Eternity Avowed - Obsidian's first person action-RPG in the Pillars of Eternity setting - coming November 12th(?)

[Roguey]

Few new articles about Avowed out https://videogames.si.com/features/avowed-interview-carrie-patel

“Deadfire players will recognize some references, like the dwindling existence of the godlikes, without us going too deep into it and making it feel like required reading for new players,” game director Carrie Patel explains.

Deadfire explored the impact of colonialism on cultures, and Avowed takes a similar route, examining the idea of order and chaos through the lens of the player character. As an envoy to the Empire, you’re an agent of ‘order’, but whether you wish to be their puppet or help the people of the Living Lands is completely up to you.

“As in previous Pillars games, there’s that political story, and then underneath that, there’s a metaphysical story about The Divine, about mysteries, about long-standing secrets and how those have affected the development of life in the region,” Patel explains.

Third time's the charm maybe...?

Avowed isn’t just close to Deadfire in terms of themes – it’s also similar in tone. Where Pillars of Eternity was grimdark and unrelenting, Avowed, like Deadfire, will balance its high-stakes story with moments of levity. Side quests and characters bring humanity.

Still Bioware Jr of course.

...I wouldn't really describe Piillars of Eternity as "grimdark" though. It was grim and full of melancholy, but it wasn't full of edgy and gory moments like Dragon Age: Origins, that's not Sawyer's bag.

The setup, with you playing as an agent of an authoritarian regime, reminds me of another Obsidian game, Tyranny, in which you work for an evil overlord who’s already conquered the world. Patel tells me this is a result of Obsidian’s penchant for exploring moral complexities.

“We enjoy exploring morally gray themes, territory, and complicated questions that force the player to engage and choose an answer without giving easy answers,” she explains. “We wanted to avoid the idea of this very black and white, good and evil monolithic Empire versus everybody else who was really nice, and then create a situation that feels believably complex.”

Looks like "no, we will not be doing noble savages" won out.

That freedom to explore, be curious, and carve your own path through Avowed has its limits. One thing you won’t be able to do is murder everyone. Unlike in many other Obsidian games – some of which Patel has worked on – quest-critical characters can’t be killed in Avowed.

“We decided to forego the murder hobo playstyle,” Patel explains. Designing a game to fit around the possibility of a psychopathic rampage, as with adding anything in a game, comes with a series of design challenges.

“Often it’s something that people do accidentally, which means you can’t put combat in a crowded space because one stray fireball can aggro the whole town,” she continues. “Or it’s something that they do just for fun. I don’t want to discount the value of that, but I also see how many things we have to forego on the dev side to support it.”

Now this will cause some seething https://readwrite.com/obsidian-avowed-the-outer-worlds-preview-length-hours/

• Avowed will have a shorter length similar to The Outer Worlds, around 20 hours of gameplay.
• The game features multiple open zones with distinct characters and aesthetics, unlike a single open world.
• Avowed includes six character attributes and four skill trees, enhancing RPG elements and customization.

Game director Carrie Patel told TechRadar: “So in terms of both the scope and the structure of the game, I’d look to The Outer Worlds for a pretty good point of comparison.

“It’s going to be broadly similar in terms of the length and breadth of the experience, and it’s also similar in terms of the structure,” she said. Unlike some games, especially the role-playing games which Obsidian is known for, which can go on for as long as 100 hours, The Outer Worlds broke the mold at 20 hours.

Patel then goes on to explain that the structure of the world is divided into multiple open zones, similar to that of The Outer Worlds. “Rather than a pure open world where you have one enormous, continuous map, what you have is a series of open zones that unlock as you move through the story, and what that really allows us to do is give each one a distinct character — a really different aesthetic,” she explained.

“At this point, you’ve seen Shatterscarp which is a desert with these rocky highlands, and now we’ve also seen Emerald Stair which is almost the polar opposite; this very boggy, gloomy, lush, green forested area.

