Eternity Avowed - Obsidian's first person action-RPG in the Pillars of Eternity setting

[Abu Antar]

They always had three games rotating in development, though. At least from old comments.

 

[JarlFrank]

Sawyer has his hang-ups but he tends to be more analytical than the average RPG designer.

Being extremely analytical is why his systems suck so much: they are overly abstract and obsessed about balance.

REAL systems designers just work on vibes.

 

[luj1]

the character models do show their limited budget

I thought ur opinion on Avowed was kinda genuine, but now I am sure you are another rabid bitch shill

the models have nothing to do with the budget, they are just plain stupid to look at even for normies:

Spoiler

Limited budget you say? I say limited creativity

... I was mainly talking about polygons...

Polygons have nothing to do with the budget either (and the number of polygons is fine). You are fake

 

[luj1]

Sawyer has his hang-ups but he tends to be more analytical than the average RPG designer.

Being extremely analytical is why his systems suck so much: they are overly abstract and obsessed about balance.

REAL systems designers just work on vibes.

Vibes, asymmetry, fun, dopamine, etc... Soyer never understood this fundamental thing which is why he failed as a system lead (twice).

 

[Lemming42]

It also just shows it doesn't matter what you actually have in the game, once the mainstream fronts are drawn around culture war, anyone who falls on one side of it will just project whatever belief they have towards the game they have about it. Now we have people talking about how power fantasy is when you are the most chosen one like in Skyrim and Avowed is not a good power fantasy even though you are literally the agent of the ruler of a colonizing empire with personal relationship to said emperor and have both institutional and personal power to decide the outcome of the entire story from start to finish. Else how Avowed has no narrative RPG elements when it has more reactivity than anything Bethesda put out and really any first/third person action-RPG I can think of right now unless you count Kotor2 and MoTB as third person or something.

No idea if this is directed at me, but I'm as far removed from any "culture war" surrounding this game as it's possible to be. I stopped posting on this site mostly because I'm not a right-winger and therefore can't stand how every discussion turns to culture war shit that frequently, as you point out, has nothing to do with gaming, and whole threads consist of people who haven't played the game talking about irrelevant shit.

My negative impressions of the game come entirely from actually playing it. I hated PoE and skipped PoE2 so maybe I'm missing some context, but as a player without knowing much about the backstory and who Aedyr actually are, I feel that the game is a very simplistic story in which I am up against the Steel Garrotte, a group of comically evil clowns who burn cities down for fun. Other than myself and the ambassador early on, they are the main representatives of the colonial project in the main quest. My dialogue options reflect this; I am typically presented only with options that involve me disowning the Steel Garrotte and/or expressing a desire to kill Lodwyn, and my companions all agree. I cannot express to you how boring I find this story.

I'd love to know how this game has more reactivity than anything Bethesda have put out; Fallout 3 has a ton of interesting parts where the game reacts to past actions and character build and Daggerfall is built entirely around systems that respond to the player's actions in dynamic ways. What does Avowed have? As far as I can tell, the one and only piece of genuine reactivity so far is that the Steel Garrotte will set a city on fire in a big way if you don't kill a group of them earlier, and will set it on fire a bit less if you found and killed them beforehand. There's also been one speech check where you can avoid a long boring boss fight with some plant queen. The main plot, otherwise, seems to me to be completely on rails.

 

[FreeKaner]

Polygons have nothing to do with the budget either (and the number of polygons is fine). You are fake

What's the point of this bad faith partial quoting? I didn't say just polygons, I talked about general feel of detail of the character models, as well as their animations, compared to environment. Such assets and animations are often some of the costliest things in game development hence the arms race about it with big titles with huge budgets.

 

[POOPERSCOOPER]

It also just shows it doesn't matter what you actually have in the game, once the mainstream fronts are drawn around culture war, anyone who falls on one side of it will just project whatever belief they have towards the game they have about it. Now we have people talking about how power fantasy is when you are the most chosen one like in Skyrim and Avowed is not a good power fantasy even though you are literally the agent of the ruler of a colonizing empire with personal relationship to said emperor and have both institutional and personal power to decide the outcome of the entire story from start to finish. Else how Avowed has no narrative RPG elements when it has more reactivity than anything Bethesda put out and really any first/third person action-RPG I can think of right now unless you count Kotor2 and MoTB as third person or something.

