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

[Quillon]

Behold Might 2 giving +6% damage, and 149.5 health.

9 years later "might" is still the biggest factor in codex' gripe with sawya

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/x...last-decades-best-sci-fi-movies/1100-6526088/

Xbox-Exclusive Avowed Is Like Skyrim Plus One Of The Last Decade's Best Sci-Fi Movies​

Playing an hour of Avowed revealed a dense game with responsive dual-wielding combat and the kind of storytelling Obsidian is known for.

A giant beetle charged toward me, and as it stepped into a big puddle in the center of the room, I snagged it with a burst of magical vines that appeared beneath its feet. Then I blasted the creature with one of my dual flintlock pistols--this one charged with electricity--which sent arcs down through the water, shocking a few skeletons that were joining the fray behind it. As they looked to overwhelm me, I unloaded with both my pistols, zipped a little sideways with a dodge, and clambered away to unload on them before they could slice me up.

One of the highlights of my hands-on time with Avowed, Obsidian Entertainment's upcoming first-person RPG, is its breezy combat and combination of elements. The game has seen some comparison to The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and with a weapon in each hand, it feels on point. Mixing and matching different play styles, like blasting away with elemental pistols, sneaking around with a bow, or dipping into a pocket to pull out explosive jars to chuck into a melee, felt pretty good in my short look at the game. That brief time also highlighted that the options I tried only seem to scratch the surface of what Obsidian is going for.

Obsidian showed off an hour-long look at Avowed at an Xbox event in Los Angeles that mirrors what is available this week during Gamescom in Cologne, Germany. The preview build picks up early on in the proceedings as you search for a missing expedition from the Aedyran Empire that has entered the islands of the Living Lands, the game's bright and deadly setting. Their path took me--the Aedyran Empire's envoy--into a huge underground cave system, alongside a companion character named Kai.

As Avowed's trailers have shown, the Envoy's job is to find the cause of a mysterious illness plaguing the Living Lands called the Dream Scourge. Evidence of the sickness, which infects people and animals and can also be seen spreading across the land as a sort of fungus, keeps appearing even deep underground--but what exactly it is or does was a mystery in this early part of the game.

The first thing I thought of when I originally saw Avowed's cover art was Annihilation, both the book by author Jeff VanderMeer and the movie adaptation directed by Alex Garland. Venturing through the demo continues that impression; the demo takes place in a bright, beautiful underground cave, full of plants and flowing water, and interspersed with bioluminescent flora.

Art director Matt Hansen and production designer Ryan Warden lit up when I mentioned Annihilation during an interview after playing the demo. Hansen said that, of course, everyone working on the game has brought a ton of different inspirations to it, but Annihilation was a big one.


"It's a very vibrant world, and that was a very intentional decision on our part, because when you allow yourself access to that, you can explore the full range of color psychology, and, you know, vibrant colors tend to be dangerous. What does that mean if we really play into that?" Hansen said. "And with trying to sell [that] the Living Lands is arguably the most dangerous place in Eora, we went big on color, but that's also an interesting juxtaposition to a lot of really grim story that you're going to encounter over the life of the game."

In both the book and movie, a strange phenomenon has cordoned off a piece of land that comes to be known as Area X, and an expedition is sent in to study it, with strange and horrific results. To enter the area, the group has to pass through a strange, inexplicable barrier called the Shimmer in the movie.

"What I really like about that is going back to this concept of duality and light and dark," Warden said. "There's that hesitation right as the group is about to enter the Shimmer in Annihilation. There's that moment where they're all just sort of looking at each other, and you get the sense of, okay, it's almost like nervousness, but also excitement, at going into something that's brand new, but also, I don't know what's lurking behind there. And that's kind of what we've got with the danger of the Living Lands, or certainly something that we've tried to bring out. It's that sense of, if you get an embrace from a loved one, that's a very nice thing. If you get an embrace from a python, that is maybe not as good of a thing. And so, is it an embrace? Is it a stranglehold? And that sort of a little bit of salt with your sugar helps really sell the overall thing."

Avowed is part of the universe of Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity series, but it feels a lot more like the studio's other recent RPG, The Outer Worlds, in how it plays. That's not just because of the first-person perspective that defines both Avowed and The Outer Worlds, as compared to Pillars' isometric viewpoint. Avowed is also faster and more visceral in terms of how it plays. Moving through the cave requires a lot of jumping over gaps and climbing up ledges, and while the game doesn't have a full free-running, Assassin's Creed-like feel, this demo shows off how much verticality and traversal are part of the world design.


"Working on The Outer Worlds, we started to realize, 'Hey, we can go a lot more vertical with the game,'" art director Matt Hansen told me in an interview. "We can do a lot more with traversal. And that's new for us as a studio; we've not really done that before. And so getting to experiment with that and also encounter pitfalls and figure out, 'Okay, that didn't quite work, what could we do to really make it sing?' And I mean, I didn't really like traversal in The Outer Worlds, I'm gonna be totally honest. It's fine, there's nothing wrong with it, but I didn't feel momentum in the way that I do in Avowed, and that was one of the things that we really want to make sure that we improved upon."

