To be honest, I had forgotten that Avowed was announced five years ago, at the beginning of the current console generation. I remembered the project when it was involved in a series of frankly idiotic scandals on social networks. Needless to say, my expectations were lowered to the absolute minimum. So much so that I found out about the early release on the same day it happened. And so, with such a ‘clean’ mind, I plunged into a new great RPG from the masters of the genre… To be honest, I was pleasantly surprised, but not everything is that clear. After the unsuccessful advertising campaign for Obsidian’s new game, I was hoping for a new legend in the RPG genre, but I didn’t expect much. Furthermore, the release of Dragon Age Veilguard reinforced my fears that Avowed would be another ‘masterpiece.’ Let’s take a deeper look in our Avowed PC review.
Who is Obsidian, and why are there such high expectations for Avowed?
Obsidian Studios was founded by the same people who worked on the original Fallout games. Initially, Obsidian was known for creating exemplary sequels to previously released projects. For example, these guys created the beautiful Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II and Neverwinter Nights 2. Then there was the controversial stealth RPG Alpha Protocol and even a return to the Fallout series.
Obsidian worked on Fallout New Vegas at Bethesda’s request. Unfortunately, despite its cult status, the game was plagued with problems upon release, resulting in Fallout New Vegas not receiving high reviews and Obsidian being paid less than they deserved. That was the end of their relationship with Bethesda. Ironically, both companies are now owned by Microsoft.
It was under the latter’s wing that Obsidian first released a cartoonish first-person survival game about children called Grounded and the detective game Pentiment. Now, the team is returning to what it started out with – a classic first-person action RPG.
Avowed is not Baldur’s Gate 3
More than once, I’ve read comparisons of the future game with Larian’s work. I don’t understand what they are based on, except that they have similar letters in the description (RPG). I’ll state the obvious: Avowed has practically nothing in common with the standard of Western RPGs in recent years.
You can see this from the character creation stage. It is much simpler here. There is, however, the option of choosing your character’s biography. Admittedly, this has little effect on the dialogue. At most – a few optional lines. As for the player’s appearance, everything is quite good, especially the possibility of creating a leper character who will look like an infect from The Last of Us series.
The local dialogue system is also rather rudimentary. Although the choice of lines depends on the character’s traits, the voice acting is rather weak, and you can’t become an absolute good guy or an inhuman monster even though the story does not require it.
The plot is not immediately obvious
An important point is that the game takes place in the Pillars of Eternity setting, and more specifically in the Living Lands – one of the regions of the Eor world that has just been invented for Pillars of Eternity. But I’m telling you right now, that shouldn’t affect the perception.
The main character is a certain chosen envoy of the Emperor, sent to the Living Lands to deal with the disaster raging there. Getting there without a hitch didn’t work out so well, and the story begins with a shipwreck. And the start of the game turns out to be… very weak in terms of player perception.
The first few minutes of the game do not give you the feeling that you are about to embark on an epic and exciting adventure like, for example, Baldur’s Gate 3 or Skyrim. The hero comes to life on the beach and completes a series of tutorial quests. That’s it. You walk around the characters, listen to rather weak dialogue from a text perspective, and run errands. Everyone in the world knows that you were sent here to find a way to defeat the plague and to use that knowledge actively.
After a detailed story about how bushes can burn from fire and the plant on top is very explosive, we are offered to solve such a puzzle.
In many ways, the game is similar to the previous Obsidian game – The Outer Worlds. Only now, there is no evil corporation of evil villains and noble rebels. Or rather, they’re there, but the game doesn’t try to make one clearly good and the other clearly bad.
The Empire, which has come to take over foreign lands, not only introduces tyrannical laws and massacres dissenters, but it also brings order and boosts the economy. Alongside the ruthless Inquisitor palaces, we see idealistic soldiers who truly believe they are bringing prosperity to the barbarian land and helping the people. The rebels, though fighting for the freedom of their people, were not afraid to use any methods, and the life of these people before the arrival of the Empire was very short but hard.
Avowed complements the lore of Pillars of Eternity quite well and handles it with care. Visually and stylistically, it is very similar to Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. There is a light touch of MMO-ness.
The thing is that a terrible disease is ravaging the Living Lands, causing people to have horrible hallucinations and turning them into monsters. In my humble opinion, a rather daring setting for a fantasy RPG.
Avowed regularly paints beautiful pictures of morbid withering. Humans and animals are changed by disease, go mad, and create madness. There’s none of the vanilla gloss of a typical fantasy RPG here, and that’s a good thing. The graphics are worth mentioning at this point. Avowed desperately tries to flirt with the aesthetics of dystopian body horror in a medieval setting. This is most evident in the design of the infected enemies.
There are also problems with the visuals of the characters. The faces of the characters look inexpressive, facial expressions are barely conveyed and gazes seem empty.
It’s addictive
Games are, first and foremost, about PLAY. I know plenty of examples where poor story, graphics, and production have dragged down the gameplay. Avowed is such a case.
The first thing that makes you forget about the problems is the combat. There’s one thing worth pointing out here. I’m a big fan of two genres – first and third-person online shooters and Japanese RPGs. Avowed is a first-person action RPG with an emphasis on the use of melee weapons and magic. There are also firearms and a third-person view.
The developers put a lot of emphasis on the variety of fighting styles and did not miss anything. In the game, there is no rigid attachment to a character’s class. For example, no one forbids you from actively combining melee weapons and magic. The combat skirmishes themselves work perfectly – the impact of the blows is there, the magic looks spectacular, and, in general, it is pleasant to hit frags. Every hit really feels good. Frankly, Avowed is reminiscent of the old Dark Messiah of Might and Magic in places, and that’s a very good thing.
The game is very fast-paced and quite interesting; you can’t just cast a spell on an enemy; the system is designed to use abilities and impose status effects on the enemy. Every spell is useful. Even the lowest level ones can change the outcome of a battle.
You level up very slowly, but each level-up is tangible; there are no silly abilities like +5% to cold damage in winter on a moonlit night. You don’t have to play a single class; you can be a mage, a thief, or a warrior, and your choice of abilities is not limited by the skill tree of a particular specialization but by the level of the hero, which is very handy. There is room for building.
Role Playing
The character’s acting is good. Very good. Want to be a rare scumbag? You’re welcome. Want to be the local ‘knight on a white horse’? OK. A cunning pragmatist? Why not. Even the Evil Passage is available, as far as I’m concerned. Very much influenced by the origin chosen at character creation. Almost every dialogue has an option related to the character’s origin.
Many quests are variable, and the main quests are no exception. I can’t say much about the consequences of decisions, but in one side quest, I was helped by a character I had saved at the beginning of the game. The character editor is standard, not very flexible, but it’s not an Oblivion freak generator either.
Aside from what was originally created for Pillars of Eternity – races, deities, and other stuff – it looks like the neural network was asked to draw a ‘magic sword/armor from fantasy.’ No identity, no memorability. Colonial-style buildings? That was already in Risen, and pretty much every game had islands. Aztec-style ziggurats? Hello, Gothic Night of the Raven. Weird mushrooms? That became mainstream in the genre over 20 years ago after the release of Morrowind. Strange animal from the Living Lands? The Blue Cow. A strange jumping animal? The blue lemur. A creepy insect that terrorizes the forests? The overgrown stink bug. Also blue. That sort of thing.
It’s immersive
Scary! Fantastic. If an NPC is a merchant, he’s condemned to stand behind a counter for the rest of his life. Literally, the poor guard stands at his post like a British beefeater, and the ambassador lives in his office, looking at a pile of bureaucratic papers day and night. Now that’s discipline in the Aedir Empire! Also, it seems that by the Emperor’s decree, all inanimate objects are frozen in place as a monolithic block, and no force can move a cup, a box, or even a bottle. Glass is special in the Living Lands – you can’t break a bottle with a mace! Windows in houses are as strong as the adamantium in Wolverine’s bones. When I jumped on the awning, and it suddenly tore, I sat there in surprise for a minute, trying to work out where in this plastic world an interactive object had come from. Later, I went to DTF and saw several delighted posts in a row with that very awning.
You can’t steal in the game. A hero’s status does not allow them to steal. Although some chests require lockpicks, which cost pennies and weigh nothing. There isn’t even a mini-game. Why this mechanic was introduced is unclear. I still don’t understand the mechanic with the weight limit – the hero can carry a whole shed, but not more!… …and if there’s more, it can always be teleported back to the camp.
On the technical side, it’s a triumph
Obsidian’s games are notorious for being less than technically stable at release. Many gamers even joke that the studio’s games are actually released a year after they hit store shelves. Avowed, however, is a very welcome exception. The game suffers from neither bugs nor performance issues. There are plenty of graphics settings available on the PC, the Unreal Engine 5 engine is running at full speed, and many of the optimisation issues have been fixed in the early release phase for owners of the Premium Edition.
Not to mention that the animations are terrible. They are about as out of place as you can get. Twitchy, abrupt, hypertrophic, cartoonish. Similar in style to Vanilope’s animations in Ralph vs the Internet. Ragdoll physics reminds me of Titan Quest. A great one refers to a brilliant one.
Not Skyrim. Not perfect. But it’s not a game to be skipped or forgotten
For a reason, I mentioned the iconic part of the TES series several times in the text. The thing is that at the announcement stage, it was thought that the game would be an analog of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (the first concept art above, you see, there is even a dragon) with a huge open world. However, this idea was abandoned in the process, and the project was reformatted into something more chamber-like.
There is no open world in the game, by the way. No, the region itself is large, but it is divided into separate locations. Obsidian tried to create a game that emphasizes the story and characters more, but it is in this aspect that Avowed turned out to be the weakest.
And no, by no means is it a bad game. It’s not a game on the same level as Dragon Age: Veilguard, but neither is it the greatness of Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, next to which Avowed was unlucky enough to come out. It’s just a pleasant AA game that can be fun to play, but will be quickly forgotten because there’s nothing to make it memorable.
Avowed failed to become another Skyrim or Dark Messiah. But it has managed to become Outer Worlds 2.0, shrugging off many of its predecessor’s shortcomings. It’s not a masterpiece of game design, and it’s certainly not a bad game. It’s a mediocre, good AA game, a spin-off that doesn’t put the original series to shame. The industry lacks games of this format. Everyone is trying to release Triple-A, so they inflate the budget, and because of the inflated budget, they try to attract as large an audience as possible, so we have maximum simplification of the mechanics, change of style, cutting of sharp corners and adding everything that is fashionable and popular to the game, throwing away their own audience and common sense in favor of the masses.
It’s as if Obsidian didn’t have enough time or budget, so they decided to skimp on the environmental interaction and invest in a pleasing visual. And I’m glad they decided to skimp on that rather than the core mechanics. They focused on what they were good at and put their best efforts into it.
Avowed is first and foremost an RPG, maybe not the one everyone wanted, not the one you’d expect from the legendary Obsidian, but it’s a step forward after Outer Worlds (which wasn’t bad), albeit a small one. It’s a sign that the studio is still alive, even if not quite in the form they wanted. And there is hope that Obsidian will have more good games in the future.
