Game News Avowed Early Access and Reviews

[Infinitron]

Tags: Avowed; Obsidian Entertainment

https://www.obsidian.net/news/obsidian/avowed-early-access-is-open

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Review roundup:

Ars Technica, But Why Tho? 9.5/10, CGMagazine 8.5/10
COGconnected 93/100, Checkpoint Gaming 9.5/10, Creative Bloq 4/5
Dexerto 4/5, Digital Spy 4/5, Digital Trends 4.5/5
Dot Esports 8.5/10, Eurogamer 4/5, Forbes 9/10
GAMINGbible 9/10, GINX TV 7/10, Game Rant 7/10
GameSpew 8/10, GameSpot 6/10, GameStar 81/100
GameWatcher 7.5/10, Gamepressure 9/10, Gamereactor UK 9/10
Gamers Heroes 85/100, GamesHub 4.5/5, GamesRadar+ 4/5
Gaming Nexus 8/10, GamingTrend 85/100, Guardian 3/5
Hardcore Gamer 4/5, IGN 7/10, Impulsegamer 4.5/5
Inverse 9/10, Kotaku, Loot Level Chill 8.5/10
MMORPG.com 7.5/10, Metro GameCentral 6/10, PC Gamer 82/100
PCGamesN 6/10, Player 2 B+, Polygon
Press Start Australia 8.5/10, Pure Xbox 8/10, Radio Times 3/5
Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Screen Rant 9/10, Shacknews 9/10
Slant Magazine 4/5, Stevivor 7.5/10, TechRadar Gaming 4/5
The Escapist, The New York Times 80/100, The Verge
TheGamer 3/5, TheSixthAxis 9/10, TrueAchievements 9/10
Twinfinite 4/5, VG247 5/5, VGC 4/5
Vice, VideoGamer 7/10, Washington Post 3/4
Wccftech 8.8/10, WellPlayed 6/10, Windows Central 4/5
Worth Playing 7.8/10, XboxEra 8.8/10, ZTGD 8/10​

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2457220/Avowed/

 

[Chaotic_Heretic]

So Obsidian has gone full popamole and is not even pretending anymore.

 

[Urthor]

Seems like all the reviewers really liked it.

Then gave it a low number because they're high on Kingdom Come 2's crack.

 

[Drowed]

It seems they took everything they "learned" from The Outer Worlds and doubled down on it. The characters are even more generic. The environments are even more uninteresting. It's curious how they're literally using the same basic formula in increasingly worse versions. I'm genuinely curious about how bad the concurrent player count will be, because the situation doesn't look good.

I was thinking, I don't remember the last time the mainstream WRPG scene was this bad, could this be the official moment of the second coming of the great decline? Dragon Age is dead and Bioware is destroyed. Bethesda can't even fool their own fans anymore and Starfield was a failure. Obsidian most likely has a flop on their hands. The next Witcher is ringing a lot of alarm bells, and if you want to call Assassin's Creed an RPG, the catastrophe is already announced. (EDIT: I forgot about inXile. But I mean, of course anyone would forget about inXile, it reinforces the point.)

What's left in the current scene, besides indie developers?

 

[luj1]

So Obsidian has gone full popamole and is not even pretending anymore.

It's more like Diversity: the RPG

art director literally said on Twitter that he wanted to replace all white dudes with blacks

whilst Patel was quite obviously a diversity hire with poor experience who got promoted to director lol

So yeah, it turned out something like Concord

 

[HammyTheFat]

I don't remember the last time the mainstream WRPG scene was this bad

2015 if you ignore Age of Decadence.

The "highlights" for "mainstream" rpgs that year were dragon age inquisition and fallout 4 if I remember right.

 

[AlwaysBrotoMen]

flop

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

I don't remember the last time the mainstream WRPG scene was this bad

2015 if you ignore Age of Decadence.

The "highlights" for "mainstream" rpgs that year were dragon age inquisition and fallout 4 if I remember right.

You're forgetting Codex GotY 2015 The Witcher III: The Wild Hunt

 

[v1c70r14]

I don't remember the last time the mainstream WRPG scene was this bad

2015 if you ignore Age of Decadence.

The "highlights" for "mainstream" rpgs that year were dragon age inquisition and fallout 4 if I remember right.

Inquisition came out in 2014. There are ways in which 2015 mirrors 2025. Fallout 4 did come out that year and was a modest success commercially for Bethesda (compared to how big Skyrim was) even if the game itself sucked while Starfield bombed just a while ago because it was so bad not even the goyslop eating swine could ignore how much it reeked. Pillars of Eternity came out in 2015 and was a snoozey Infinity Engine revival with a worse system and a setting that was even more boring and awful than Ed Greenwood's magical realm for AD&D. As bad as Pillars was though it looks like they've really outdone themselves with this Underworld Ascendant spiritual successor taking place on the surface with more niggers and homosexuals that was supposed to be Obsidian's fantasy New Vegas. They went from the Sawyerian stroke of genius of renaming kobolds into xaurips in a bad Baldur's Gate wannabe clone to homosexual fish people shaming you for colonization in the worst take on Skyrim so far.