Momentum is one of the surprising elements of how Avowed feels moment-to-moment, in fact, and it feels like Obsidian has put a premium on movement as part of combat and exploration. There are the running, jumping, and platforming aspects, but you also have a short-range dodge move you can use in combat to avoid taking a hit or to sidestep an enemy. And like a lot of games, Avowed lets you slide from a sprint. Hansen noted that the slide was something that's not strictly necessary as part of combat or movement, but it's fun, so Obsidian put it in--and people playing the game have been excited to discover the ability to slide as they play.

"When you're an isometric, top-down game, it's pretty slow by comparison, especially when it's real-time with pause, like Pillars was, and so having our gameplay team really dig in hard to what makes those moments fun was an interesting challenge for us," Hansen said. "It's a lot of new territory--like we've had first-person combat in games before, but we really wanted to dig into, 'What do games outside of genre do that work so well, and which of those things can we reasonably pull in?'"

Delving deeper into the cave, our demo had us spending a lot of time with companion Kai--notably voiced by Brendan Keener, who played Garrus in the Mass Effect games. Kai comments pretty liberally on the proceedings, fleshing out his character and drawing attention to the evidence we find as we make our way deeper into the cave. He notes that there are a lot of signs of life here, and not just those left behind by the expedition. This place is also dangerous, in part because of the xaurips--hostile humanoid lizard people we keep finding along the way. It's also outfitted with traps, several of which caught curious or incautious expeditioners.


We eventually stumble across a survivor of those traps and hostile creatures, a kid named Caedmon, who, alongside Kai's commentary, gives a sense of Avowed's tone. Bleeding and maybe dying of his injuries, the first thing Caedmon does is lament that he's going to die a virgin. Obsidian fans will be instantly familiar with what's on offer here, with multiple dialogue options for how you deal with Caedmon, including several that depend on your character, like the stats you've focused on or the backstory you've chosen in character creation.

You can help Caedmon out, and he gives you information about what happened to the expedition if you do. On the other hand, you can tell him to suck it up and get over his life-threatening injuries, and as was demonstrated by another journalist during our session, Caedmon will actually (and somewhat hilariously) just... die.

Caedmon directed us to Sargamis, an oracle and worshiper of the god Eothas and, apparently, the guy responsible for the underground temple and the traps. Sargamis has little in the way of information about the expedition, but he sends you on a side quest that dovetails with your search, asking you to retrieve something called the Splinter of Eothas from deeper in the cave. That artifact is possibly what the expedition members were after as they proceeded, and if you bring it back to Sargamis, he'll use it to try to summon and trap Eothas in a big statue. There's a bunch of lore surrounding this whole quest, and one notable element of Avowed is how tooltips will let you pull up short glossary entries alongside dialogue for a quick explanation of what key terms mean, to help you follow along.

The highlight of the quest with Sargamis is that, if you bring back the splinter and give it to him, he tries to use a series of magical and scientific devices to summon his god and seemingly fails. Then he has a suggestion: You should sacrifice your soul to the statue to draw Eothas into it. The dialogue options give you the chance to do that, if you really want to, but it sounds like a terrible idea. Naturally, as this is an Obsidian game, you can convince Sargamis to use his own soul on the statue instead. While you can warn Sargamis that you don't think this is going to work, he does it anyway, and it goes exactly as expected. So if you make the right choices, that's both characters you meet dying soon after talking to you.


The interactions with Caedmon and Sargamis have their funny moments, but as Hansen and Warden told me, Avowed isn't really a comedic game in the same sense as the satirical The Outer Worlds is. The tone is more in line with Pillars of Eternity--funny at times, and pretty dark at others.

"[The Pillars of Eternity game] are very much games for adults, but adults also like to have a laugh, right? And so we try to punctuate the serious tone of a lot of things with levity, both in terms of the writing, but also the visual storytelling," Hansen said. "It's definitely not a comedy game, but I think just like in real life, when faced with incredible tragedy and incredible adversity and really challenging situations, people turn to comedy a lot as a defense mechanism, as a release of all of that stress, and we know that that's a powerful component of human psychology. ... It's a game of contrasts, and things feel bigger when they're contrasted against their opposite. Black is blacker if you've just been hit with a bright light. And that's true of narrative tone as well."

Not far beyond the oracle and his statue, after another big combat encounter with some rather large beetles, you eventually do find the Splinter of Eothas sitting and waiting on an altar--although there's still no sign of expedition. Taking it causes an earthquake to shake the cave like something out of Indiana Jones, followed by a boss fight with a big, barbarian-like skeleton called the Godless Executioner.

The big guy hits hard with a two-handed sword, requiring you to dodge away to avoid taking a bunch of damage from his hits, but the tough element of this fight is actually in figuring out your priorities. Before long, the Godless Executioner is joined by a bunch of other skeletons, including archers, fighters carrying swords and shields, and a priest who will heal the boss continually during the fight. You can't make any progress until the priest goes down, but fighting the boss is tough while getting sniped by the archers, too. Luckily, Kai is here to help draw the boss's ire while you mop up all the little guys around the room.


