It's a good deal Infinitron. I can personally vouch that jaekl has not broken a deal made with me even once.
Sounds like something a transgender would write, move on from the past self, stand up to bigots and bravely face the future
The Talmud states that deals made with goyim need not be honored, so...
I'll just become Jewish then. I'm a Jew now, please don't do any atrocities to me everyone
Too late, we're auditing your financials.
I never bought The Outer Worlds either. Game Pass for $5 a month, then got a free Steam key at some point. My opinion of Obsidian's mainstream titles is less positive than many realize: https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads...dian-to-ever-make-it-big.149046/#post-8790603
Sounds like something a transgender would write, move on from the past self, stand up to bigots and bravely face the future
Avowed review
Eora surprise.
What Avowed lacks in gloss it makes up for with charm, depth and a playful heart. It's one of this year's most pleasant surprises.
It took me a while to warm to Avowed. There's a feeling early on that it's all rather old-fashioned, a bit stiff and a bit wooden. It's there in the ambition of the game too: it doesn't seem to be doing anything grand or headline-grabbing. This is a big new role-playing adventure from a renowned first-party Xbox studio, but I just seem to be running around whacking lizard people. Where are the bold new ideas? Sometimes it feels like playing a game from the Xbox 360 era, albeit one with ray tracing and DLSS 3.
But as I stuck with it, that cynicism melted away, its Xbox 360-ness feeling more like a strength than a weakness. Unlike so many po-faced RPGs of today, Avowed feels blissfully unburdened by complication. It's an adventure in the warm sea air of a strange and fantastical island, and it never loses sight of that - of being an adventure. It's a game about climbing around on treasure hunts, striking out into the unknown, and revelling in the absurdity of its super-powered combat. It's a game that enjoys being a game - and I don't think we say that enough.
Avowed is an action role-playing game in the same way Skyrim is an action role-playing game: a first-person (though there is the option of a third-person view) swashbuckling spell-flinger where you run around picking up apples and wedges of cheese. But the similarities stop there. Far from being a sandbox, Avowed is a more authored kind of game where characters and their associated stories are deliberately placed to direct you around the world. It's also an experience where the few companions you meet aren't optional and aren't romanceable, which feels delightfully novel these days. They'll fight alongside you in battle (two at a time) and weigh in on decisions you make, both in the moment and when you're back at camp.
The adventure itself takes place in an island region called the Living Lands, a mysterious new addition to the world of Eora, which is the setting of Obsidian's acclaimed Pillars of Eternity games. It's a standalone area so you don't need to have played those games to understand this one, but there's an undeniable thrill for returning players in seeing this previously isometric world through the eyes of a character who lives there. There are also several nods to characters and events from previous Pillars games. It's nice to be back.
Whether you know the world or not, though, one thing is inescapable: this setting is a very pleasant place to be. Warm sun, clear water bays, busy jetties and ramshackle towns: this is a tropical getaway. But it's a getaway with a problem: a plague of sorts - a fungi-powered exuberance that twists trees and saturates everything in kaleidoscopic colour. I can't think of a game that's used a palette of pinks, purples and oranges quite like this before. It's as though the world is going to an undersea, coral-themed ball, and it's brazenly unique because of it. There's no moody realism here: this is maximalist fantasy and I'm here for it. It's beautiful. And it's into this set-up you arrive as an envoy of an overseas Emperor to find out what's going on, and stop it. You are also a Godlike, a chosen one of a deity who left their mark upon you at birth - a gaudy facial feature chosen during character creation. The only problem is, you don't know who your god is. But as you arrive on the island, a voice starts to sound in your head.
It's an intriguing set-up, but it's unfortunate how long it takes for anything intriguing to actually happen. There's an overabundance of names and factions at the start that won't mean anything to you initially, and it arguably puts too much focus on establishing the world's fraught political landscape. Eventually, it does all start to sink in many hours later, but it's too much too soon, for sure. The genericness of running around a town collecting quests from exclamation mark-denoted NPCs, as well as bounties from a notice board, also does nothing to alleviate this. In these opening moments, Avowed feels distinctly uninspired.
