Game News Avowed Early Access and Reviews

[Maldoror]

Deadfire is one of the best old-school isometric crpgs ever created

Absolutely based. It's incredible how much better it is than the original, too.

 

[Azdul]

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

In Icewind Dale NPCs do not travel much, and it is probably for the better, because you can find each small NPC in expected place. Backgrounds are static, trees don't move and scenery is non-interactive because you need to fit all images on finite number of CDs.

Now - leave everything as it was in Icewind Dale, but change perspective to 1st / 3rd person, and suddenly world in Avowed feels dead.

 

[luj1]

Deadfire is one of the best old-school isometric crpgs ever created

Deadfire is one of the best old-school isometric crpgs ever created

It's incredible how much better it is than the original, too.

What is incredible, is that none of the oversights in core systems (which everyone on the official forums noticed and warned Josh about) were addressed.

Instead, they focused on petty shite - such as cape physics, minigames (system bloat) exploding barrels and talking parrots. That is what is incredible.

 

[Maldoror]

What is incredible, is that none of the oversights in core systems (which everyone on the official forums noticed and warned Josh about) were addressed.

Instead, they focused on petty shite - such as cape physics, minigames (system bloat) exploding barrels and talking parrots. That is what is incredible.

What's incredible is the Codex's determined inability to have fun playing a video game. Plenty of classic RPGs that are widely considered to be great games and are highly influential are completely and utterly broken. Not that Pillars 2 is on the same level as Arcanum or the early Fallout games, but there are totally non-functional gameplay mechanics in those titles that are glossed over because everything else is of great quality. Pillars 2 is not a 10/10 masterpiece, but "oversights" in core mechanics are functionally excusable so long as the core experience remains meaningful and interesting.

This isn't to say that mechanics should be a smokescreen for depth, but I would rather play a game with a flawed or shitty attribute system and good reactivity and flavour than one without, most of the time. And I say that as someone with a great deal of disdain for modern TTRPGs and a lover of 1st Edition AD&D.

 

[Zanzoken]

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.

Not that I care to defend Sawyer but I'm not sure this is accurate.

Sawyer was working under design constraints given that Pillars was marketed as a spiritual successor to the Infinity Engine games. Therefore the combat had to be RTwP, the character system needed to be class-based, etc.
It's been a decade at this point so I could be misremembering, but I recall him saying something like he didn't think the IE formula was the best way to make a cRPG, but he felt he had to do it that way because that is what players expected.
I am sure Roguey can fact check my memory on this.
Of course we know now that players don't really give a shit. Nobody who likes BG3 seems to care that it's a 5E turn-based game instead of an AD&D RTwP game like BG1 and BG2.

Anyway, none of this really relates to Avowed. The only thing Avowed has in common with the earlier titles is the inherited Pillars universe and worldbuilding and I don't think anyone is blown away by those. This is Obsidian's shitty attempt at a Skyrim clone (just like Outer Worlds was their shitty attempt at a nu-Fallout clone) and I really couldn't care less.

 

[Morgoth]

From RPS:

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

I thought RPS was widely considered trash on the Codex?

 

[Sweeper]

Deadfire is one of the best old-school isometric crpgs ever created

I'm concerned for you RPGCodex, I really am.

 

[Black]

From RPS:

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

I thought RPS was widely considered trash on the Codex?

So is nuobsidian.

 

[Israfael]

Therefore the combat had to be RTwP, the character system needed to be class-based, etc.

What actually happened is that we expected to see something like IE/DnD3.5/OGL game and what we've got was the express negation of whole concept of 3.5ed (which Sawyer, not the backers, wanted to create because of whatever personal reasons). And it'd be probably fine if this 'subersion' was good, but in the end we got the eponymous banal,shit,boring (tm) (C) system that was simply unfun to play in addition to missing all the QoL features that previous Obsidian/Bioware games had like action queue, quickcast bar, at least some companion AI and whatnot.

 

[luj1]

What actually happened is that we expected to see something like IE/DnD3.5/OGL game and what we've got was the express negation of whole concept of 3.5ed (which Sawyer, not the backers, wanted to create because of whatever personal reasons)

This knowledge should be surgically implanted into Infinitron and Roguey's gray mass

But yeah, that is the essence of the Pillars fiasco. Josh was traumatized by tabletop because a skinny wizard with a dagger can't match the combat prowess of a barbarian. So he tried to correct this "injustice" with Pillars. The way he talked about all of this in the early stages also sounded very political. There is something wrong with him and he should stay away from lead positions (which investors finally began to understand after 2 failed Pillars games)

 

[Falksi]

What is incredible, is that none of the oversights in core systems (which everyone on the official forums noticed and warned Josh about) were addressed.

Instead, they focused on petty shite - such as cape physics, minigames (system bloat) exploding barrels and talking parrots. That is what is incredible.

What's incredible is the Codex's determined inability to have fun playing a video game. Plenty of classic RPGs that are widely considered to be great games and are highly influential are completely and utterly broken. Not that Pillars 2 is on the same level as Arcanum or the early Fallout games, but there are totally non-functional gameplay mechanics in those titles that are glossed over because everything else is of great quality. Pillars 2 is not a 10/10 masterpiece, but "oversights" in core mechanics are functionally excusable so long as the core experience remains meaningful and interesting.

This isn't to say that mechanics should be a smokescreen for depth, but I would rather play a game with a flawed or shitty attribute system and good reactivity and flavour than one without, most of the time. And I say that as someone with a great deal of disdain for modern TTRPGs and a lover of 1st Edition AD&D.

I found Deadfire boring as fuck, a far cry from anything meaningful or interesting. The combat was good-ish if a little wonky, but story-wise it dragged big time, and the bloated world and filler drowned out any real excitement.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

Afouled is gonna be one of those funny games where the average critic review on Metacritic is gonna be 4-5 whole points above the average user review. It hit all the DEI checkmarks, and no one on the development team has single color hair, but damn if the game don't put you to sleep.

 

[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.

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

it came out in 2015? I cant remember dates!