I played this sequence twice with two different builds. The first time, I did it with the dual-pistol character, which Obsidian helpfully referred to as a "ranger" in the save file, who also sported a bow for stealthy snipes and a spell for going invisible to get out of danger. The second time, I was on the "barbarian" file, wielding a big, two-handed club and doing big damage to the boss with heavy melee attacks.

Though Obsidian put us into save files with classic RPG character types like ranger and barbarian, Warden said that one of the major elements of Avowed is that it doesn't have traditional character classes. These character builds were created for the sake of these demos to give a sense of the different approaches you can take in the game (there was also a magic-focused character I saw a bit in action but didn't get to play).

"One of the things that's also kind of novel about this game, certainly in comparison to the Pillars games, is the fact that it's a classless game," Warden explained. "You don't jump into character creation [and] press A on 'barbarian.' Here, it's up to you. You can roll around with a sword and board, you could do sword and pistol, you could do wand and pistol. You could do basically any combination that you can come up with."

Replayability and the ability for players to find different pathways through the game are also major focuses of what Obsidian is going for with Avowed, Warden said. He mentioned that despite playing through the preview build a huge number of times, he often was surprised by the different ways you could take through it. As an example, he mentioned another player who skipped one of the major combat encounters in the demo--the fight with the beetles--by using the invisibility spell to slip by them. Warden said he expected the player would have to deal with that combat encounter on their way back out of the cave. But it turns out, they never had to, because the earthquake triggered by grabbing the Splinter of Eothas floods that cavern, something he hadn't considered. You can even swim down and find all the drowned bugs, he said.


Watching other people run through the demo, it's clear that it is a bit shorter than I realized. You can clear the whole thing in a matter of minutes if you're quick about it and ignore diversions. But I spent an hour on the cavern quest, reading lore, checking corners, and finding side doors and secret locations opened by shooting hidden switches. The demo wasn't long, but it was dense with things to see and do.

I asked Hansen and Warden about Obsidian's approach to Avowed, which isn't quite a full open-world game such as Skyrim--the developers instead are calling it "open zone," with the map made up of several large but discrete areas to explore. Taking that not-quite huge open-world approach, they said, allowed Obsidian to up the density on the content within Avowed, much like in the demo's cave.

"You may have noticed the game is super dense with visual interest, with things to do, all of that," Hansen said. "The bigger the level is, the harder it is to actually have that density and have it run. And we wanted to make sure that we were focusing on the content and making the content as good as possible, and not have to worry as much about trimming back so much to accommodate a big open world."

"Our zones are still huge," Warden added. "There are some of them that are absurdly large."

The demo ended soon after I returned to Sargamis with the Splinter (in fact, the power to game stations went out just before he surrendered his soul to the statue). I still have no idea what happened to the expedition. But delving into notes and books, and talking to the demo's two characters, I got an intriguing look at the expansive depth of the Living Lands. Though my look at the game was brief, it was full of potential, with fun and funny moments and fascinating characters, a ton of deep lore, and a fast, dynamic combat system underpinning it all. Avowed seems to contain all the things that make Obsidian's RPGs deep, fascinating experiences, while taking a major step forward for the studio. Just how big a step it is will become clearer when the game releases in February 2025 on PC, Xbox Series X|S, and Xbox Game Pass.

https://venturebeat.com/games/avowed-hands-on-scratching-the-skyrim-itch-with-style/

Avowed hands-on: Scratching the Skyrim itch with style​

I’ve been looking forward to Avowed. It feels like a long time since I had an Elder Scrolls-style, first-person RPG to dive into. I mean, The Elder Scrolls VI will launch one day, but it sure won’t be any time soon.

That’s OK, since Obsidian is releasing Avowed on February 18 for Xbox and PC. I got a chance to play a demo of the game during Gamescom in Cologne, Germany.


And, yeah, it’s definitely scratching that Skyrim itch. But Avowed also stands out with some visual flairs and interesting ideas.

Sightly spelunking​

Avowed looks striking, at least on the PC on which I played my demo. My adventure took place entirely in a single cave. But this wasn’t the kind of dark, gray abyss that I’m used to from The Elder Scrolls. This cavern shined with brilliant purples, greens, and blues.

---

Join us for GamesBeat Next!
GamesBeat Next is connecting the next generation of video game leaders. And you can join us, coming up October 28th and 29th in San Francisco! Take advantage of our buy one, get one free pass offer. Sale ends this Friday, August 16th. Join us by registering here.

---

I had a lot of narrow, twisting paths to explore, but there were also plenty of open areas. This didn’t feel like a claustrophobic place. Even the smaller spaces were filled with details. Nothing looked drab or boring.

Pretty cave!

Pistol power​

It was a gorgeous and fun place to explore. It also had spiders, lizards, and skeletons for me to fight. I’ve seen something of a rising sentiment that Skyrim’s combat is dated and simple these days. I can see how people think that with the rising popularity of games with complex battle mechanics like Elden Ring. Still, I always enjoyed the simple, somewhat spammy nature of fighting in The Elder Scrolls.

