The thing is, Avowed just feels right.
Usually, sitting down with a new role-playing game, there’s a period of adjustment, of getting used to the foibles and learning its particulars. But with Avowed, I just started playing. I had picked a rogue-ish character, armed with twin pistols and a bow for longer range, and immediately set about exploring some caves beneath Dawnshore like I’d lived there my whole life.
A lot of what’s been shown of Avowed up until now has been very much focused on action and exploration, either the game’s combat systems (especially dual-wielded wands for some reason) or the un-RPG-like jumping and climbing around its first-person world. The demo I played at GamesCom was much more focused on an aspect I imagine long-time Obsidian fans might have been missing until now: the roleplay. While I took part in multiple battles and did my fair share of exploration, the emphasis here was on conversation, deliberation, and branching decision-making.
Being first-person certainly helps with that feeling of familiarity—it removes a lot of what can feel alienating about more traditional, remotely-viewed RPGs, and means you’re not learning a new UI of 800 buttons. Instead all your actions here are dealt with via wheels that pop up when holding down the left bumper (I started out playing mouse/keyboard, because that’s my natural inclination, but then found it more comfortably played on a controller), the action pausing when you select a health potion, or ask your companion Kai (voiced by Garrus himself, Brandon Keener) to help out with something in particular.
It also helped that so much of the conversation in this 45-minute section of the game felt familiar for someone who’s already spent a fair few dozen hours in Eora, the world in which Pillars of Eternity was set. Here, I was tasked with finding a missing expedition team, who themselves had been hunting down a holy relic, related to the god Eothas. I know Eothas! Or indeed, don’t, given the events of the 2015 RPG, and its 2018 sequel, Deadfire, and entirely understood why the godlike I then meet, Sargamis, notes that Eothas’ light has recently been fading.
Of course, developers Obsidian aren’t daft, and all of this is color for those who’ve been along for the ride, while an aside for those who are new. And to maintain a balance between the two, Avowed continues the RPG series’ tradition of including footnotes for absolutely everything of note, including the option to pull up a paragraph on Eothas (the god of rebirth, and the deity of the earlier games’ antagonist, Waidwen). (I leaned over from my PC and asked an Obsidian developer, “Why doesn’t he know what happened to the gods?” and was told, “Eora is a big place, and news takes time to travel—these people don’t even have the printing press.”) The Living Lands, where Avowed is set, is deliberately an entirely new location, meaning it’s fresh for first-time players, but flavored enough to be familiar to longer-term followers.
Right, so Sargamis is a godlike, like your own character (a unique race, beings thought to be blessed by the gods, with special skills), and he’s clearly up to no good. He’s got some ridiculous plan to revive Eothas via a statue, and he’s stringing us along with some nonsense about never having seen the exploration party. Sargamis is clearly too chicken to go get the relic he needs, given it’s beyond a collapsed and flooded section of caverns and guarded by various beasties, so inevitably suggests that we go get it ourselves.
So begins the quest of leaping between platforms over a massive chasm, climbing and exploring to find chests, and discovering the route to reach this magical MacGuffin. As I played, I couldn’t help but collect every item, harvest every plant, and seek out every chest, even though I knew I wasn’t going to be using any of it given the brevity of my time with the game. But that it was there, that it was compelling, I think is crucial. This meant I was finding strange electric devices that were triggered by throwing seeds of a plant I’d plucked which opened doors to special areas, or smashing my way through suspicious-looking wooden boards to find bonus chests.
What took me aback, aside from how natural this all felt, was the scale. This section is all set in caves, and could easily have been tunnels and small rocky rooms. Instead, it was a series of vast, beautiful caverns, extraordinarily detailed across vast areas I couldn’t hope to reach, pretty enough to want to just stay still and stare for a while. This is bolstered by some stunning lighting. (You’ll see what I mean if you jump to 13:30 in the video below and see the candle-lit library, then the turn toward the spider-filled sunlit section of cave just beyond.)
The one thing I didn’t have time to get to grips with properly was combat. I managed fine, although I felt slight shame at how many health potions I was glugging, but clearly performing as the rogue when things get close-up is going to take some practice. (It would also have helped if I’d had the sense to spend more time improving my skills and putting on some of the armor I’d collected.) But at range, I felt like a fucking master. The bow and arrow is fantastic to use, and rather generous with its aiming (this is an RPG after all, not a first-person shooter), meaning I was more often clearing an area of the goblin-like Xurips before I’d even arrived. Thankfully, Kai was also helping out, his own AI taking care of his fighting.
The same sequence from the game was being used for hands-off demos elsewhere in the German conference, so you can see an alternative playthrough of what I saw, albeit with a wizard instead of a rogue, and making different conversation choices. Also notable is there’s a whole section of opening a gate here that I never encountered, because I’m fairly sure I found a completely different route through.
I’ve seen a lot of gaming sites comparing Avowed to Skyrim, which I find the most peculiar idea. The games are both RPGs and both first-person, but after that I struggle to find a connection, no matter how much I love Bethesda’s game. Avowed feels much much more coherent, more focused, like the natural evolution of games like Arkane’s wonderful 2006 RPG, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. It felt emboldened by the storytelling chops Obsidian has gained through its wonderful third-person RPGs, and distinct from its Bethesda-adjacent Fallout and The Outer Worlds titles.
In the mad frenzy of a week of nonstop appointments, I entirely forgot the release date for Avowed, and got it into my head it was arriving before this Christmas. With the demo completed, Sargamis dealt with, and a ridiculous hankering to carry on playing, I turned back to the Obsidian guy and said, “What’s the release date for this again?” “February 2025,” he replied, and in a moment of complete unprofessionalism I respond, “WHAT?! NO!”
I think that’s likely the most useful bit of information to take away from all this: I exclaimed like an affronted nine-year-old when I realized how long I have to wait to be able to play any more.
.