In our Avowed review, we take a look at Obsidian’s game that will make old-school RPG fans happy.
As someone who loves role-playing games from the 2000s, in recent yearsBaldur’s Gate 3 I am very pleased with the revival of RPG interest. February will be like a holiday for fans of the genre with Avowed and Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, although I haven’t had the chance to try it yet. Let’s take a look at how Avowed, which I had the chance to play early with a code provided by Microsoft, turned out.
Avowed Review / PC
What Happened to Your Face?
Avowed is Obisidian Entertainment’s new game, set in the Eora universe that we know from the CRPG Pillars of Eternity series, and stands out with its story that is independent of other games. Our main character, who is an ambassador for the Aedyr Empire, is tasked with going to the Living Lands, a land we have heard of but never seen in the Pillars of Eternity games, and investigating the disease called “Dream Plague” that has spread to the region. As the name suggests, this disease takes over people’s dreams and then their entire minds. After a difficult journey, we are greeted with cannon fire as we approach the shores of the Living Lands and our adventure begins.
Our main character, the “Envoy”, is not a normal person, he belongs to the blessed or cursed “Godlike” species of the Eora universe, depending on your perspective. Godlikes are known as humanoid species (called kith) that are blessed by a god before birth and carry his features on their bodies. Godlikes usually leave a negative first impression, but Envoy has another problem, no one knows which god blessed him. The markings on our bodies (we can choose) do not belong to any known god, and while other Godlike species communicate with their gods, no one talks to us.
The Avowed story introduces us to various corners of the Living Lands, while also giving us plenty of information about its old and new people. The Living Lands, which is mostly the land of those who escape the law, those who love their freedom, and the outcasts, is a difficult place, each region has its own dangers and special stories. The game has made a very nice presentation with both side quests and notes you find while exploring.
Both the characters that join our team and the other NPC characters we meet are beautifully written. After the recently released Dragon Age Veilguard, which had dialogues that were like those of an elementary school play, I was very happy to read such beautifully written stories and dialogues. If you follow the quests and collect information about the environment, you gradually start to care about most of the characters and make your choices accordingly. Or if you want, you can do the opposite and even accept being called a jerk. The choice is free in most cases.
Side quests are usually written in a way that will put you in a dilemma and then make you see the decision you make. Will you help a character who thinks that the plague is slowly taking over him and he is losing control of his mind to kill himself or will you listen to his family? Or will you destroy a powerful mechanism full of souls and use it instead of saving the souls and let the souls suffer? However, no matter what we do in some side quests, we cannot reach the conclusion that we say “but this is the logical thing”. Oh, and if you are interested in side quests and say you will return after the main quest progresses, be careful, sometimes events move too fast and you may not be able to return to the quest.
In the main quest, you have similar choices, and as a result of the actions you take, you can go after the empire, the Living Lands, or a completely different side. Moreover, even those I said “I would never support this character in life” gave such good and logical reasons that there were parts where I sat down and thought thoroughly while making choices, even though they were against my character’s actions. We can’t always say “Hooray, I fixed everything with one option.”
In Baldur’s Gate 3, we experience the “You made a simple choice 20 hours ago, here’s the result” situations a little faster in this game, and I was pleased with that. However, one thing that bothered me was that party members only chatted in the camp area. They make comments outside, but after a mission they cut to the chase by saying “Come to the camp, we’ll talk about something”. Say whatever you want to say here so I don’t have to change regions twice.
Dream Plague Won’t Let You Sleep
When I first started playing Avowed, I thought of the Elder Scrolls games. I always make this comparison when it comes to first-person perspective role-playing games. But as you play, you see that this game is not something you can call “like Skyrim”, but more like Fable or Kingdom of Amalur. Less objects to interact with, a smaller map, a less complicated world. But everything is used almost in moderation.