At every turn, the game screams adventure, and the scenery can be spectacular. | Image credit: Eurogamer / Obsidian
But the game is saved early on - and propelled for many hours after - by its very moreish combat, which, funnily enough, was an area of concern in trailers prior to release. As a spectator, Avowed's fights don't look particularly special and the enemies seem hesitant. But it's less about what they do to you that matters, and more about what you do to them - in short: sending them flying. It's the way enemies ragdoll with the velocity of your gunshots, axe blows, or explosive spells when they die that makes it so enjoyable. Combat is all about movement, dodging and dashing, and there's a snap and responsiveness immediately apparent when fighting that makes it satisfying to do.
The free-form approach to combat is also one of the game's major draws, and it's fun to toy around with. There are skill trees associated with Ranger, Fighter and Wizard archetypes, but you're free to mix and match abilities from whichever build you want. It's perfectly feasible to be an armoured mage, for example, and switch between wand-and-spellbook and two-handed hammer. I was a hybrid Fighter-Ranger, broadly, but because respeccing can be done any time for a small fee, I changed around a lot within that idea, at times more like a heavily armoured fighter, and others a nimble archer. My favourite build involved starting with power-shots from my rifle (arquebus), then charging into melee with my mace and shield. There are some wonderful abilities to go with this, too, such as spinning attacks, that aforementioned Charge, and a rapid Flurry of Blows.
At the heart of your build is your equipment, which determines - alongside your level - what you're capable of in the game. Equipment is separated into tiers (with three upgradeable steps in between them) and if you fight enemies considered a higher tier than you, you'll incur significant penalties to damaging them, whereas they'll gain significant bonuses in damaging you. Being underquipped for battle, then, is a bad idea, so upgrading your equipment is crucial. You'll know if your gear isn't good enough, incidentally, because your companions will incessantly nag you to upgrade it.
A glipse at the game's brilliantly-named equipment and pervasive crafting system. Note the different tiers. You can also enchant unique items to add one of two special abilities to them, which, if you're so inclined, you can match with your character build. | Image credit: Eurogamer / Obsidian
Each major area of the game is based around an equipment tier, so the repeated loop becomes 'struggle for a bit in a new area, then gradually gather enough resources (or new items) there such that you upgrade to being powerful enough to conquer all of it'. It's a nice enough system - you can upgrade pieces of equipment and use them all the way through the game if you want, though you will constantly be finding unique gear that challenges your loyalty to them. I'm a sucker for a named and storied piece of equipment, and Avowed is full of them - my One Last Trick rifle and Star of Unbending mace being particular favourites.
This gear-tier idea does a good job of slowing you down and making you explore the entirety of a region to get the most from it, though you can break this rhythm if you don't mind taking on a significant challenge. (On this point: Avowed has a brilliant second-wind-style idea whereby you come back to life, once, in a surge of fist-clenched determination after you've been knocked down. I'm a big fan). This cyclical rhythm of stripping a new region to its bones does start to wear thin by the time you reach the third or fourth area, but the charm of Avowed lies in the ways Obsidian finds to constantly placate any feelings of restlessness. It's here where the playfulness of the studio and game really come to the fore. Each of its zones are more like oversized playgrounds than sandboxes, filled as they are with jumping puzzles and unexplored caves and hidden treasures. It's rare to go anywhere in the world and not feel rewarded for it, be it by one of the many chests squirrelled away, emitting a faint tinkling sound when you're near, or by the dramatic climbs that await you leading to spectacular scenery, or the bizarre pockets of story you'll find. Everywhere you go, something has been hand-placed to entertain you.
Obsidian is relentlessly witty in Avowed - it's ever present in whichever situation you find yourself in. Also highlighted here: high-up ledges deliberately placed above pools of water so you'll be tempted to jump into them. I did, every single time. | Image credit: Eurogamer / Obsidian
In the early stages of the game, I was waiting for this Obsidian-ness to shine through - this wit, this imagination - because this is a studio renowned for making games like these. Thankfully, like water cracking and eventually rupturing a dam, it absolutely comes through. Even during its slow start when it's swamping you in mechanically uninteresting tasks and pages of conversation, it's still able to raise a smile. What's more, it also has the confidence to dangle RPG tropes in front of you before deftly subverting them, toying with your expectations as a player.
This being an Obsidian game, there's also a lot of weighty choice-and-consequence stuff here, with significant events written into each act that carry huge stakes for the story and the people you meet. There's never a correct outcome, which I like - never a general consensus. Someone will always disagree and then confront you about it, pushing you to explain, to reflect, to justify. There's always a conversation to be had, and there's so much more to the companions than I thought there would be. There are some really touching, tender moments, too, where they reveal hidden sides of themselves and ask for advice.
