Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire official artwork

On October 4th Obsidian published an in-depth survey asking players about their preferences regarding DLC, as well as a bit about their gaming background, the type of games they play, and so forth. All in all, around 55,000 people from across the various online communities participated in the survey, bringing with them some rather interesting insights about the average cRPG player.

You can probably guess a few answers given the type of players attracted to hardcore RPG games, but even so its a bit surprising to see that 92% of the participants were male, while only 6% identified themselves as female. This result was probably a bit skewed given how the survey was advertised and spread, but even so its a bit out of the ordinary to have such a low female representation, especially when the average for RPGs is around 20% from what I remember reading a little while back.

 What shouldn't come as much of a surprise is the average cRPG gamer's DLC preferences. Most of survey participants have expressed interest in expended singleplayer content, extra stories and quests, additional character interactions and new companions, as well as ways to make the game last just a little bit longer. What I didn't expect, however, is that most people prefer one or two beefy DLCs rather than full expansions. I can only imagine this is because the delay between the game's release and an expansion's arrival is so long that people often lose interested and move on, while a couple of large DLCs can offer a whole bunch of new content at a reasonable time frame.

I won't go into any more details as the survey is pretty damn interesting, so it would be a real shame if I just 'spoiled' all of the surprises by simply blazing through them. You can read the whole thing by going over to Obsidian's Forums, and I would suggest you do so as it gives a rather unique insight into the mind of the average Obsidian fan.

On a slightly different note, it is worth mentioning that Obsidian is currently teasing a brand new project. Not much is known about it right now, but what I can tell you is that it won't be a DLC or expansion - it'll be a full game! You can learn a little bit more, with the emphasis squarely placed on "little", by heading over here.