Combat in Avowed is certainly similar to Skyrim’s, but it has some important flourishes that should make it feel more interesting. At first, I played a stealthy rogue who used pistols and a bow. I could use the bow to take out targets at far ranges, while the pistols worked best for mid and close-range combat.

Now, pistols like these aren’t something I remember from any Elder Scrolls game. They’re powerful and slow to reload, but you can wield two a time. They also don’t require any ammo (same is true for the bow), so you don’t have to worry about looting bullets or arrows as you dungeon crawl.

You also have a companion character. Now, that’ll sound similar to Skyrim fans, but I found this partner more useful. I could access a couple of cooldown commands that would get him to perform some moves that could do big damage. He also just great at distracting and tanking enemies so I could get clean shots.

Dense with detail.

Magic maybe​

I enjoyed combat with pistols quite a lot. I was a bit less in love with the magic user that I tried. Now, all the spells look great. I was shooting fire out of my wand like a flamethrower and spewing out homing magic missiles. But compared to my guns and stealth techniques, I felt a bit weak. Plus, getting hit at all (even from an arrow you’re unlikely to see coming) could stun me out of longer spells.

Mages also use a lot of mana, so you have to drink potions if you want to keep using spells (often in the middle of a busy fight). It just seemed like a bit of hassle without a good tradeoff.

Of course, this was a small demo, and I’m sure that Avowed will have magic builds that will probably deal more damage than any traditional weapon in the game. I just felt a lot more powerful and efficient relying on more traditional weapons at least in this small slice of the game.

That RPG feeling​

My quest in the cave had me discovering an odd fellow who was building a giant statue of a god. Like any good RPG, I could deal with the situation in a few ways. You can do what this guy wants and help revive his god, or you can tell him that his idea sounds, you know, pretty dangerous and then kill him. I was also able to use lighting abilities to start up some generators and just blow the statue up.

I don’t think I trust this man.
It was a small taste of the role-playing potential for Avowed. These kinds of games thrive on these sorts of mechanics, so I was glad to see interesting dialogue trees that included unique options based on my character. For example, I could use my intellect or my background as a rogue to access special lines.

Lots of confusing nouns are also a staple of RPGs. Luckily, Avowed is joining a recent trend of making it easier to keep up with all of these new names by highlighting the text of important people and places. You can then press a button to read some relevant lore about them. It’s a great way to become more invested in Avowed’s world.

Wowed with Avowed so far​

So far, Avowed is looking like the exact game I was hoping for. It’s a prettier Skyrim with enough new ideas to stand out, but it still sticks close enough to the Elder Scrolls formula to give off similar vibes.

I’m looking forward to getting my hands back on my pistols when Avowed launches next year.

 

[ferratilis]

January 2025 - after 20 amazing years at Obsidian, Josh Sawyer leaves the studio to pursue new challenges
January 2025 - Jason Schreier unveils troubling development details on Avowed, lack of team cohesion and poor leadership being cited as the main reasons. Microsoft assures players and the press that the studio is in great shape, confirms the game is on track for February release and that Obsidian is one of its most important studios
February 2025 - Avowed releases to mixed reception and poor performance, caused by strong competition from another RPG title released in the same time window
March 2025 - after much deliberation, Outer Worlds 2 is cancelled, followed by layoffs at Obsidian. Microsoft ensures players and the press that this will ensure the long-term success of the studio
May 2025 - Microsoft announces the closure of Obsidian Studios to make sure the business is healthy for the long-term. These decisions are never easy to make, Xbox Game Studios head Phil Spencer says, wishes all the Obsidian developers luck in their future endeavors
June 2025 - former Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart takes his new position as the head of Xbox Game Studios, replacing Phil Spencer. "My greatest triumph? I survived," Urquhart says.

 

[Ryzer]

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/xbox-exclusive-avowed-is-like-skyrim-plus-one-of-the-last-decades-best-sci-fi-movies/1100-6526088/

Xbox-Exclusive Avowed Is Like Skyrim Plus One Of The Last Decade's Best Sci-Fi Movies​

Playing an hour of Avowed revealed a dense game with responsive dual-wielding combat and the kind of storytelling Obsidian is known for.

A giant beetle charged toward me, and as it stepped into a big puddle in the center of the room, I snagged it with a burst of magical vines that appeared beneath its feet. Then I blasted the creature with one of my dual flintlock pistols--this one charged with electricity--which sent arcs down through the water, shocking a few skeletons that were joining the fray behind it. As they looked to overwhelm me, I unloaded with both my pistols, zipped a little sideways with a dodge, and clambered away to unload on them before they could slice me up.

One of the highlights of my hands-on time with Avowed, Obsidian Entertainment's upcoming first-person RPG, is its breezy combat and combination of elements. The game has seen some comparison to The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and with a weapon in each hand, it feels on point. Mixing and matching different play styles, like blasting away with elemental pistols, sneaking around with a bow, or dipping into a pocket to pull out explosive jars to chuck into a melee, felt pretty good in my short look at the game. That brief time also highlighted that the options I tried only seem to scratch the surface of what Obsidian is going for.