First of all, I want to talk about the character creation screen briefly. Character creation screens are especially important in games where they say “you are the character”, I prefer to create a character that looks good to my own eyes. In fact, not being able to create a character in role-playing games bothers me a little (I’m looking at you KCD) but I don’t mind it too much. Still, we have the chance to make our character however we want here and that’s nice. Moreover, since we are Godlike, we can even customize the weird appearance features we have. Of course, while these make people uncomfortable, they can also bother you. Luckily, they offer the option to turn it off, everyone reacts as if they are there but you don’t see it. There’s one part that bothers me though, you can’t change the character appearance again, continue with whatever you chose at the beginning. I wondered if we could change our hair at least. I guess they will add a mirror with a future update.
When our character first enters a region, a completely closed map awaits us, which opens as we explore. Various settlements, bandit camps, bear dens, treasures and more await us on this map. Sometimes, you can take out and give it to a man who says, “A bear took my necklace” because you visited the map without visiting the city, and say, “Is this it?” or you go to a bounty hunt too early and the bear takes you. The possibilities are not endless, but there are enough. There are also secret missions that do not appear as tasks in the game, but you understand thanks to the conversations of NPCs. You can clean the area for someone who wants to leave flowers on his brother’s grave but is afraid of monsters, and you can earn small rewards by reporting it.
Exploration is usually rewarded, there is always a reward waiting behind the broken mechanisms you see in the environment, the walls hidden by illusions or the rocks you explode. These can be money, materials or a special piece of equipment. You always need better equipment, so exploration is very important. The items that the vendors have in the game are also good, but since I could not fix my economy, I mostly went for scavenging. Of course, another advantage of exploration is that you can find the place that the vendor sells for money and the map shows for free. Sometimes, while exploring, you can find the paths used by smugglers, collect their materials and then get scolded by the guards for using the forbidden elevator.
As I played the game, I realized that there were many similarities between the company’s previous RPG game, The Outer Worlds, and this game. There were places to explore in that game as well, most areas had small stories within themselves, and gave mini side quests that didn’t even make it obvious that they were quests. A world that was too small to call an open world but had plenty of places to explore awaited us. In my opinion, the fantasy Eora universe fits this structure better and is therefore more enjoyable than Outer Worlds.
Sword Shield Book Grab Whatever You Have!
Avowed’s combat system may first bring to mind Skyrim or another TES game, but if we were to compare it to a game, I would say it is more similar to Fable or Kingdom of Amalur. When creating our character, we choose a background and start with equipment accordingly, but we have the chance to use everything. You can use a sword, shield, warhammer, knife, staff, bow and arrow, pistol, rifle, whatever comes to mind, you can even use one set and keep the other in reserve. With a gun in one hand and a spell book in the other, you can be a ranged monster or a ranged tank with a magic staff-shield combination.
There is no limit to using weapons, but the stat points and skills you give determine how efficient you are. For example, I played an interesting mage-warrior by investing all my points in passive skills and casting spells through a spell book. After a while, I reset the skills and tried different skills depending on the weapon I found, but in the end, I always preferred to go with magic. How difficult the fights will be depends on how you develop your character and which teammates you enter the fight with.
I want to touch on the difficulty of fights a little. Weapons have 5 different rarity levels and we can upgrade them with the materials we collect in the game. In other words, you have a chance to use the weapon you get at the very beginning of the game even at the very end by making enough investments. The difficulty levels of the enemies also have the same rarity levels. Let’s also point out that each rarity level has 3 sub-levels. If your weapon is at a normal level, it deals 25% less damage to the enemy at the next level, and your armor takes more damage. This is actually the real difficulty in fights. It’s actually a simple system to understand, but there’s something about its operation that bothers me.
If you play the game by progressing through the main story and don’t get too involved in exploration and upgrading, the enemies will be stronger than the equipment you have, this is normal. However, the game brings a new rarity level in each new area, and this level has always been much higher than my equipment without exception. If an item is not unique, we cannot upgrade it to “Legendary” level, so I focus more on these. In the meantime, I say let me not spend resources on the spare one I use so that there is no shortage, but its power is low. I enter a new area, there is a creature in front of me with 3 skulls next to it, in short, a “one-eat-all” situation. Don’t be mistaken, you can still defeat it, but the damage you deal is ridiculous. If I wanted to buy equipment suitable for the place, this time the prices in the shops were very high. I couldn’t find a middle ground, at the end of the day I always saved it with spells.
