Eternity Avowed - Obsidian's first person action-RPG in the Pillars of Eternity setting - coming February 18th

[Child of Malkav]

Is there a game where you play can as various species but have actual gameplay advantages and disadvantages? That are not just tall human, short human, blue human, green human? A few examples of what I'm talking about: a spider race where the members have the native ability to crawl on walls and ceilings, a dragon race where you can switch from walking to flying etc.?

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

The Elder Scrolls series had meaningful differences between races/species, but even there the greatest physical advantage was that Argonians were able to breathe underwater, a condition that could be replicated via magical effects.

Not sure if there's ever been an RPG where the choice of race/species results in gameplay that is otherwise inaccessible.

 

[Hagashager]

The only Elder Scrolls game that made races **noticably** different was Morrowind. Even Daggerfall's races are superficially different. There is very little mechanically to distinguish between a Nord, Breton and Khajiit.

 

[Sannom]

I guess its meant to be a dragon pistol?
Old blunderblusses did have a dragon sculpted onto the muzzle, hence the origin of the word "dragoon" and why handheld blunderbusses were called dragons.

That's a shark, come on!

 

[Baron Dupek]

PR blah-blah and then:

yet creating a new game that is more approachable for a larger audience

yeah, RIP

incredible storytelling

v.humble

 

[AwesomeButton]

I am self-quoting this with great delight, especially in light of BG3's reception:

Nothing screams "my thinking has calcified sometime around 2003" like the belief that switching your games from isometric to FPP will improve their sales.

I'm sure going first person will make it so much more approachable than the largely unapproachable Deadfire, created by closeted nerd Sawyer.

After ToW, what would be the boundaries of approachability that Obsidian might me aiming at?

Will Avowed be more approachable than BG3 thanks to being first person, or less?

All those questions which there is no one available to ask. Much less answer.

"At least we've got Microsoft to foot the bill" -- someone, somewhere at Obsidian.

 

[duskvile]

Fantasy settings have never been too ambitious past dragons and ghouls, and fampyr are a good example of even Josh's autism being constrained.

Fampyr could have bee derived form Vampyr, but also from famine. A fampyr could be a creature who ever hungers for flesh and soul.

 

[Butter]

I forgot about this game. It's going to be really bad.

 

[AwesomeButton]

I forgot about this game. It's going to be really bad.

They say laughter is good for the health.

 

[gabe1010]

I played The Outer Worlds again recently to get some idea from a tech perspective what we will be dealing with in Avowed, as by all indicators Avowed will just be medieval/fantasy TOW. The bad stuff everyone remembers, ie mediocre story, cringe writing, laugh-track worthy anti-corporate satire, blah blah...are still there of course. The art style and over saturated colors still look bad (apparently Tim Cain is literally colorblind...), but at it's core the movement, animation, shooting, melee, time dilation and other first person gameplay tech is nice and polished (better than Starfield tbh, although not nearly as good as dedicated AAA FPS games). They may or may not be able to add more engaging first person melee to that (with at least some more detail to the melee, like Mordhau, Chivalry or at least Mount and Blade).

The huge drawback for me still though is the "hub-world" style large levels with loading screens rather than a genuine open world, which basically immediately kills a lot of what was so appealing about Fallout:NV and earlier Bethesda games (StarField has also lost the plot with this, although it's open areas are more open). You just can't get the feeling of genuine exploration and immersion from travel alone where you stumble upon beautiful scenery or POIs in an organic way without an actually open world. While playing TOW, all I ever did was fast travel to quest giver, walk straight to quest location, shoot/rob the MacGuffin, and then fast travel back. Even when you walk between places you have to stay on a road or maybe 1-2 side trails between impassable cliffs, unlike in TES games where you can pretty much go over any hill or mountain or forest. Every time I tried exploring, I ended up at some impassable wall and forced back onto a road, where enemies are distributed at an even density like an MMO. It's just a linear, story driven FPS campaign with RPG elements where you have to occasionally walk between places with nothing to do or see while traveling, and you can kind of pick the order in which some quests are done. I never forgot that I was playing a video game.

In effect, it is a lesser looter shooter rather than a more streamlined open world RPG. It really doesn't feel open world at all, but the non-linearity means it can't benefit from strict storytelling as well as a linear shooter like Halo:CE did. Studios need to commit one way or the other, but they don't because they fail to realize that the advantages of a linear story vs those of an open world game fall along a gradient where the more of one you have, the less of the other you can get. Rather than having the best of both open and linear shooters (exploration + environmental storytelling, and coherent/explicit storytelling with more handcrafted smaller areas) it gets the worst of both worlds (no true sense of exploration, but lesser shooting mechanics and a worse plot). The semi-VATS like Time Dilation kind of splits the difference between VATS and Superhot, but I'd rather just have VATS and go more in on roleplay than player skill dependent shooting.