However, it doesn't always come together. There are moments where systems and story jar with each other. Food plays a key mechanical role in the game by healing or buffing you, for example, so you'll often be carrying pies and ales and a larder's worth of grub with you, but in the second area of the game, which is suffering a famine, you never offer any of it, and it feels odd. Similarly, I can have blistering rows with someone, only for them to offer me a key to their personal belongings a moment later. It isn't just incidental things either: there are major decisions towards the end of the game for which the ramifications start to raise their head before disappearing a moment later, as though everything is suddenly forgotten. I'm still scratching my head about the missing consequences of one of my biggest end-of-game decisions. Clearly a lot of your actions and decisions are tracked, but some never seem to amount to anything and blow away on the breeze. It leads to a feeling that much of Avowed's story is fixed and you're merely choosing the context in which key events happen, rather than their actual outcomes.
You can feel the limitations Obsidian was working with, the places where a modest budget couldn't quite stretch to match an ideal, despite some heroic effort. This isn't the triple-A Microsoft-funded showcase I once believed it would be. It's closer in spirit, perhaps, to the double-A games that had their heyday in the 360 era, which I promise you isn't meant to disparage. Rather, it's to invoke the spirit of that age and how many of those games overcame their limitations to become classics, with a clarity of vision and a sense of fun that resonated with audiences. Avowed has been more generous than I thought it would be - in length, in heart, in depth - and it never loses sight of being a game, of being an adventure, of taking you places you would never normally go, or of simply providing a few dozen hours of unabashed escapism. I think it's one of this year's most pleasant surprises.
A copy of Avowed was provided for review by Microsoft Game Studios.
Avowed review
Avoid?
Avowed is almost good, but there's something so resigned and workmanlike to its quest design and storytelling that it often feels like dog-eared chorelist of Obsidian must-haves, ticked off so aimlessly that the result is a bit like having an RPG described to you by someone late for a bus.
And that should be that, really. I'd run through all the ways Obsidian's latest didn't quite do it for me, most of you would go play it anyway because it's on Games Pass, and we'd all go back to patiently waiting for the sun to explode.
But, god, what a devastatingly gorgeous open-zoned world this is. What a triumphantly weird, sprawling playground of fantasy naturalia. What a treat it is to just climb all over, its design ethos captured in the first magical ring I found offering a 15% buff to parkour speed.
Ignore two thirds of the weapons and just roll a wizard to witness the stodgy melee combat of other classes give way to crackling, cackling spell-slinging. There is such a gulf of quality here it's like playing two different games. I spent 27 hours having a meh ol' time until a reinstallation of Nvidia's loathsome app deleted 200 some screenshots and I had to restart. Why not play a wizard? I thought. Why not indeed. Suddenly, I'm frying whole families of lizards at once with chain lightning and grinning like Palpatine in a pet shop.
Of all the things I expected to have to say about Obsidian's latest, "it's a pretty fun magical treasure-hunting parkour FPS" was not one, but here we are.
Extra conversation options come from the background you'll pick in the character selection, combat stats that double as character traits, and the occasional abnormality. | Image credit: Obsidian/Rock Paper Shotgun
Avowed's introduction follows a multicoloured lemur-like snifflebeast curiously pawing up ivy-licked branches until it disturbs a dripping vegetal cyst, which puffs out noxious gasses and knocks the lemur to its death on the forest floor. Night falls and other lemurs come to investigate, only to be greeted by a snarling fungal zombie in the form of their former branchmate. These are the effects of the Dreamscourge, a mycelial plague with the potential to affect all life on the wild and dangerous Living Lands. As an envoy to the emperor of Aedyr, you're here to investigate.
It's a tense situation for a few reasons besides the Big Shiitake. Your first port of call is Paradis, a sanctuary for salty rogues that - like most in the Living Lands - don't take well to the new Aedyran occupation, nor the presence of an inquisitorial band of supercops named The Steel Garotte. Local customs? Give 'em the musket. Adherents of ancient magical traditions? Free trip to the pyre. The game lets you pick your own flavour of supercop as you try to quell various unrests and placate locals or root out resistance as you see fit, providing you see fit to choose between a couple of obvious responses plus a token selfish bastard option whenever someone remembered to write one in. "How much is it worth to you?". "This much coin". "Thank you for your coin". "No, thank you for taking my coin from me". I made those last two bits up but that's the vibe. Everyone feels so easy to shake down, either for actual cash or just their resolve in general.
