of gameplay.”
The pirate fort is filled with
interesting, colourful characters,
including Snake Eyes Condwen, a
shifty gambler, and Ungwith the
Craghearted, the hard-nosed captain
of the guard. “I wanted the fort to
feel almost like a little town,” says
Salgado. “It’s a place where a lot of
different pirates meet up, and that
made it more interesting than it just
being populated by Benweth’s crew.
This let us create tension between
him and the other captains, which
opened up lots of new avenues for
different kinds of gameplay.
“We have a group of drunks,” he
adds. “And then we have the teetotal
Captain Ungwith, who hates that“I WANTED THE FORT
TO FEEL ALMOST LIKE
A LITTLE TOWN”
crew. You can humiliate him and
convince him to back down from a
fight, which is a nonlethal way of
completing the quest.”
Building a quest that offers this
amount of freedom was a challenge,
even for an experienced designer like
Salgado. “Building a single space that
allows for three or four different
types of gameplay at once was
probably the biggest challenge,” he
says. “But that’s how we keep the
game varied, rather than it just being
combat all the time.”
Because Pillars is an incredibly
text-heavy game, Salgado also had to
work closely with the writers when
designing the quest. “Once I created
the bare bones of the quest andthe quirkier characters that you’ll
meet in the Deadfire Archipelago,
and as of the release of the free Rum
Runner’s Pack DLC, you can recruit
her as a companion.
“I knew that players would be
smiling mischievously to themselves
as they booby-trapped the
harpsichord with a bomb,” explains
Salgado. “But you don’t have to do it
at all. You can lure Benweth down to
the court and instead use this as an
opportunity to talk to him and make
him look like a fool in front of hisLEFT: In this market
area you’ll find a
gambler who has
some dirt on one of
the guards.Fort Deadlight
FEATURE
RIGHT: The secret
dock area is where
Benweth keeps his
ship. You can help
orchestrate a plan to
steal it from right
under his nose.
FAR RIGHT: If you get
caught lurking around
in the dungeons too
many times, the
guards will get tired of
you, turn aggressive
and attack.