I don't get how Tim Cain himself could make these mistakes, and I don't understand why Obsidian isn't able to use UE4's open world tools any better than this (that is UE4 world composition, not UE5 world partitioning). Just take a brief look at this sort of UE4 World Composition tutorial video (just skip around):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeJz26M2xn4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQUC0Gejmo4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pg0kWxDjLZk

The tech for generating large, realistic looking terrains, distributing realistic foliage and environmental objects around them, and streaming those objects and game world interactables in and out as you come upon them, already existed in UE4 when they made TOW, and even more advanced versions of it exist in UE5 (assuming they bother to upgrade engines, which they may not, but part of my point is that they actually don't need to, although they probably have: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/789317331079135246/971629936928510042/unknown.png). That is, there's really no excuse for doing hubworlds, except perhaps that their foliage artists, modelers, AI programmers etc...aren't able to account for it, but really they ought to be. It's a singleplayer, first person game. There is only one human player with one narrow FOV. It's not like a multiplayer shooter where one human with a sniper rifle could be on each corner of the map zooming in on something far away where the performance challenges would be immense. Breaking a world into sectors of various levels of granularity and streaming stuff in and out while the player moves around is a known quantity. There's just no excuse for how limited TOW is, and how limited Avowed will allegedly be. Even putting lore aside, just the landscape of Morrowind's world was more believable than TOW...

 

[jungl]

idk I have a feeling this may be a fun wrpg. Starblunder and divinity gate 3 missed that mark with their horrible inventory management, redundancy and other bullshit.

 

[luj1]

This will be a glorious dumpsterfire

will be forgotten in 6 months like Outer Worlds

 

[Roguey]

That is, there's really no excuse for doing hubworlds, except perhaps that their foliage artists, modelers, AI programmers etc...aren't able to account for it, but really they ought to be.

Strongly disagree with this and prefer the Warren Spector approach. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/warren-spector-who-forgot-the-role-in-role-playing-games-

I've worked on games in which it takes hours to walk from one side of town to the other. Many popular, award-winning RPGs boast of hundreds of generic towns and randomly generated quests. The shallow simulation of huge environments isn't a good thing. Providing dialogue for scads of NPCs means none of them has anything interesting to say. Creating an entire country means any single building will be devoid of useful objects. It's a matter of time and storage space, and no amount of whack-on-the-side-of-the-head thinking allows you to finesse your way around the problems. Limit the size of your world. Provide several smaller maps. Increase the density of interaction. This accomplishes several goals:

• Players can explore without searching for something exciting to do. Aimless wandering is the enemy of fun.
• Developers can populate the world more densely with characters, objects, and quests, and give the illusion of a place with a life of its own.
• Action can be tailored to player skill. Difficulty can be increased easily as players get deeper into the game.
• Developers can create more varied locations than in a sprawling world. This last point is critical, and most RPGs do this well. However, most RPGs feature wacky environments straight out of designers' fevered imaginations. It's not asking too much to think in terms of believable, recognizable locations instead of arbitrary game spaces. We should try to acknowledge the conventions of the everyday, even when we create fantasy worlds. In the real world, you can tell you're in a bedroom, as opposed to a bathroom, the instant you enter because of size, placement, and furnishings. More game designers should realize this.

Deep as an ocean, wide as a puddle>Wide as an ocean, shallow as a puddle for me

 

[luj1]

good this wont be deep in any way, shape or form

 

[gabe1010]

I've worked on games in which it takes hours to walk from one side of town to the other. Many popular, award-winning RPGs boast of hundreds of generic towns and randomly generated quests. The shallow simulation of huge environments isn't a good thing. Providing dialogue for scads of NPCs means none of them has anything interesting to say. Creating an entire country means any single building will be devoid of useful objects. It's a matter of time and storage space, and no amount of whack-on-the-side-of-the-head thinking allows you to finesse your way around the problems. Limit the size of your world. Provide several smaller maps. Increase the density of interaction. This accomplishes several goals:

The point is that there are things to do/see during the walking, and that it both improves immersion and is enjoyable for it's own sake, rather than just being a walking grind. You engage with the world via signposts, maps, random encounters, scenic vistas, POIs etc...you find along the way. If you want a high density of interactions on a small map(s) only, just save us the trouble altogether and make a linear story campaign. There's nothing wrong with doing that, just commit to it. But, that's not an open world game and does not have the same appeal.

For what it's worth, I don't like randomly generated quests either, but what does that have to do with the open world vs hub world comparison? Morrowind does not have randomly generated quests, but Skyrim and Shadow of Mordor do, and so do lots of non-open world procgen rogue-likes, so it's not tied to being an open world or not.

• Players can explore without searching for something exciting to do. Aimless wandering is the enemy of fun.