“So by having these open zones, it allows us to give each environment a really distinct sense of character, and it also allows us to create this sense of spread and distance between them as you’re moving from one part of the Living Lands to another.”

20 hours? To the bone!

It took me 48 hours to complete TOW so maybe they're just once again ineptly underselling it?

 

[Tyranicon]

"When the player feedback is like, 'Oh, this doesn't look great,' you're like, okay, we need to prioritize that polish, like, immediately. So we jumped on that," he explains in regards to how fans reacted to the combat.

This gives me a slight glimmer of hope, because at least they're acting like rational humans. "Our audience didn't like it, better change it."

As opposed to the Dragon Age route of ignoring massive backlash and turning on the shill faucet.

 

[Lemming42]

“We enjoy exploring morally gray themes, territory, and complicated questions that force the player to engage and choose an answer without giving easy answers,” she explains. “We wanted to avoid the idea of this very black and white, good and evil monolithic Empire versus everybody else who was really nice, and then create a situation that feels believably complex.”

This is a frankly audacious thing for her to claim, given the way TOW ended up.

Patel's very much reached Pete Hines levels of PR failure in that everything she says gives me a sinking feeling in my stomach. Just like Hines, about 75% of what she says is hugely discouraging shit that she's inexplicably presenting as a positive (it's going to be laughably short with hub worlds - hooray!), and the other 25% is stuff that sounds right but, in light of her track record, simply has to be her lying through her teeth.

This colonialism plot is going to be a trainwreck, mark my words. It's either going to be exactly as black and white as you'd expect and Patel's lying, or it's going to try and force a "morally grey" stance by adding comically jarring "bad points" to the natives which will be there entirely to help fabricate a moral dilemma in a plot that is otherwise totally straightforward.

 

[Old Hans]

"When the player feedback is like, 'Oh, this doesn't look great,' you're like, okay, we need to prioritize that polish, like, immediately. So we jumped on that," he explains in regards to how fans reacted to the combat.

This gives me a slight glimmer of hope, because at least they're acting like rational humans. "Our audience didn't like it, better change it."

As opposed to the Dragon Age route of ignoring massive backlash and turning on the shill faucet.

a part of me sort of agrees, but also part of me thinks the devs dont really know how to make the combat fun, which tells me there is a lack of vision

 

[Heroic Liberator]

“We enjoy exploring morally gray themes, territory, and complicated questions that force the player to engage and choose an answer without giving easy answers,” she explains. “We wanted to avoid the idea of this very black and white, good and evil monolithic Empire versus everybody else who was really nice, and then create a situation that feels believably complex.”

This is a frankly audacious thing for her to claim, given the way TOW ended up.

TOW is crap, but Deadfire dealt with it relatively ok in terms of factions.

 

[Roguey]

TOW is crap, but Deadfire dealt it with relatively ok in terms of factions.

Deadfire had Josh Sawyer as director who's now Sir No-one-has-to-listen-to-my-feedback on this project.

I also have to seethingly agree with Avellone that factions should be designed to give you good reasons to want to join up with them. I disliked every faction in Deadfire and went it alone because they were a all bunch of selfish bickering brats.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

I also have to seethingly agree with Avellone that factions should be designed to give you good reasons to want to join up with them. I disliked every faction in Deadfire and went it alone because they were a all bunch of selfish bickering brats.

I think that the factions are much better if you have a PC that is related to them. Otherwise yeah, doesn't make too much sense to get involved in that nonsense when you've got other priorities with following Eothas.

 

[Old Hans]

why do rpgs even need different factions? which game started that trend? im kind of sick of it

 

[Lemming42]

why do rpgs even need different factions? which game started that trend? im kind of sick of it

I can think of a few earlier games with competing joinable guilds and shit like that, and of course there's stuff like M&B and Wiz7. But funnily enough, New Vegas might have been the game most responsible for popularising, if not inventing, the commonly-used model for factions of "player joins faction A, faction A is therefore destined to win the game as long as the player follows their questline, all other factions just sort of do nothing, player gets congratulatory slideshow/cutscene/dialogue at the end telling them everything went like they wanted it to".