No idea if this is directed at me, but I'm as far removed from any "culture war" surrounding this game as it's possible to be. I stopped posting on this site mostly because I'm not a right-winger and therefore can't stand how every discussion turns to culture war shit that frequently, as you point out, has nothing to do with gaming, and whole threads consist of people who haven't played the game talking about irrelevant shit.

My negative impressions of the game come entirely from actually playing it. I hated PoE and skipped PoE2 so maybe I'm missing some context, but as a player without knowing much about the backstory and who Aedyr actually are, I feel that the game is a very simplistic story in which I am up against the Steel Garrotte, a group of comically evil clowns who burn cities down for fun. Other than myself and the ambassador early on, they are the main representatives of the colonial project in the main quest. My dialogue options reflect this; I am typically presented only with options that involve me disowning the Steel Garrotte and/or expressing a desire to kill Lodwyn, and my companions all agree. I cannot express to you how boring I find this story.

I'd love to know how this game has more reactivity than anything Bethesda have put out; Fallout 3 has a ton of interesting parts where the game reacts to past actions and character build and Daggerfall is built entirely around systems that respond to the player's actions in dynamic ways. What does Avowed have? As far as I can tell, the one and only piece of genuine reactivity so far is that the Steel Garrotte will set a city on fire in a big way if you don't kill a group of them earlier, and will set it on fire a bit less if you found and killed them beforehand. There's also been one speech check where you can avoid a long boring boss fight with some plant queen. The main plot, otherwise, seems to me to be completely on rails.

This has been a bit of my dilemma when looking at this game. A lot of the discourse seems to be some culture war thing and not the actual quality of the game. Right wingers hate it because of what the art developer said and then the left overly counter reacts to say "no it's amazing". In reality it just looks like a shallow and boring RPG.

 

[Lemming42]

This has been a bit of my dilemma when looking at this game. A lot of the discourse seems to be some culture war thing and not the actual quality of the game. Right wingers hate it because of what the art developer said and then the left overly counter reacts to say "no it's amazing". In reality it just looks like a shallow and boring RPG.

Yeah, I think the closest comparison to Avowed is Dragon Age 2 - the combat sometimes slips into being mindless fun and you can sort of imagine how the combat systems could be part of a good game, but the actual experience of playing it consists of coming up against dull writing and really bad encounter design over and over again until any fun you were having ends up getting drained away after a few hours, and the sheer amount of combat you're forced into ends up making the mechanics wear thin.

 

[Daedalos]

Heres my dude.

Anyway been playing the free gamepass version, and yea, it's fun enough the for whatever it is, combat and what not feels fine, VA and quests,, eh.. sure.. wahtever.
I don't care about it all that much, just passing through the game. fixing some plague, killing some evil dudes, whatever right.

The graphics and environment does look quite good, to be fair. Especially amped up with reshade, sharpening and some DLSS 4.0 shit going. actually semi-impressed with the graphics and performance.

I wished the game was alot more grimdark like PoE 1, but alas.

it's a ultra light-rpg, and having played BG3, not many fantasy games ever measure up to that ever again.
Everything is dumbed down, little to no C&C, writing is subpar, RPG elements feels arcadey as fuck.

I mean imagine if this game was actually BG3 level, but first person, that would've been fucking good and then in the pillars universe. It wasn't.

At least the outer worlds 2 team is quite different from the avowed team.
The xtra money definitely is there in avowed, but squandered. avowed feels alot more realized that outer worlds did, for all its faults, which makes me hopeful that TOW2 will actually be new vegas 2 in space this time.
Seeing as boyarsky is still at the helm with adler.

 

[Lemming42]

At least the outer worlds 2 team is quite different from the avowed team.
The xtra money definitely is there in avowed, but squandered. avowed feels alot more realized that outer worlds did, for all its faults, which makes me hopeful that TOW2 will actually be new vegas 2 in space this game.

Is this true? I assumed Avowed and TOW1 had a big overlap in the teams making them because the games share so many of the same problems - obviously TOW1 had Boyarsky and Cain but their presence didn't seem to help the game's quality in any way. Is the TOW2 team different from the TOW1 team?