What about aim-ful wandering where you use the terrain, instructions, signs, landmarks and so on to travel from one place to another, getting familiar with the world as you do so? This comment seems like something written by a person who just doesn't like open world games. Notably, Spector worked on NON fully open-world RPGs or Immersive Sims like Deus Ex and Thief. Again, nothing wrong with that, but what's the point in using his opinion on how to design an open world game?

• Developers can populate the world more densely with characters, objects, and quests, and give the illusion of a place with a life of its own/

Yeah, and you can do that inside a town or dungeon in an open world game, while still having a large map to explore. Does Morrowind not have areas with a density of characters, objects, and quests? There's no illusion of life when I loading-screen travel from place to place in a hub world, but if I walk from Sydan Neen to Balmora and come across rivers and bridges, wildlife and bandits, small towns and farms and mines and so on, there is the illusion of life.

• Action can be tailored to player skill. Difficulty can be increased easily as players get deeper into the game.

For love of god NO. Are you/Spector really advocating for level scaling? The worst thing about Oblivion, and the best thing to mod-out on any run, is the level scaling. How can I feel like the world is real and immersive when it exists to server me, the player, to such an extent that encounters and loot scale up with me? Holy immersion-breaking, batman. Also, player skill <<<< character traits in an RPG. Tying exploration to player skill rather than character ability makes for an action game, not an RPG.

• Developers can create more varied locations than in a sprawling world. This last point is critical, and most RPGs do this well. However, most RPGs feature wacky environments straight out of designers' fevered imaginations. It's not asking too much to think in terms of believable, recognizable locations instead of arbitrary game spaces. We should try to acknowledge the conventions of the everyday, even when we create fantasy worlds. In the real world, you can tell you're in a bedroom, as opposed to a bathroom, the instant you enter because of size, placement, and furnishings. More game designers should realize this.

I have no problem with this, but what does it have to do with open vs hub worlds? Skyrim had quite a good take on this, where Norhtern/Scandinavian style biomes are, and feel, real, while having a believable level of environmental variety across mashes, fjords, mountains, arctic ice flows, pine forests, rivers, tundra, etc...plus fantasy dungeons or the occasional trippy, colorful daedric world quest.

Deep as an ocean, wide as a puddle>Wide as an ocean, shallow as a puddle for me

Is The Outer Worlds as deep as an ocean? Where would you put Morrowind, for example, along that spectrum? What is the relationship of width/depth/puddle/ocean to the hub vs open world comparison? Morrowind is deep and TOW is shallow, so where does that leave us?

 

[Desiderius]

Is there a game where you play can as various species but have actual gameplay advantages and disadvantages? That are not just tall human, short human, blue human, green human? A few examples of what I'm talking about: a spider race where the members have the native ability to crawl on walls and ceilings, a dragon race where you can switch from walking to flying etc.?

BG3

 

[Roguey]

If you want a high density of interactions on a small map(s) only, just save us the trouble altogether and make a linear story campaign.

Having an all-or-nothing attitude about this is bizarre. No one would want a linear Fallout.

Are you/Spector really advocating for level scaling?

No, it's about having a better-balanced difficulty curve.

Is The Outer Worlds as deep as an ocean? Where would you put Morrowind, for example, along that spectrum? What is the relationship of width/depth/puddle/ocean to the hub vs open world comparison? Morrowind is deep and TOW is shallow, so where does that leave us?

I haven't played TOW yet but it seems to be deeper in ways that Morrowind isn't, different focuses. I would not describe Morrowind's encyclopedia NPCs as deep for example.

 

[Jenkem]

Obsidian's redemption arc begins NOW.

 

[Delterius]

Is The Outer Worlds as deep as an ocean?

I really like this question. I suppose it's clear that Outer Worlds is not as wide as an ocean, and that it's also deeper than a puddle. For what it's worth, while many complain that TOW was disappointing to due it's limited scope, I felt the problem with TOW was qualitative in nature. I felt like I was neither in an ocean nor a puddle, but an enclosed beach. And the real problem is how there weren't any waves to play with. I felt that plot failed to live up to the premise of TOW. But some of the scattered journals you find offered a glimpse of something better.

The very first zone has this interesting backstory to it. From what I remember at least. It was originally meant to be a self sustaining colony. Except the soil was atrocious for agriculture, so it transitioned into becoming an industrial hub for inputs from other colonies. Once the corporate coup / revolution happened on Monarch, it began to decline. It didn't have to. Sure, the local fish were atrocious for Edgewater's food industries. But there were plenty of people in the corporate hierarchy with ideas as to make a better product in spite of what they had to work with. It's only that the corporate culture was so toxic and short-termist that any ideas brought forward were responded to with demotion. As in, 'you're not paid to come up with better flavors of tuna and besides we are part of an oligopoly so we aren't competing with ourselves with different choices'. By the end of the colony's shelf life, Edgewater's middle managers had sabotaged their own equipment and sued each other's department for insurance claims. Downsizing and corporate cannibalism was their only recourse in face of their own lack of creativity.