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

why do rpgs even need different factions? which game started that trend? im kind of sick of it

Because people break off in to factions? Happens in any population of a certain size.

 

[normie]

I'm part of the "fuck Obsidian" faction, also the "I hate currysharks" faction

 

[Butter]

why do rpgs even need different factions? which game started that trend? im kind of sick of it

New Vegas definitely popularized it. It worked well in that game and felt organic to the situation. It felt extremely forced in Deadfire (Choose which faction is going to help you sail to Ukaizo!). I think developers glommed onto the idea because it's a way to introduce multiple endings besides the obvious good/bad, but you have to design your story around it. Imagine if KotOR (for example) had multiple factions but it was just about which group helped you go to the Starforge at the end. It would be retarded and pointless. Similarly, Fallout 4's retardation where you're just choosing which group destroys the Institute, something you as the player don't even need helping doing.

 

[Cohesion]

He gives feedback on Avowed and TOW 2 that nobody has to listen to and is being held on to until they get the greenlight for a project he's excited about.

That's a lot of money for doing basically nothing. He earns in a month more than me in a year busting my ass working 12 hour shifts plus 2h commute. First world problems lol.

Edit: You - amerikwans are disgusting creatures, exporting your debt to the whole world and we pay for it.

 

[Roguey]

why do rpgs even need different factions? which game started that trend? im kind of sick of it

Fallout, Fallout 2, Planescape Torment, Baldur's Gate 2, Arcanum, Gothic, Morrowind, Gothic 2, Temple of Elemental Evil, Bloodlines, Neverwinter Nights 2, Oblivion, The Witcher, Risen...

That's a lot of money for doing basically nothing. He earns in a month more than me in a year busting my ass. First world problems lol.

Southern California does have a really high cost of living. He laments that buying property is a pipedream (Chris Avellone and his wife bought a house right in LA though, all that freelancing really paid off)

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

Fuck Codex has declined badly. Post like yours would give you Bethtard tag 10 years ago.

1.) You haven't even been here for 10 years.
2.) Look at my join date. Notice that I'm user #4. You might think being here for 9 years makes you an oldfag, but you're still a newfag to me.
3.) Which part of "I don't think Bethesda can really call themselves a AAA CRPG developer anymore" was confusing to you to the point where you think that's an endorsement?

Skyrim is a shit CRPG. Is it a bad game? Not really, there's plenty to do in the game but exactly how much of that has to do anything with how you made your character? Not much at all. How much of the character system has Bethesda stripped between Skyrim and Oblivion? Now go back to Morrowind or Daggerfall. There's very little left of the Daggerfall character system left. Fallout 4 gutted SPECIAL just like Skyrim gutted the Elder Scrolls character system that Daggerfall put in place in a similar fashion. Hell, both games completely removed ATTRIBUTES, a staple of RPGs since the 1970s. As much as people shit on Diablo, it still has attributes.

They basically removed what inane prowess a character might have due to his "nature" aspect, his genetics. What's the difference between Player A's Dragonborn with a few ranks in axe skill and Player B with the same ranks? Absolutely nothing, because they got rid of the physical innate characteristics of their character system. Fallout 4 is even worse, because they still claim to have attributes, but they're really not even though they left in some mechanics from the previous games. It's like some cobbled together Frankenstein of a mess with missing pieces and applied to things that shouldn't be changing that much over time.

Because they stripped down the character system with the bathwater, they also threw out any ability to flesh out meaningful options you can have within the world. When lockpiocking goes from a scale of 1% to 100% down to four or five levels, that essentially means there's only four or five different locks possible in the game. You strip the depth. That's not just lockpicking, that's every single "skill" in both games. You piss away something nuanced like a 60% Speech check, since there's only 0, 25, 50, 75, and 100 now.

And all that is beyond how it's no longer fun to level up.