The game’s combat system is also fun, but it really bothered me that it was designed entirely for consoles and controllers. First of all, we can only put 6 skills on the skill bar, the rest we can choose by stopping time with a window we open. I started as a mage, there are 4 spells in the book that I couldn’t choose, I wanted to put the spells I bought, I have godlike skills, my teammates’ skills and a few other things. I had to constantly stop the fight and choose a skill, and then I had to target it, which is another thing, we select it by right-clicking. In the end, I gave up and continued with passive skills and spells in the book.
Our teammates are very well written, each one is an expert in their own field, but in a fight they suddenly turn into children playing games. We can’t directly order someone to attack, we can’t say stop near me during the fight, we can’t say go and pull the others. Finally, I fight with two ogres, skeletons come to help anyway, my teammate draws the enemy away and also revives the camp in that area. As I was about to take down the ogres, who were already above me in terms of level, a healer from the camp came and healed them both. At that time, since their only skill was waiting, I could only mutter to myself because I couldn’t say “Come back” even though I saw them running to the camp. They are already dying far away and waiting for you to pick them up, while the bear is screaming behind you (literally), but never mind, you find its location from the compass first and then try to pick them up.
Speaking of the compass, I want to point out that it’s also extra crappy. Everything is ready, what if you made that compass a mini map so we could see it? It would be more useful than opening and examining the map every time. Moreover, there is no direct map opening button when playing with a controller, and if there is, I couldn’t find it. When playing on Series S, I always go to the menu and go to the map from there, after a while I gave up and continued playing on PC.
Finally, forget about stealth in the game, sneaking out of the bushes and clearing the entire camp. The game’s aggro system works very strangely, at best you can make two silent attacks, then they come running even from the neighboring camp. You have unannounced attack skills, but the game pushes you to do all kinds of actions. Again, in some missions you are asked to go silently or not to kill anyone. If you try to run without killing anyone, it doesn’t work, your only way to avoid being caught is to invest one point in the invisibility skill and eat essence-filling food while running.
Audio Visual Performance
Thanks to Avowed’s support for cross-save, I had the chance to test it on both PC and Series S. The game is visually very satisfying, the color palette changes with different climate conditions and vegetation (or barren lands) in the regions we visit. When I entered a new area, the first thing I did was find the highest point in the place, climb it and watch the view. The environmental details are meticulously detailed, the character models are very good, and the cities look very nice. It’s not the best graphics I’ve seen in recent years, but it definitely draws you into its world.
We said the graphics are nice, but where are we in terms of performance? The minimum system requirements of the game on the PC side are determined as Ryzen 5 2600 – i5 8400 processor and RX 5700 – GTX 1070 – Arc A580 graphics card, as well as 16 GB RAM and 75 GB disk space. The recommended system requirements are reported as R5 5600X – i7 10700K processor and RX6800 – RYX 3080 graphics card. I played on a system with an R5 7600 processor and 4070 graphics card, at 2K resolution with the highest graphics settings without any performance problems. The game, which also offers DLLS support, did not drop below 75 fps even when I did not enable this option, and when I did, it provided higher values.
I have some minor issues with the graphics, especially the character models. For example, there were strange glows on the character models during conversations unless I turned on and off certain shadow settings. I think this will be fixed with the updated drivers. What I don’t think will be fixed is the fact that the character models’ clothes show through. I can accept Kai or Giatta’s necklace disappearing under their clothes, but it looks weird when Marius’ beard goes into his neck. You can also sometimes see NPCs with their hands tied behind their backs, and their arms bend in strange ways while talking.
So can you play games on Xbox Series S? I’m not used to playing games with a controller from a first-person perspective, but I did some testing. There will be three different graphic types in Xbox Series X/S consoles: Quality – