Role-playing games come in all shapes and sizes, but something I really rather appreciate is when a game in the genre doesn’t sweat the gritty stuff. I do respect and enjoy when a game really goes for crafting a world experience, I admit – but sometimes, I just want my RPG fix to come in the form of a truly video gamey video game. Avowed is that – still immersive, but gleefully unashamed of doing whatever it can to shine a light on mechanics first to deliver a fun and memorable world to noodle around in.
In a sense, this month’s release of Avowed thereby pitches it as an interesting antithesis to the recently released and also-excellent Kingdom Come Deliverance 2. These two games represent the two extremes of the western-made RPG lineage – the grit of a ‘real’ feeling world and… this. More joyful, more approachable. There’s serious themes to be found, but at the same time, it’s just a bloody good romp. I expect this will inspire no small degree of critic and audience division.
Some will doubtless find Avowed to be a little bit unserious. But if you embrace what it is presenting, it’s a total joy. Pretty early on in my playthrough I began to sense a future cult classic, the sort of game that becomes certain players’ muse, the sort of game that a small subset of people will never shut up about. In a sense, that shouldn’t surprise. This is an Obsidian game, and this studio has made rather a lot of games like that. I would kill a man for Alpha Protocol. But let’s be clear on something else: this is a tightly-wound, smartly-scoped, polished, balanced game. There’s little in the way of ‘jank’ here.
Alright then, you say. It’s good. But what is it? A first glance at a character meandering around a town in first-person will give impressions of an Elder Scrolls style open world RPG. It’s a little bit of that, sure, though it’s also quite deliberately scoped as something a little different – and smaller – than that. There’s not the crazy world persistence of every object being movable or the like, and rather than one huge open world the setting of The Living Lands is carefully segmented into several modestly-specced ‘open zones’ you freely travel between via a world map, vaguely bringing to mind the world structure of Dragon Age Inquisition.
In role-playing terms, it’s a generous full-fat experience. Avowed is a spin-off of Pillars of Eternity, which is a capital ‘C’ CRPG – that is to say, a full-on dungeons and dragons-like experience. You’ve got the familiar six stats to pump points into on level up, plus three different categories of abilities divided into traditional character classes (Fighter, Ranger, and Wizard). Despite the class system on show with skills, there’s no ‘hard’ class divisions – you choose your starting skills, but you can equip everything and buy any skill you like as you progress.
This all leads to a delightfully squishy and flexible approach to character development that I feel engenders exciting role-playing and build construction. I fell in love with the guns of Avowed – great big blunderbuss-style guns that take an age to reload. There’s a primary hand/off hand system, so I settled on a heaving pistol in my right hand and a grimoire in my left. Grimoires allow the casting of magic spells without investing ability points into them, but exactly what spells you have access to are of course limited by the book.
Over the course of the game my character began to trend towards a hybrid battlefield control build. I became deeply attached to a specific gun which had some perks I loved, plus a book that gave me spells that could freeze a group of enemies in place with ice and then bounce devastating chained lightning between them. I’d do this, then strafe away, firing powered-up shots with my gun. What started out as me picking ‘Ranger’ at the onset of the game became something very different indeed.
If things got dicey, I had backup plans. Your companions, of which two can join you at any given time, have a handful of abilities you can trigger – so I made sure they had skills which helped to draw aggro off me. And if things got really bad, I’d drop back to my secondary weapon set – a trusty spear and shield combo. Avowed has a one-click switch between primary and secondary weapon sets in combat, and even has stats and skills that are built to make the switching faster. Obsidian’s designers knew that some people would make switching weapon multiple times per encounter the centerpiece of their playstyle – and so the flexibility to lean into that system is there.
Add in a low barrier to entry for refunding skill points and respecing your character, and you’ve got all the makings of a role-playing experience with a wonderful degree of experimentation at its heart. Combine that with the fact that this is generally good-feeling, crunchy-enough action combat for a game that is ultimately driven by numbers, and the point is this: I never got tired of fighting. There’s a whippet-fast energy to combat in this game at its best, where managing the enemies, cooldowns, and your own attributes becomes frenetic and fun. The best sort of combat encounter in Avowed could be summed up as ‘organized chaos’, which I love.
My approach quickly morphed into aiming to fully explore each new area and attempt to exhaust side quests before even attempting to advance the main narrative. Hunts, which I usually initially enjoy but usually eventually tire of, became and remained an absolute priority. My love of the combat, systems, and RPG mechanics arguably drove the rest of my enjoyment of the game – and I dare say one’s opinion of these systems will likely truly define your experience with Avowed.