Obsidian showed off an hour-long look at Avowed at an Xbox event in Los Angeles that mirrors what is available this week during Gamescom in Cologne, Germany. The preview build picks up early on in the proceedings as you search for a missing expedition from the Aedyran Empire that has entered the islands of the Living Lands, the game's bright and deadly setting. Their path took me--the Aedyran Empire's envoy--into a huge underground cave system, alongside a companion character named Kai.

As Avowed's trailers have shown, the Envoy's job is to find the cause of a mysterious illness plaguing the Living Lands called the Dream Scourge. Evidence of the sickness, which infects people and animals and can also be seen spreading across the land as a sort of fungus, keeps appearing even deep underground--but what exactly it is or does was a mystery in this early part of the game.

The first thing I thought of when I originally saw Avowed's cover art was Annihilation, both the book by author Jeff VanderMeer and the movie adaptation directed by Alex Garland. Venturing through the demo continues that impression; the demo takes place in a bright, beautiful underground cave, full of plants and flowing water, and interspersed with bioluminescent flora.

Art director Matt Hansen and production designer Ryan Warden lit up when I mentioned Annihilation during an interview after playing the demo. Hansen said that, of course, everyone working on the game has brought a ton of different inspirations to it, but Annihilation was a big one.


"It's a very vibrant world, and that was a very intentional decision on our part, because when you allow yourself access to that, you can explore the full range of color psychology, and, you know, vibrant colors tend to be dangerous. What does that mean if we really play into that?" Hansen said. "And with trying to sell [that] the Living Lands is arguably the most dangerous place in Eora, we went big on color, but that's also an interesting juxtaposition to a lot of really grim story that you're going to encounter over the life of the game."

In both the book and movie, a strange phenomenon has cordoned off a piece of land that comes to be known as Area X, and an expedition is sent in to study it, with strange and horrific results. To enter the area, the group has to pass through a strange, inexplicable barrier called the Shimmer in the movie.

"What I really like about that is going back to this concept of duality and light and dark," Warden said. "There's that hesitation right as the group is about to enter the Shimmer in Annihilation. There's that moment where they're all just sort of looking at each other, and you get the sense of, okay, it's almost like nervousness, but also excitement, at going into something that's brand new, but also, I don't know what's lurking behind there. And that's kind of what we've got with the danger of the Living Lands, or certainly something that we've tried to bring out. It's that sense of, if you get an embrace from a loved one, that's a very nice thing. If you get an embrace from a python, that is maybe not as good of a thing. And so, is it an embrace? Is it a stranglehold? And that sort of a little bit of salt with your sugar helps really sell the overall thing."

Avowed is part of the universe of Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity series, but it feels a lot more like the studio's other recent RPG, The Outer Worlds, in how it plays. That's not just because of the first-person perspective that defines both Avowed and The Outer Worlds, as compared to Pillars' isometric viewpoint. Avowed is also faster and more visceral in terms of how it plays. Moving through the cave requires a lot of jumping over gaps and climbing up ledges, and while the game doesn't have a full free-running, Assassin's Creed-like feel, this demo shows off how much verticality and traversal are part of the world design.


"Working on The Outer Worlds, we started to realize, 'Hey, we can go a lot more vertical with the game,'" art director Matt Hansen told me in an interview. "We can do a lot more with traversal. And that's new for us as a studio; we've not really done that before. And so getting to experiment with that and also encounter pitfalls and figure out, 'Okay, that didn't quite work, what could we do to really make it sing?' And I mean, I didn't really like traversal in The Outer Worlds, I'm gonna be totally honest. It's fine, there's nothing wrong with it, but I didn't feel momentum in the way that I do in Avowed, and that was one of the things that we really want to make sure that we improved upon."

Momentum is one of the surprising elements of how Avowed feels moment-to-moment, in fact, and it feels like Obsidian has put a premium on movement as part of combat and exploration. There are the running, jumping, and platforming aspects, but you also have a short-range dodge move you can use in combat to avoid taking a hit or to sidestep an enemy. And like a lot of games, Avowed lets you slide from a sprint. Hansen noted that the slide was something that's not strictly necessary as part of combat or movement, but it's fun, so Obsidian put it in--and people playing the game have been excited to discover the ability to slide as they play.

"When you're an isometric, top-down game, it's pretty slow by comparison, especially when it's real-time with pause, like Pillars was, and so having our gameplay team really dig in hard to what makes those moments fun was an interesting challenge for us," Hansen said. "It's a lot of new territory--like we've had first-person combat in games before, but we really wanted to dig into, 'What do games outside of genre do that work so well, and which of those things can we reasonably pull in?'"

Delving deeper into the cave, our demo had us spending a lot of time with companion Kai--notably voiced by Brendan Keener, who played Garrus in the Mass Effect games. Kai comments pretty liberally on the proceedings, fleshing out his character and drawing attention to the evidence we find as we make our way deeper into the cave. He notes that there are a lot of signs of life here, and not just those left behind by the expedition. This place is also dangerous, in part because of the xaurips--hostile humanoid lizard people we keep finding along the way. It's also outfitted with traps, several of which caught curious or incautious expeditioners.


