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 don't 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, and a very slight amount of awkwardness with the analogue movement, 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.

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