There’s plenty to love here if you’re less interested in blasting and casting, though. All I can really say is this – it’s an Obsidian game, and a good one. This is a studio that knows its way around a story with consequences – and real ones. These guys made Fallout New Vegas, lest we forget. I genuinely agonized over a few choices – which is how it should be.
At the start of the game you’ll pick a character role which will help to frame your place in the world and add new dialogue options. There’s also plenty of speech checks based on your character stat choices. Should you wish, there is plenty of opportunity to through intimidation, compassion, or completionism deescalate tense encounters and solve issues without firing a shot, uttering a spell, or drawing a blade. In a game that trades so heavily on the strength of its combat, this is in fact a little bit brave!
Well-written characters verbally spar and charming companions have fierce and often conflicting opinions on matters. Your character often faces preconceptions and judgement over their status as a ‘Godlike’ – a fact visible to all. Some will regard you as a savior; others an abomination. It’s an interesting story beat, and you have some decent latitude in terms of how you navigate people’s various responses to you.
The world itself can feel a touch static when you’re meandering through it compared to some rivals. You can’t slaughter a town of innocents or get in trouble with the guards. Tossing a grenade in town will just result in it harmlessly going off. NPCs don’t have much reaction to you that isn’t part of a specific dialogue or quest. This feels cheap, but it also is absolutely in keeping with the stall the game sets out early on: this isn’t that sort of RPG. I didn’t feel short-changed by this, because narratively there’s a hell of a lot going on and some great choice-and-reaction stuff. When you’re in a conversation Avowed’s Pillars lineage stands tall – it feels more like a slower-paced tactical, story-driven RPG than it does a console-first action combat extravaganza.
In fact, probably my only scope-related complaints rest on the companions. They’re good, charming folk – but I wish there were a little more to do with them beyond conversations at camp – and I wish their ambient dialogue weren’t so reactive. Crouch for a second, even mid-combat, and someone might go, “be quiet as a mouse!” because, yep, crouching is often used for stealth. But when my finger brushes C while trying to jump in the middle of an explosive combat encounter… we’re not stealthing, are we, mate? While I’m nitpicking, food is key for buffs and health restoration – but the cooking system related to food feels fairly half-baked, if you’ll excuse the pun, and is far too divorced from RPG systems for my liking – a cooking-related skill would’ve been neat to see.
But I digress. Back to what I like: I also think it’s all rather striking looking. This is a gorgeous world, and though a joined-up approach is sacrificed in favor of the smattering of open zones, the advantage here is that each biome can feel unique. Dawnshore is, I think, one of the strongest first zone, dip-your-toe-in zones I’ve experienced in a game of this type. It teaches you the rhythms of picking up quests, of solving cute environmental puzzles with elemental magic, of combat, and of both directed treasure hunt quests and unguided listening for the subtle twinkling noise in the background that indicates that there’s a chest of valuable loot nearby. The instincts trained here stick with you for the rest of the game.
Ultimately, Dawnshore will suck you in, but it’s also gloriously a little bit run-of-the-mill – which means surprises can be saved for more hair-raising areas later. This comes both in story terms, where you travel from more prosperous areas to places shattered by the forces of nature herself – but also in striking visual design and an incredible level of visual polish, especially on a higher-end PC (though the spec requirements are mercifully modest, as this is a game that still needs to run well on Xbox Series S).
If I can level a criticism at Avowed, it’s arguably that it simply is very ‘classic’. There’s no reinvention of the wheel here. It brings to mind and was evocative of a similar warmth of some of my favorite role-playing games of eras gone by. Noodling around the open world sort of gave me that fuzzy feeling I most keenly associate with Oblivion – but in a streamlined package. The most revolutionary thing on offer, in a sense, is how the lore and world view of Pillars of Eternity is reinterpreted for this new type of game. These are wildly different products, but they feel utterly cohesive at their heart.
In that sense, Avowed is perfect proof of a great proof in all game design and in the execution of all art: you sometimes don’t need to pitch a revolution. Instead, you just need to have something to say, and then use the established tools and concepts to say it well. That’s what Avowed is: strong storytelling, great combat, lovely visuals, and utterly charming. It’s not going to light everyone’s hair on fire, but that’s fine – because I know for a certain subset of people – refined people of taste, if you ask me – Avowed will enjoy cult classic status. It doesn’t necessarily push the envelope, but nor does it need to. It’s exactly what it needs to be.