We eventually stumble across a survivor of those traps and hostile creatures, a kid named Caedmon, who, alongside Kai's commentary, gives a sense of Avowed's tone. Bleeding and maybe dying of his injuries, the first thing Caedmon does is lament that he's going to die a virgin. Obsidian fans will be instantly familiar with what's on offer here, with multiple dialogue options for how you deal with Caedmon, including several that depend on your character, like the stats you've focused on or the backstory you've chosen in character creation.

You can help Caedmon out, and he gives you information about what happened to the expedition if you do. On the other hand, you can tell him to suck it up and get over his life-threatening injuries, and as was demonstrated by another journalist during our session, Caedmon will actually (and somewhat hilariously) just... die.

Caedmon directed us to Sargamis, an oracle and worshiper of the god Eothas and, apparently, the guy responsible for the underground temple and the traps. Sargamis has little in the way of information about the expedition, but he sends you on a side quest that dovetails with your search, asking you to retrieve something called the Splinter of Eothas from deeper in the cave. That artifact is possibly what the expedition members were after as they proceeded, and if you bring it back to Sargamis, he'll use it to try to summon and trap Eothas in a big statue. There's a bunch of lore surrounding this whole quest, and one notable element of Avowed is how tooltips will let you pull up short glossary entries alongside dialogue for a quick explanation of what key terms mean, to help you follow along.

The highlight of the quest with Sargamis is that, if you bring back the splinter and give it to him, he tries to use a series of magical and scientific devices to summon his god and seemingly fails. Then he has a suggestion: You should sacrifice your soul to the statue to draw Eothas into it. The dialogue options give you the chance to do that, if you really want to, but it sounds like a terrible idea. Naturally, as this is an Obsidian game, you can convince Sargamis to use his own soul on the statue instead. While you can warn Sargamis that you don't think this is going to work, he does it anyway, and it goes exactly as expected. So if you make the right choices, that's both characters you meet dying soon after talking to you.


The interactions with Caedmon and Sargamis have their funny moments, but as Hansen and Warden told me, Avowed isn't really a comedic game in the same sense as the satirical The Outer Worlds is. The tone is more in line with Pillars of Eternity--funny at times, and pretty dark at others.

"[The Pillars of Eternity game] are very much games for adults, but adults also like to have a laugh, right? And so we try to punctuate the serious tone of a lot of things with levity, both in terms of the writing, but also the visual storytelling," Hansen said. "It's definitely not a comedy game, but I think just like in real life, when faced with incredible tragedy and incredible adversity and really challenging situations, people turn to comedy a lot as a defense mechanism, as a release of all of that stress, and we know that that's a powerful component of human psychology. ... It's a game of contrasts, and things feel bigger when they're contrasted against their opposite. Black is blacker if you've just been hit with a bright light. And that's true of narrative tone as well."

Not far beyond the oracle and his statue, after another big combat encounter with some rather large beetles, you eventually do find the Splinter of Eothas sitting and waiting on an altar--although there's still no sign of expedition. Taking it causes an earthquake to shake the cave like something out of Indiana Jones, followed by a boss fight with a big, barbarian-like skeleton called the Godless Executioner.

The big guy hits hard with a two-handed sword, requiring you to dodge away to avoid taking a bunch of damage from his hits, but the tough element of this fight is actually in figuring out your priorities. Before long, the Godless Executioner is joined by a bunch of other skeletons, including archers, fighters carrying swords and shields, and a priest who will heal the boss continually during the fight. You can't make any progress until the priest goes down, but fighting the boss is tough while getting sniped by the archers, too. Luckily, Kai is here to help draw the boss's ire while you mop up all the little guys around the room.


I played this sequence twice with two different builds. The first time, I did it with the dual-pistol character, which Obsidian helpfully referred to as a "ranger" in the save file, who also sported a bow for stealthy snipes and a spell for going invisible to get out of danger. The second time, I was on the "barbarian" file, wielding a big, two-handed club and doing big damage to the boss with heavy melee attacks.

Though Obsidian put us into save files with classic RPG character types like ranger and barbarian, Warden said that one of the major elements of Avowed is that it doesn't have traditional character classes. These character builds were created for the sake of these demos to give a sense of the different approaches you can take in the game (there was also a magic-focused character I saw a bit in action but didn't get to play).

"One of the things that's also kind of novel about this game, certainly in comparison to the Pillars games, is the fact that it's a classless game," Warden explained. "You don't jump into character creation [and] press A on 'barbarian.' Here, it's up to you. You can roll around with a sword and board, you could do sword and pistol, you could do wand and pistol. You could do basically any combination that you can come up with."

Replayability and the ability for players to find different pathways through the game are also major focuses of what Obsidian is going for with Avowed, Warden said. He mentioned that despite playing through the preview build a huge number of times, he often was surprised by the different ways you could take through it. As an example, he mentioned another player who skipped one of the major combat encounters in the demo--the fight with the beetles--by using the invisibility spell to slip by them. Warden said he expected the player would have to deal with that combat encounter on their way back out of the cave. But it turns out, they never had to, because the earthquake triggered by grabbing the Splinter of Eothas floods that cavern, something he hadn't considered. You can even swim down and find all the drowned bugs, he said.