Maybe because when you leveled up, wolves, bandits and guards leveled up too, making your short level-up dopamine rush almost worthless.

No, but that's a problem as well, but it has more to do with anticipating what you can do on level up and what you're really working towards when you only have 1 point to spend every level. You look at where you want to be early in the game and you start thinking, "I'm going to need 13 points to do that." So, eventually, you slide in to the line of thinking that the next level up won't really matter towards your goal because you're only moving that bar by 1 each time. The incremental changes feel like they have much impact when you plopping down 10 skill points, and Fallout's SPECIAL also had Perks which can also help towards those goals. You look forward to the levels when you get a Perk.

You took what should be the one thing you're looking forward doing and just screwed it up completely. And yes, you're right, level scaling doesn't help this at all.

 

[Cohesion]

I am not jealous or anything. I just wonder what he does day to day at the workplace. Consulting and s(h)itting on the twitter? Why don't give him unpaid leave if he is a useless asset?
Or he is useful? Maybe he leads some secret project?
Chris Roberts (top grifter) > Josh > oncelost games (df remake) > unknown realm (pure scam).
Hierarchy established!

 

[Infinitron]

It took me 48 hours to complete TOW so maybe they're just once again ineptly underselling it?

Yeah, this game will be 20 hours as much as SKALD was 10 hours.

I think game developers are constantly watching their QA staff run through their games again and again and they get a skewed impression of how people consume them.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

It took me 48 hours to complete TOW so maybe they're just once again ineptly underselling it?

Yeah, this game will be 20 hours as much as SKALD was 10 hours.

I think game developers are constantly watching their QA staff run through their games again and again and they get a skewed impression of how people consume them.

If you do nothing BUT the main quest in New Vegas, the game's over in 20 hours.
Do the side quests, side with a faction, that goes up to 40 hours.
A full playthrough with the dlc could reach the 90 hour mark.
This is why sites like howlongtobeat track different completion metrics.

 

[Drakortha]

Avowed >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> DA4 >>>>>> BG3

 

[Heroic Liberator]

Avowed >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> DA4 >>>>>> BG3

Cope of ages.

t. someone who wasn't particularly impressed with BG3 either

 

[Drakortha]

Avowed >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> DA4 >>>>>> BG3

Cope of ages.

t. someone who wasn't particularly impressed with BG3 either

BG3 is just original sin 2 with makeup on.

Avowed might be a TOW asset flip, but at least Obsidian are flipping something of their own creation and are not just digging up the grave of a beloved series and stamping their name on it.

Same goes for DA4. The Codex can complain as much as they want that it's woke garbage for normies. But the fact is that BG3 took Biowares formula and did it better. Hence it deserves the hate it gets for more effectively poisoning the RPG well.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

Avowed >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> DA4 >>>>>> BG3

Cope of ages.

t. someone who wasn't particularly impressed with BG3 either

BG3 is just original sin 2 with makeup on.

Avowed might be a TOW asset flip, but at least Obsidian are flipping something of their own creation and are not just digging up the grave of a beloved series and stamping their name on it.

Same goes for DA4. The Codex can complain as much as they want that it's woke garbage for normies. But the fact is that BG3 did that first, and did it better. Hence it deserves the hate it gets for more effectively poisoning the RPG well.

I can understand your stance, but at that point you're no longer rating the games themselves.

 

[Lemming42]

I really like BG3.

 

[Drakortha]

I can understand your stance, but at that point you're no longer rating the games themselves.

But I am rating the games. When Swen first appeared on the stage to reveal Baldur's Gate 3 gameplay for the first time he showed us gameplay consisting of running around a beachfront that looked identical to the beach zones in Original Sin 1/2. Then he stacked wooden barrels on top of each over and jumped on them to reach something.

Then he did the whole "You see that puddle of oil, there? If I shoot a fire spell at it, I can create fire!"

Was that what we've been waiting 20 years for? Swen's clown game rebranded as Baldur's Gate?

I rated the game right then and there. And nothing that followed redeemed it in my mind.