Initially engaging sidequests fizzle out with little pathos or intrigue; larger beats can offer difficult dilemmas but feel siloed and stiffly scripted. All beats are haunted by a deity that speaks to your character from afar and interrupts the fun constantly with achingly dull riddle-me-this mushroom bullshit. I rarely felt allowed to express myself in ways I wanted, more that I was having choice and consequence™ dangled in front of me as an obligatory feature of This Sort Of Thing.
If there's any treasure in that temple, or anyone's home, I'll be able to take it without a peep from anyone. You can steal NPC's money from right next to them without anyone saying a word, save a few scripted comments. | Image credit: Obsidian/Rock Paper Shotgun
But! There is a sort of organic, evolving sense of political and social tension in the cities and towns that makes itself known in some fun ways. "I've got no quarrel with you," I tell the bandit leader that's just stopped me in the street out of nowhere. "Well, you better find some quarrel quick!" he retorts. There is no dialogue option to tell him I don't know what that means and it sounds like a sofa mimicking human speech patterns so we just fight. Avowed is full of bits like this, unmarked encounters and conversations that add texture to the busy settlements. I help a guard by the gate search a trader's goods for contraband, find two grenades, pocket them, then tell the guard I ain't seen nuffin. In a back alley I find a grandiloquent moustache bastard named 'Cutty Pete" who sells illicit goods. One of them is a magic pistol named 'The Disappointer' with a lovely lore blurb that tells me how shit it is.
I'd love to waste money on it but I can't, because the way Avowed gates-off progress by demanding you carry adequately colour-tiered equipment to deal with certain enemies can be so stringent that it sometimes threatens to make the entire concept of freeform exploration pointless. You can either buy new stuff for millions of money or use millions of the upgrade materials you'll find in chests strewn about the world, and then you'll probably accidentally find a magic item that does the job after two hours spent gathering the right resources. Exploration is wonderful for reasons I'll talk about soon, but few things feel worse than getting truly absorbed in your own freeform adventures before realising you're now forced to do a chain of side quests in a very specific order to gather funds so you can carry on enjoying yourself.
Of course, you could and should just play as a wizard, which doesn't negate the gating but does let you fry lizards above your weight class easier. Melee just isn't interesting. You can fall into a comfortable rhythm with it but you'll otherwise be doing the same thing hour 30 as hour one: watching your character slash, parry, and block as you shout commands at them through a megaphone full of baked beans. Firearms are fun in concept, but decades of collective gun wisdoms on juice and heft have seemingly been ignored, and so headshots are physically identical to opening a browser tab.
You can cook food at camp, as well as upgraded equipment, then munch it all down in the field for health and mana regeneration as well as other buffs. | Image credit: Obsidian/Rock Paper Shotgun
So, magic it is. Spellbook in one hand, wand in the other. One-handed wands can't help but look inherently twee so it's always very funny to stun a bear by filling its stagger bar then bring the Bibbidi-bobbidi-boot down. Progressively better books offer upgraded elemental spells which you can then augment and bind to your hotkeys through the class skill tree. There's another stat tree with percentage bonuses for things like perception and might, and you can sometimes use these to talk your way out of fights. You might want to do that as wizard, because you're squishy of course, but that's where your companions come in.
I…don't really feel like writing about who they are as characters save to say that the only one I liked was Brandon Keener's Kai and then only a little bit. They do talk to each other at camp though, which is nice. More usefully, they have their own skill trees with hotkey abilities you can mix and match to shore up your own weaknesses. So, if you want to pin down a troublesome guard with an axe, you can have tracker dwarf and charisma void Marius throw down some trapping vines.
Avowed's open zones are wonderfully vertical, and you might spend as long climbing around a city's outside walls than exploring the city itself. | Image credit: Obsidian/Rock Paper Shotgun
Avowed bloody loves a good vine, and not for nothing either. "Are those roots tearing the bridge apart, or holding it together?" asks Kai. What a beautiful and perfect line that is. My favourite one in a script of scant wit and scanter interest in brevity. It could be a mission statement for Avowed's entire approach to environmental design; nature eating nature eating civilisation and throwing it back up again in myriad eye-catching, hand-crafted ways. Its outside environments beg to be trundled through. Its dungeons and caves feel conjured from a fantasy Boomer Shooter, momentously flowing and stuffed with secrets found through hidden pools and smashed walls.
If you have Game Pass, it's worth the download just to go rambling and vaulting. And hey, you might find some interesting characters where I just found fantasy-themed insurance advert extras reading from lore encyclopedias with the occasional bawdy dad joke scrawled in the margins. There is a honest-to-god "it's not the size, it's how you use it" dialogue option in this thing. Someone wrote that. Someone else okayed it. A willy joke! A lovely little willy joke in my RPG! Tops. Anyway, better be off. I've got lighthouses to climb and horizons to dive toward. Sometimes it really is the size. This might be the most beautiful, intricately hand-crafted open-ish world in gaming. I wish I was more excited to spend time in it.
Avowed review
Humble and a little old-fashioned, but Obsidian's decades of RPG experience still shine through.
In mid-2023, a few prophetic minds warned that the imminent launch of Baldur's Gate 3 was going to raise expectations for future RPGs to unrealistic heights. Now, in early 2025, I'm here to say that, sadly, they were right: I'm compelled to point out right off the bat that Avowed is not Baldur's Gate 3, nor is it Stalker 2, nor is it Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. It's not Fallout: New Vegas, either. No, it's a much more old-fashioned kind of thing.
Avowed is undeniably a product of the studio responsible for The Outer Worlds and—most relevant in this case—Pillars of Eternity. It spins a gripping fantasy yarn, balancing existential severity with arch humour, while retaining that most enduring and fascinating Obsidian quirk: this is an admirably flawed achievement. It succeeds as an action game, it excels as a choice-based narrative game, but with the criteria determining what makes a brilliant RPG having so dramatically shifted of late, it doesn’t feel like a standout RPG in 2025. Its world, though beautiful, is simply too static—not as malleable or reactive as some of its contemporaries, nor even the classics it recalls.
I am a Godlike envoy of the Aedyr emperor, sent to the notoriously dangerous Living Lands to investigate the Dreamscourge. This "soul plague" sends people and animals mad while blighting them with actually-quite-stylish technicolour body fungi. The virus is spreading fast, so my nameless, voiceless and fully-customisable envoy must put a nip in its fungal bud before it spreads to the Aedyr empire proper.
As an envoy for a powerful empire hoping to claim dominance over the Living Lands, I’m both hated and feared by the races who have planted flags across the island. But that's not the only special thing about me: I'm also a Godlike, which means I’m blessed by a god, boast gnarly divine abilities, and am also marked by fungi signaling my connection to divinity, though without the "going mad" component. I'm also, importantly, harangued by strange voices in my dreams. The character creator is complete with all the lip and ear-size sliders you could want, and if the fungi creeps you out (like some members of the PC Gamer team) it can be toggled off entirely.
As the narrative unfolds, Avowed evolves from a fantasy-flavoured political potboiler into something verging on Dantean: there are ancient gods, forgotten races, and many bewildering philosophical rants. I begin as a mere messenger, but things inevitably get way out of hand, as they surely must in a game that obliquely traverses a lot of thematic terrain—colonialism, encroaching totalitarianism, environmental disaster—without ever feeling heavyhanded. Obsidian is good at writing fantasy. With Avowed, they have a world already substantiated across two meaty CRPGs, and people who played the Pillars of Eternity games will be amply rewarded with callbacks and lore. I for one loved reacquainting with the weirdly cute Xaurips and Sporelings (before killing them).
As unwieldy as the setup may seem on paper, Avowed maintains an admirable focus during its 50-odd hours. I never lost track of what was happening. And I thought I would, given this is a game with a dynamic glossary accessible mid-conversation, à la Final Fantasy 16. Across a handful of discrete "open zones," Obsidian weaves a compact critical path between a wealth of fascinating sidequests that, while ostensibly optional, feel like the substance of the game.
Eora mission
Like in all the best RPGs, it's not the world you hope to save that matters, but the frivolous jobs you do along the way. I remember a dubious situation between a Paradis woman and her weirdly adoring Xaurip admirers more vividly than any of the major plot beats. Likewise, visiting my companion Marius's vanquished home village, crouched in the shadow of a giant volcano, was more impactful than finally confronting the fascistic antagonist for the first time. I was more proud of saving a brothel in Paradis than I was of deciding to have mercy on a villain who I really ought to have, in retrospect, killed. These sidequests shouldn’t be missed, and in truth cannot be, because focusing on the main quest at the expense of the XP and steady upgrade materials they provide probably won’t be feasible for most players.