Watching other people run through the demo, it's clear that it is a bit shorter than I realized. You can clear the whole thing in a matter of minutes if you're quick about it and ignore diversions. But I spent an hour on the cavern quest, reading lore, checking corners, and finding side doors and secret __cpLocations opened by shooting hidden switches. The demo wasn't long, but it was dense with things to see and do.

I asked Hansen and Warden about Obsidian's approach to Avowed, which isn't quite a full open-world game such as Skyrim--the developers instead are calling it "open zone," with the map made up of several large but discrete areas to explore. Taking that not-quite huge open-world approach, they said, allowed Obsidian to up the density on the content within Avowed, much like in the demo's cave.

"You may have noticed the game is super dense with visual interest, with things to do, all of that," Hansen said. "The bigger the level is, the harder it is to actually have that density and have it run. And we wanted to make sure that we were focusing on the content and making the content as good as possible, and not have to worry as much about trimming back so much to accommodate a big open world."

"Our zones are still huge," Warden added. "There are some of them that are absurdly large."

The demo ended soon after I returned to Sargamis with the Splinter (in fact, the power to game stations went out just before he surrendered his soul to the statue). I still have no idea what happened to the expedition. But delving into notes and books, and talking to the demo's two characters, I got an intriguing look at the expansive depth of the Living Lands. Though my look at the game was brief, it was full of potential, with fun and funny moments and fascinating characters, a ton of deep lore, and a fast, dynamic combat system underpinning it all. Avowed seems to contain all the things that make Obsidian's RPGs deep, fascinating experiences, while taking a major step forward for the studio. Just how big a step it is will become clearer when the game releases in February 2025 on PC, Xbox Series X|S, and Xbox Game Pass.

But there wasn't any truly good sci fi movie this decade.

 

[NJClaw]

The HUD leaves me speechless. I'm alternating between laughter and honest disbelief.

I mean... look at this shit. There's barely any empty space left. What the fuck are all those arrows? Who needs so many arrows?! WHY WOULD YOU KEEP YOUR QUEST OBJECTIVES ON THE LEFT WHEN THERE'S ALREADY ALL THIS SHIT CLUTTERING THE SCREEN???!!!! I don't know why this is bothering me so much...

 

[Vulpes]

Josh Sawyer isn't actually working on this game, but its systems were always going to be somewhat inspired by Pillars of Eternity.

But Avowed is an action-RPG where you control one character, so I'm not actually sure what the problem is with this kind of percentile-based progression. The problem people had with that in a game like Pillars is that it was hard to make sense of in the context of party-based tactical combat, but in this game it just means the stuff you're directly doing as your character becomes more (or less) effective. What does it matter if it's a plus, a percentage, or a label saying your damage is now "Very Good".

My point is that these bonuses are laughably miniscule, even more than in PoE where at least those numbers could go in the negative. Soyer's attempt at differentiating PoE's ruleset from other d20 based RPGs was nothing short of terrible. STR wizards and INT barbarians still make me laugh to this day. Adapting such an awful attribute system for an ARPG instead of coming up with something else was a braindead move. No one who plays this (except for mega-autists like Soyer) is gonna ask themselves "Hmmmm, should I lower my damage bonus from +15% to +12% so that I can increase my max Stamina from 140 to 145?". Why would they? They'll get much bigger stat bonuses just from picking up perks after every second level-up

 

[Melcar]

The HUD leaves me speechless. I'm alternating between laughter and honest disbelief.

I mean... look at this shit. There's barely any empty space left. What the fuck are all those arrows? Who needs so many arrows?! WHY WOULD YOU KEEP YOUR QUEST OBJECTIVES ON THE LEFT WHEN THERE'S ALREADY ALL THIS SHIT CLUTTERING THE SCREEN???!!!! I don't know why this is bothering me so much...

Many games are like that now. One of the reasons I can't play modern games. Information overload and it gets tiring.

 

[Ryzer]

The HUD leaves me speechless. I'm alternating between laughter and honest disbelief.

I mean... look at this shit. There's barely any empty space left. What the fuck are all those arrows? Who needs so many arrows?! WHY WOULD YOU KEEP YOUR QUEST OBJECTIVES ON THE LEFT WHEN THERE'S ALREADY ALL THIS SHIT CLUTTERING THE SCREEN???!!!! I don't know why this is bothering me so much...

I honestly thought this was Grounded for a sec, what with the cartoony art direction? Why it is so awful visually speaking?

 

[Old Hans]

The HUD leaves me speechless. I'm alternating between laughter and honest disbelief.

I mean... look at this shit. There's barely any empty space left. What the fuck are all those arrows? Who needs so many arrows?! WHY WOULD YOU KEEP YOUR QUEST OBJECTIVES ON THE LEFT WHEN THERE'S ALREADY ALL THIS SHIT CLUTTERING THE SCREEN???!!!! I don't know why this is bothering me so much...

that is very hideous. its like a hud youd see in a shovelware rpg made in 2005

 

[Ryzer]

Also for the love of god, when you have optional objectives which lead to optional stories, let the player figure it out on his own. That what differentiate games from retards and good games.