 

[Daedalos]

At least the outer worlds 2 team is quite different from the avowed team.
The xtra money definitely is there in avowed, but squandered. avowed feels alot more realized that outer worlds did, for all its faults, which makes me hopeful that TOW2 will actually be new vegas 2 in space this game.

Is this true? I assumed Avowed and TOW1 had a big overlap in the teams making them because the games share so many of the same problems - obviously TOW1 had Boyarsky and Cain but their presence didn't seem to help the game's quality in any way. Is the TOW2 team different from the TOW1 team?

Yes, I am 95 % certain about that. Nothing yet seems to suggest that the TOW team has been replaced. Feargus URGUheart, even mentioned in several interviews, that the TOW1 team is largely the same for TOW2.

Now Tim Cain has a much smaller role in TOW2 and is an advisory consultant for hire, which might be a good thing, because it gives Boyarsky more freedom and shit to do what he wants. Boyarsky was always the more edgy and grimdark of him and Cain, and not really into humour n shit.. so.
TOW1 was mediocre as fuck, most of all due to the limited budget, scope and time they had to make TOW1 which came out in 2019 mind you, a time where Obsidian was struggling to survive.

Honestly, with microsoft money, TOW2 might turn out great, let's see tho. I mean the trailer they did in december was quite good imo.
They even allude to it in the trailer, that they "want" to make the "real" new vegas 2 this time.
They simply couldn't get it done for TOW1 due to the constraints mentioned.

 

[Roguey]

They always had three games rotating in development, though. At least from old comments.

Nah, typically just two with pitches brewing in the background, similar to Bioware.

Sawyer has his hang-ups but he tends to be more analytical than the average RPG designer.

Being extremely analytical is why his systems suck so much: they are overly abstract and obsessed about balance.

REAL systems designers just work on vibes.

https://forums.obsidian.net/blogs/e...itude-and-the-responsibility-of-expectations/

Something that seems to frequently come up when discussing the design of a game system is whether or not some aspect of that system adheres to reality. Or, more precisely, whether the outcomes of that system accurately simulate the results that the person making the argument expects, based on their particular interpretation of reality.

Generally, these arguments come from players, or from non-designers, or less experienced designers, and will take the form of, "But XXXX isn't realistic!" or "Realistically, YYYY should happen instead". And, frequently, experienced game designers will turn around and say "Who cares?" and merrily go on their way designing an "unrealistic" system.

This guy has shipped multiple games and impressed Blizzard enough to get hired from Obsidian. You worked on a cancelled game. You're the "non-designer"/"less experienced designer" he's referring to.

 

[Lemming42]

Yes, I am 95 % certain about that. Nothing yet seems to suggest that the TOW team has been replaced. Feargus URGUheart, even mentioned in several interviews, that the TOW1 team is largely the same for TOW2.

Of all the many problems with TOW1, my biggest was the writing. I think I could have accepted the shit itemisation, tiny sparsely populated hub-based maps, and all the other crap if the story and characters hadn't been such a car crash, so hearing that it's the TOW1 people again makes me lose hope. If Avowed ended up like it did because of the same writers, I just straight-up think they're not capable of writing something worthwhile.

Microsoft money might improve their scope, but if they can't get the plot right it'll just be TOW1 all over again, only with fancier visuals.

 

[Daedalos]

Yes, I am 95 % certain about that. Nothing yet seems to suggest that the TOW team has been replaced. Feargus URGUheart, even mentioned in several interviews, that the TOW1 team is largely the same for TOW2.

Of all the many problems with TOW1, my biggest was the writing. I think I could have accepted the shit itemisation, tiny sparsely populated hub-based maps, and all the other crap if the story and characters hadn't been such a car crash, so hearing that it's the TOW1 people again makes me lose hope. If Avowed ended up like it did because of the same writers, I just straight-up think they're not capable of writing something worthwhile.

Microsoft money might improve their scope, but if they can't get the plot right it'll just be TOW1 all over again, only with fancier visuals.