Marius is one of four companions, and like the others, he's familiar: a diminutive foul-mouthed tough guy with a golden heart. Early favourite Kai is the sardonic but sincere Garrus-like (voiced by Brandon Keener of Garrus fame, coincidentally), while a later character—it may be a spoiler to say too much—is the sassy sexual innuendo enjoyer. And don't fear: there's a bookish, determinedly humourless companion too.
You've met these people before in other RPGs but they're nevertheless well-drawn, with stories and motivations of their own, and an almost unbelievable reservoir of random stuff to say at the campfire sites where I can lick my wounds, improve my gear, and mercilessly question them. Archetypal though they are, they feel alive.
Adventuring with this gaggle across the varied regions of the Living Lands is gratifying mainly because Avowed is a stunning game to look at. Each zone carries a distinct grandeur of its own, and whoever designed these landscapes did so with the sensibility of a cinematographer. It’s common to turn a corner, or mount a crest, and bear witness to a perfectly framed vista that would have looked like overly ambitious concept art 10 years ago. The discrete maps are dense with points of interest, whether caverns chiselling deep into the earth or ruins full of spoils. They don’t feel like real spaces, but that’s not because they feel like videogame spaces: they feel like dreamlike fantasy worlds dreamt up by paperback fantasy bonglords.
Avowed leaves a great first impression. Those first 10 hours I spent in the sprawling city of Paradis and the wider Dawnshore region, learning about the Dreamscourge and life under the Aedyr colonisers, exploring surprisingly deep dungeons, shooting the shit with Kai, and making enemies with the local strongmen, put me in mind of the feeling of playing New Vegas or Oblivion for the first time, but better. Some of the missable sidequests, particularly in the first area, take me places other studios would want to frontload in the opening hours of the main quest. Avowed felt like a sumptuous embarrassment of riches.
But while this is a very good game, with time I came to understand that its ambitions are a touch more humble than some recent genre heavyweights. I realised that it might be more flattering to think of Avowed as a choice-based narrative-driven action game. Or, as a certain kind of simplified blockbuster RPG that is fast receding in the medium’s rearview mirror.
Doom infernal
Let's talk about the fighting first. Avowed is surprisingly combat heavy, especially in its second half. It’s possible to play with the usual array of melee weapons—swords, axes, spears, maces—but you’d be missing out on a lot if you’re not playing Avowed like 21st century Hexen, mixing powerful ranged attacks with down-and-dirty close quarters hacking. Every one-handed weapon can be dual-wielded, so I normally roamed with a grimoire in one hand and a fire-enchanted sword in the other, raining down elemental area of effect attacks on bears, bugs and lizardmen before sprinting in to hack away. For the magic averse, it's also possible to muscle about with a mace in one hand and a pistol in the other, for example.
The grimoire is fun for all the flashing lights and mystical effects it conjures, but if magical pew-pew is more your bag there are wands too. Pistols and arquebuses are present too with all the slow reloading that entails, and so are bows. These conventional weapons have unlimited ammo, probably for magical reasons, but grimoires need essence (basically mana, in this context). Whichever route is taken, high mobility is key, standing still is death, and my envoy’s impressive parkour abilities proved useful when manoeuvring around the hordes.
There are classes and backgrounds to choose from, but all skill trees—fighter, ranger, wizard, and godlike—are available to all classes, and I ended up with a fully blended build without feeling disadvantaged for not specialising. I can't change the gear used by my companions, but they steadily accrue special attacks I can trigger at any time. My crew is pretty good at using these specials themselves, but they're close to useless when it comes to moment-to-moment combat, except when I revisit areas I'm way overpowered for.
Each quest has a difficulty ranking, not based on my level but on the power of the weapons and gear I'm using. The system is pretty vague: while gear is graded along typical RPG lines, I usually had to mix-and-match a bunch before a three-skull difficulty ranking de-escalated to two, mostly blindly, because there aren't any Destiny-style numbers to crunch. Upgrading gear is essential, because finding viable weapons is rare and usually relegated to sidequests or off-the-beaten path destinations. In the early game I found a unique one-handed fire sword that I went on to use right until the end, mostly because I can toggle between two loadouts on the fly, swapping fire for an ice mace and a shock-focused grimoire.