 

[sser]

9:55 of the vid might be a reference to the demonstration I saw, where he did in fact get stunlocked into a corner and killed

 

[Infinitron]

Josh Sawyer isn't actually working on this game, but its systems were always going to be somewhat inspired by Pillars of Eternity.

But Avowed is an action-RPG where you control one character, so I'm not actually sure what the problem is with this kind of percentile-based progression. The problem people had with that in a game like Pillars is that it was hard to make sense of in the context of party-based tactical combat, but in this game it just means the stuff you're directly doing as your character becomes more (or less) effective. What does it matter if it's a plus, a percentage, or a label saying your damage is now "Very Good".

My point is that these bonuses are laughably miniscule, even more than in PoE where at least those numbers could go in the negative. Soyer's attempt at differentiating PoE's ruleset from other d20 based RPGs was nothing short of terrible. STR wizards and INT barbarians still make me laugh to this day. Adapting such an awful attribute system for an ARPG instead of coming up with something else was a braindead move. No one who plays this (except for mega-autists like Soyer) is gonna ask themselves "Hmmmm, should I lower my damage bonus from +15% to +12% so that I can increase my max Stamina from 140 to 145?". Why would they? They'll get much bigger stat bonuses just from picking up perks after every second level-up

I don't know about the Stamina, but you may not realize the impact of a seemingly-small percentage boost applied to a base damage value that increases as the player picks up better weapons and other bonuses. Percentage changes have to be small or they can go out of control faster than you think.

(Regarding the numbers going into the negative, that's basically cosmetic as you probably know. SKALD: Against the Black Priory also displays its stat bonuses this way, which is an interesting choice for that type of game.)

 

[luj1]

I honestly thought this was Grounded for a sec, what with the cartoony art direction? Why it is so awful visually speaking?

No talent in the company

 

[Tyranicon]

Thought there were no romances?

 

[Ibn Sina]

No ambition or spark of ingenuity or creativity left in this company. They are like that guy that everyone knows that just does the minimal effort to pass work and goes home and hopes he sees another day with no ambition but to pass life day by day.

 

[Melcar]

Meh. Game development stopped being a passion job like it was in the 80s and 90s. Everything is safe and sterile now to avoid financial losses, chasing the latest woke fad to appeal to modern society.

 

[Abu Antar]

 

[LizardWizard]

Ms. Dollarhyde has negative charisma

 

[S.torch]

Getting RickandMorty vibes from this. I mean, look at it:

Why is this guy glowing? Why everything NEEDS to glow?

And WHAT is THIS...?!

The Thing? It? Pennywise? I don't even know.

 

[whydoibother]

Oh boy, I can't wait for December 2023 to come, so I can play this game!

Oh boy, I can't wait for December 2024 to come, so I can play this game!

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

January 2025 - after 20 amazing years at Obsidian, Josh Sawyer leaves the studio to pursue new challenges
January 2025 - Jason Schreier unveils troubling development details on Avowed, lack of team cohesion and poor leadership being cited as the main reasons. Microsoft assures players and the press that the studio is in great shape, confirms the game is on track for February release and that Obsidian is one of its most important studios
February 2025 - Avowed releases to mixed reception and poor performance, caused by strong competition from another RPG title released in the same time window
March 2025 - after much deliberation, Outer Worlds 2 is cancelled, followed by layoffs at Obsidian. Microsoft ensures players and the press that this will ensure the long-term success of the studio
May 2025 - Microsoft announces the closure of Obsidian Studios to make sure the business is healthy for the long-term. These decisions are never easy to make, Xbox Game Studios head Phil Spencer says, wishes all the Obsidian developers luck in their future endeavors
June 2025 - former Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart takes his new position as the head of Xbox Game Studios, replacing Phil Spencer. "My greatest triumph? I survived," Urquhart says.

Microsoft will shrink and transform Obsidian into a dedicated developer of multiplayer online survival games in the fashion of Grounded, the company's greatest success in the 14 years since Fallout: New Vegas.

 

[Old Hans]

Getting RickandMorty vibes from this. I mean, look at it:

Why is this guy glowing? Why everything NEEDS to glow?

And WHAT is THIS...?!

The Thing? It? Pennywise? I don't even know.

why do game developers INSIST on trying to re-invent the wheel when it comes to wizard robes and fantasy clothes. It always ends up looking like a star trek outfit

 

[Butter]

why do game developers INSIST on trying to re-invent the wheel when it comes to wizard robes and fantasy clothes. It always ends up looking like a star trek outfit

Sir, this is Pillars of Eternity. It's spelled "huyzrd".

 

[ArchAngel]

At least it cannot be worse than Starfield.

 

[Silverfish]

What the fuck are all those arrows?

How else could you see the guy standing in the middle of the screen? Considering that this game is for people who enjoyed The Outer Worlds, this may not be enough in terms of handholding.