Avowed's enjoyable Gamescom demo makes me want to check out Pillars of Eternity - Preview
Of all the first-party games Xbox showcased at this year's Gamescom, the one that is probably of most interest to us at RPG Site is
Avowed, the next game from the role-playing veterans at Obsidian Entertainment. Set in the world of Eora, Avowed is related to the
Pillars of Eternity series, but
Obsidian continues to promise that the game will be welcoming to newcomers.
I'm a fan of several Obsidian titles already, but admittedly, I haven't yet made the time to check out either entry of
Pillars of Eternity myself. I enjoy CRPG-style games, so that's not a concern, and Bryan's
glowing review of Deadfire piqued my interest years ago. But actually sitting down and getting a chance to play through Avowed's enjoyable Gamescom demo may finally push me to boot up those titles that have been sitting dormant in my Steam library.
The demo of Avowed at Gamescom sees the player character and Aumaua companion Kai (voiced by
Brandon Keener, known for Garrus Vakarian in
Mass Effect) head into a cavern to seek a missing expedition team, which takes place relatively early in the game. Three player builds were available: a melee 'barbarian' warrior type, a dual-pistol-wielding ranged type, and a magic "blood mage". In the time allotted, I had the chance to check out the melee and ranged builds, but not the magic one.
Avowed is a nicer-looking game than I expected, at least in some ways, with a vibrant color palette full of greens, blues, and reddish tones alongside some satisfactory lighting. The artstyle goes for a slightly stylized look over high-fidelity realism, and I got acquainted with it relatively quickly. Some components of the user interface could use some small adjustments for my liking, as there's a lot of floating text and indicators. There's time for polish before the game releases, however, and I'm not certain what options will be available to the player in the full game.
You navigate a wooded and partially submerged cavern in first-person, taking on a handful of aggressive Xaurip lizards and other creatures that inhabit the area. Combat is, for the most part, separated into main-hand and off-hand attacks, using a stamina bar that dictates when actions can be performed.
First-person melee combat is a little bit chaotic, as it tends to be, being in the center of the mayhem with adversaries potentially attacking you from multiple directions. Due to the game's perspective, it can be tricky to manage the battlefield around you. Kai would at times shout lines such as "On your right!" to clue me into where enemy threats would be as we fought. Some abilities and actions could be tied to shortcuts on your d-pad (seen in the bottom left of the game UI). Alternatively, you can pull up an ability radial with a shoulder button,
Mass Effect style, to select from a larger suite of actions available. For example, you can call on Kai to perform a jumping AoE attack, which I certainly found useful for crowd control.
The ranged class option was a little bit more refined than the melee one, as you could more readily step back from the chaos and approach combat from afar, keeping better vision on the battlefield. As you might expect, this class is a little bit less damaging in general than the barbarian, but has a higher emphasis on aiming, dealing critical hits, and laying on status effects.
After exploring a bit, I met a young, lone member of said expedition team, who was poisoned and requested assistance. This dialogue options here had a few tied to my character's perception stats, and broadly speaking, I could assist the lad or leave him to die. Kai chimed in at times during the dialogue here, offering his own commentary about the situation, although there was no explicit indication of any sort of "companion approval" that is commonly seen in this style of game.
After seeking a little further into the cavern, you stumble across an encampment of sorts housing a large statue several stories tall. Here you meet the lone Sargamis, a golden deific avatar of sorts. This led to the longest dialogue sequence in the demo.
The dialogue with Saragmis was full of Proper Nouns, talking about concepts such as 'Godlikes" and the "Wheel", mentioning world locations such as Deadfire & Ukaizo, as well as some of the gods such as Eothas. While I'm sure I would have been a little less burdened by the jargon had I played Avowed from the beginning - rather than jumping in partway into the game for the demo - it was a little bit overwhelming to reconcile all of the lore and terminology thrown at me in quick succession.
Luckily, there is an in-game codex system, where you can highlight certain words & phrases during dialogue to get a quick encyclopedic summary of its meaning, if you so choose. Clearly, those who had played
Pillars would more readily understand the discussion taking place here, and even if Pillars isn't *required* to play Avowed, I still found myself wishing I had that context myself.
After some discussion about the world of Eora and the gods who inhabit it, Sargamis requests that you seek out an artifact - the Splinter of Eothas - needed for the statue he is building. The second half of the demo has the player dive even deeper into the caverns, taking on more monsters while tackling some light exploration and puzzle-solving as well.
One thing I appreciated most about going through the wooded caverns is that it was not a linear pathway, nor was it an empty open zone. Moving from room to room, sometimes you would see a container, chest, or some other object of interest through a crevice or across a gap, and I found myself looking around to try to make my way there. Sometimes this would involve finding a breakable wall, sometimes opening a long-abandoned gate, or sometimes some light first-person platforming. Some of these optional rooms would house different lore items, while others would have new equipment accessories for me to try out.
I think it's pretty clear that Avowed will be more than just linear battle corridors and dialogue sequences. Some doors in the cavern had "Godlike" rune icons nearby, and you have to figure out the mechanism needed to activate them. In this case, it often came down to tossing electrified throwables at certain objects in the world. The cavern also had a few vines/webs that could be destroyed with fire-based techniques, as well as walls torn down with explosives.
According to the Obsidian representatives on-site, even actually finding the expedition team in the demo was optional, and many demo players didn't manage to locate them, despite it being the main objective of the mission to begin with. This sort of quest design is interesting and promising in how outcomes don't solely rely on choices made in dialogue, but also on exploration & discovery.
While the demo allowed me to open the menu and check the skill trees and equipment settings available, it's difficult to evaluate RPG progression systems in such a short snippet of the game. What I could see looked promising, though, and I'm eager to explore these systems in the full game.
Overall, my experience with Avowed's Gamescom demo was a positive one. The variety in gameplay styles between the character builds available, the evident quest choices you could make, environment navigation, and the solid vertical slice of combat ... it was about as good a demo as you could have for an RPG of this nature. Hopefully, the longer-form storytelling, companion writing, and character progression all shape up to make Avowed a compelling RPG next year.
Avowed is set to release on February 18, 2025.