I don’t think Avowed’s combat could sustain my attention over the course of a linear, 15-hour action game, but as one of the main components in a story-led, exploration-rewarding RPG, it’s a lot more fun than I had dared hope for.
Performance was a little shaky on my increasingly long-in-the-tooth gaming laptop. With an RTX 3060, Ryzen 5600H and 16GB RAM, I obviously had no chance of smoothly running raytracing, but even at 1080p and low settings the framerate frequently dropped down to the 30s and 40s when I was in busy areas. The good news is that even at low settings Avowed is gorgeous, though low-quality shadows were a little over-obvious in places, and distant reflective surfaces acquire a weird opaque texture.
Immersive simple
But Avowed isn’t just a first-person action game, and after a while the artifice of its RPG systems started to show. These limits first became apparent when I, a lowly thief, realised I can rob people blind with no consequences at all. It’s possible to just enter some public figure's house, have a look around, open their chests and lockboxes, rob them of their coins, and the worst I’ll receive is a mild scolding.
When I’m not in conversation with someone, that someone forgets that I’m there. Nothing happens in this world unless I’m invited to make it happen or I'm bearing witness to it. This doesn’t make Avowed bad—I loved it—but it’s symptomatic of one area where it falls short compared to its contemporaries, not to mention the first-person Bethesda games it’s clearly modelled on. I can’t attack anyone at will and suffer the consequences (though the narrative stages ample opportunities for me to kill or have mercy). Likewise, while stealth is an option, it’s usually just a means to get an upper hand on a particular foe. Once I’ve attacked—whether from cover or using an invisibility spell—every baddie in the vicinity knows I’m there.
Where agency exists it’s in the conversation trees, and Obsidian makes good in this regard. As in Pillars of Eternity, usually my important choices are between two undesirable outcomes, or between lesser and greater evils. Moral ambiguity usually amounts to whether something bad will happen now, or whether it might happen at a more severe scale later. Decisions culminate in fun ways, especially towards the end where sidequests and the critical path cleverly intersect. Nevertheless, it all builds towards a climax that, while satisfying, loses some of the ambiguity that seems to define the series.
It’s the choices that don’t matter a lot that I really enjoyed: Avowed let me wave my snark flag at high mast, and it’s possible to be very cheeky during otherwise very stern occasions, which always made me laugh. I can be an arsehole, I can be flippant, I can speak with sagacity or well-meaningly, or I can safely opt for the answer that suits the background I chose at the beginning of the game. It’s possible to build a certain kind of envoy, even if, in the end, all it amounts to is guided head canon.
Systems shock
Avowed arrives at a weird and exciting time for RPGs. Baldur's Gate 3, Stalker 2, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2—heck, let's include Elden Ring as well—have all demonstrated that some amount of friction, whether it be difficulty, complexity or both, is welcome. Maybe even expected.
Avowed is a better RPG than Dragon Age: The Veilguard in almost every meaningful way, ranging from the meandering depth of its companion conversations through to the nuance of its worldbuilding and its willingness to get extremely dark at times. But when I look at them side-by-side I see RPGs made for audiences at scale, at a time when RPGs made for dorks and weirdos are having much more success. I really hoped that Avowed would remove the blockbuster guardrails the way recent genre heavyweights have. Obsidian knows how to do this and is among the best to have done it. Avowed is smart, but it’s not reactive. It’s not breakable. It’s not excitingly pliant, like some of Obsidian's finest.
Perhaps that's not the kind of game Avowed wants to be; it definitely succeeds on the somewhat humbler terms of a narrative-driven action RPG with memorable characters, a gorgeous world, and really fun combat. Just imagine if one day, these separate Obsidian tracks—spicy, reactive CRPGs and sumptuous first-person narrative adventures—perfectly intersect.
The Verdict
82
Avowed
Bigger than it first appears, Avowed is an engrossing and gorgeous action-RPG set in one of the most engaging fantasy worlds going, though it lacks the complex systems of its most beloved contemporaries.
Obsidian is generaly good when comes multiples outcomes, maybe a alternative path where she accepts the status quo is possible.
Same score as The Outer Worlds which was "low-budget" according to Obsidiots and redditors, unlike Avowed, which had Microsoft's massive money behind. What will be the excuse this time?Average scores on open/meta critic so far
Holy shit this sounds absolutely damning, and it's coming from thegamer, THE leftie shithole central.