I find that at least the idea of the chronic/comical mismanagement of Halcyon to be more interesting than the game's actual plot. And I notice this pattern of living through the consequences of that mismanagement, rather than witnessing the office politics gone mad in first hand. TOW in some ways is a game about the provincial concerns of Rome's ruin dwellers, and the failson generations that manage its remnants. Meanwhile I was teased with stories of Rome's collapse all throught the game. Monarch's coup is another good example. It arguably only happened because the three leaders of the coup were middle managers who were themselves mismanaged. The guy who was by the books and good with numbers was chided for not being charismatic and imaginative. The guy who was charismatic and imaginative was chided for flounting the rules too often. The woman who was a good leader was never put in a position of authority. Everyone in Halcyon who's good for a job is frozen at a position they are bad at, contributing to a systemic lack of creativity in every department. This doomed the colony once it's main settlement failed because all plans were laid down assuming Monarch's terraforming would be a success. It wasn't. It was all dominoes from there and I never got to see them fall.

 

[duskvile]

I've worked on games in which it takes hours to walk from one side of town to the other. Many popular, award-winning RPGs boast of hundreds of generic towns and randomly generated quests. The shallow simulation of huge environments isn't a good thing. Providing dialogue for scads of NPCs means none of them has anything interesting to say. Creating an entire country means any single building will be devoid of useful objects. It's a matter of time and storage space, and no amount of whack-on-the-side-of-the-head thinking allows you to finesse your way around the problems. Limit the size of your world. Provide several smaller maps. Increase the density of interaction. This accomplishes several goals:

• Players can explore without searching for something exciting to do. Aimless wandering is the enemy of fun.
• Developers can populate the world more densely with characters, objects, and quests, and give the illusion of a place with a life of its own.
• Developers can create more varied locations than in a sprawling world. This last point is critical, and most RPGs do this well. However, most RPGs feature wacky environments straight out of designers' fevered imaginations.

I would like they incorporate smaller maps with linear progression and more verticality filled with interesting storylines and few side quests. In some maps you can find secret passageways to previous maps.

 

[gabe1010]

If you want a high density of interactions on a small map(s) only, just save us the trouble altogether and make a linear story campaign.

Having an all-or-nothing attitude about this is bizarre. No one would want a linear Fallout.

Are you/Spector really advocating for level scaling?

No, it's about having a better-balanced difficulty curve.

Is The Outer Worlds as deep as an ocean? Where would you put Morrowind, for example, along that spectrum? What is the relationship of width/depth/puddle/ocean to the hub vs open world comparison? Morrowind is deep and TOW is shallow, so where does that leave us?

I haven't played TOW yet but it seems to be deeper in ways that Morrowind isn't, different focuses. I would not describe Morrowind's encyclopedia NPCs as deep for example.

There's no all or nothing attitude. When did I suggest a linear Fallout? you have completely misunderstood me. Earlier Bethesda games, as contrasted with TOW, managed to both have a high density of content in some areas, and believable open worlds. If you don't care about an open world or traveling in real time and are fine with fast travel between levels, then there is something to be said for just doing a linear story and not a compromise.

What does a balanced difficulty curve have to do with a believable open world? What satisfaction is there in learning the ins and outs of a world and advancing enough to conquer the more difficult areas, if it's being scaled to you? In Morrowind, you can stick around Seyda Neen for 15 hours, or run straight up the hill into the most difficult area of the game, and that makes it feel more real. Again, it's about the immersion of an open world, not some action game-like smooth, balanced difficulty curve to keep people mindlessly zoned out.

You haven't played TOW...? Wha...why did you reply to this?

 

[luj1]

haven't played TOW yet but it seems to be deeper in ways that Morrowind isn'

ahahaha

 

[scytheavatar]

TOW was mostly made during Obsidian's days pre Microsoft buyout. It was marketed as a space Fallout but was always meant to be a AA game of way smaller scale than Bethesda's Fallout. But we all know that Obsidian was broke after Deadfire bombed and even making a AA game was challenging for them. Because of that TOW ended up feeling more like a long tech demo than a proper game.

Now that Obsidian has Microsoft cash I do expect Avowed to be of larger scale than TOW. Though of course it's still going to end up looking like shit versus Skyrim. But this whole denser smaller scale Skyrim has already been done successful by the Gothic games like decades ago and I am not sure why it can't work.

 

[Takamori]

Obsidian's redemption arc begins NOW.

I know you are shitposting but with Carrie Patel as narrative design?

 

[Reinhardt]

fun