Reasonable criticisms to be fair, and I agree to an extent. I didn't have major problems with the writing and plot overall, but the quests and flow of the story was badly made, and the quests put me to sleep tbh.
you could've remade some of the writing to fit more exciting quests and choices imo. I wasn't gasping out loud reading TOW thinking, wow this writing is just SHIT.
I am however doing that with avowed.

btw tho, John Gonzalez, is back as a creative lead/ writer for Obsidian. He did in large part, FO: New Vegas. so theres that. Not sure if he can make revisions and changes for TOW2 writing at this stage tho.. maybe if the game comes out in like november/dec.

 

[H. P. Lovecraft's Cat]

Why are they making a sequel to TOW? Was there a single person on planet Earth who asked for it?

 

[Thalstarion]

Why are they making a sequel to TOW? Was there a single person on planet Earth who asked for it?

All the danger hairs who the characters are modeled after as self inserts, I guess.

 

[JarlFrank]

This guy has shipped multiple games and impressed Blizzard enough to get hired from Obsidian. You worked on a cancelled game. You're the "non-designer"/"less experienced designer" he's referring to.

Right now I'm involved in something that's gonna sell far more than Avowed, mark my words

 

[Cross]

This guy has shipped multiple games and impressed Blizzard enough to get hired from Obsidian. You worked on a cancelled game. You're the "non-designer"/"less experienced designer" he's referring to.

Are you talking about this guy?

https://www.mobygames.com/person/111128/nathaniel-chapman/credits/

Oh yeah, just look at that incredible resume.

Design
The Outer Worlds: Spacer's Choice Edition (2023, Windows)	Additional Area Design
World of WarCraft: Battle for Azeroth (2018, Windows)	Game Designers
World of WarCraft: Legion (2016, Windows)	Game Designers
World of WarCraft: Warlords of Draenor (2014, Windows)	Game Designers
World of WarCraft: Mists of Pandaria (2012, Windows)	Game Designers
Dungeon Siege III (2011, PlayStation 3)	Lead Designer
Dungeon Siege III (2011, Windows)	Lead Designer

 

[Drowed]

This guy has shipped multiple games and impressed Blizzard enough to get hired from Obsidian. You worked on a cancelled game. You're the "non-designer"/"less experienced designer" he's referring to.

To be fair, "impressing Blizzard" in the last 15+ years sounds more like a negative thing than a positive one.

 

[JarlFrank]

Meanwhile REAL game designers like Raf Colantonio, Tim Stellmach, Warren Spector, etc would 100% agree with me

 

[luj1]

No idea if this is directed at me, but I'm as far removed from any "culture war" surrounding this game as it's possible to be...

This has been a bit of my dilemma when looking at this game. A lot of the discourse seems to be some culture war thing and not the actual quality of the game....

If you disregard all the woke trash, Amalur is unironically a more fun version of Avowed

 

[luj1]

This guy has shipped multiple games and impressed Blizzard enough to get hired from Obsidian. You worked on a cancelled game. You're the "non-designer"/"less experienced designer" he's referring to.

Right now I'm involved in something that's gonna sell far more than Avowed, mark my words

Believe it or not, but me too lol

I will unironically send you and The Wall closed beta when its ready

 

[Roguey]

Are you talking about this guy?

https://www.mobygames.com/person/111128/nathaniel-chapman/credits/

Oh yeah, just look at that incredible resume.

Yeah, and now he's a senior AI designer for Epic. Pretty successful career.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

The question you really have to answer: Who was Avowed made for?

-Not designed for Pillars fans (not isometric or party based)
-Not designed for hardcore Codex-level RPG fans (too simplistic, bare-bones, and shallow)
-Not designed for dude-bro shooter/live service fans (no multiplayer)
-Not designed for Diablo/Path of Exile players (no loot, classes, or endgame)
-Not designed for normie AAA consoomers (no open world)
-Not designed for women (too much combat)
-Not designed for blacks (no sports, cars, or "black girl magic")

The best you can say is it's Gamepass filler, aka a race to the bottom.

 

[luj1]

It was made to brainwash the young generation and spread harmful propaganda... every character is queer or some shit.... With the cost of 70-80 million dollars that's the ONLY thing it does well

I believe this unironically btw