Looking at those two companies it's sort of like 2015 but worse. But in 2015 we had the underrated Blackguards 2, passable filler title Shadowrun: Hong Kong, indie art project Hylics, and Japanese blobber and competent dungeon crawler Operation Abyss: New Tokyo Legacy (if you didn't have a Vita you'd have to wait until 2017 to get the port). For the CYOA audience Age of Decadence also shouldn't be ignored. The mid-budget scene was much healthier back then.

There's also the symetry of a kiked shallow open world movie game done by cuckold Slavs giving American-Jewish Hollywood a cut of meat from their culture, with The Witcher 3 being a prefiguration of Kingdom Come In Hans's Arse 2: African Scholars Lecturing Hapless Czech Morons Edition.

2015 wasn't nearly as bad as this.

 

[Maldoror]

This man is your friend. He makes the only truly good RPGs at Obsidian.
They are so fucked if he ever leaves.

 

[Maxie]

This man is your friend. He makes the only truly good RPGs at Obsidian.
They are so fucked if he ever leaves.

name one good game he's ever made

 

[Berengar]

From RPS:

Sounds like this game is going right into my "when it's $10" bin.

 

[Grauken]

This man is your friend. He makes the only truly good RPGs at Obsidian.
They are so fucked if he ever leaves.

name one good game he's ever made

the Roguey character growth arc on codex

 

[Grauken]

From RPS:

Sounds like this game is going right into my "when it's $10" bin.

That bin is full of indies that are more RPG than this will ever be

 

[Maxie]

This man is your friend. He makes the only truly good RPGs at Obsidian.
They are so fucked if he ever leaves.

name one good game he's ever made

the Roguey character growth arc on codex

character arcs are not games. they're writing.

 

[Grauken]

This man is your friend. He makes the only truly good RPGs at Obsidian.
They are so fucked if he ever leaves.

name one good game he's ever made

the Roguey character growth arc on codex

character arcs are not games. they're writing.

Visual novels matter

 

[Darkozric]

 

[Maldoror]

This man is your friend. He makes the only truly good RPGs at Obsidian.
They are so fucked if he ever leaves.

name one good game he's ever made

Fallout: New Vegas
Pentiment
Pillars of Eternity 2

 

[MasPingon]

If 4/10 game is given 8/10 averange on Metacritic you can be sure faggots are ruling this industry.

 

[luj1]

Pentiment is just a small Java game about history. Not even about history, but about a hilariously specific historical niche (lives of peasants and monks in 16th Bavaria). It is quite a boring and painful experience

It is very important to emphasize that Pillars was the one game that's truly his brain child

Pillars was his exercise in futility, an experiment in which he tried to reinvent everything according to his personal understanding of RPG theory. It featured bizarre design decisions that were discussed a lot in these forums

 

[Reyvik]

How the fuck they went from hollow kids and hangman tree in POE1 to some flamboyant fags and cheerful generic hollywood fantasy? That's precisely why I didn't touch TOW. Why modern games have advertisment akin to that for energy drinks and marvel movies

 

[La vie sexuelle]

name one good game he's ever made

Fallout: New Vegas

Eeeh, ok, I guess...

Pentiment

Sometimes I play cutting with my daughter, it's a much more engaging activity than playing in Pentiment.

Pillars of Eternity 2

Sir, you must be joking.

From RPS:

Sounds like this game is going right into my "when it's $10" bin.

This bit about the "devastatingly georgious world" paired with this particulary chosen item reveals a man who hates this game but can't tell us so directly.

 

[Maldoror]

Pentiment is just a small Java game about history. Not even about history, but about a hilariously specific historical niche (lives of peasants and monks in 16th Bavaria). It is quite a boring and painful experience

Not sure what the historical period being niche has to do with anything; you could make a game about the Dancing Plague of 1518 and make it a compelling video game if you tried. It was actually extremely engaging and fun.

 

[iguana_trader]

This man is your friend. He makes the only truly good RPGs at Obsidian.
They are so fucked if he ever leaves.

name one good game he's ever made

Icewind Dale

 

[Arthandas]

Pillars was his exercise in futility, an experiment in which he tried to reinvent everything according to his personal understanding of RPG theory. It featured bizarre design decisions that were discussed a lot in these forums

While PoE1 is mediocre, Deadfire is one of the best old-school isometric crpgs ever created and New Vegas is considered by many to be the best Fallout game so clearly he knows something.

Pentiment is just a small Java game about history. Not even about history, but about a hilariously specific historical niche (lives of peasants and monks in 16th Bavaria). It is quite a boring and painful experience

Boring and painful experience universally hated by the vast majority of people who played it.

Spoiler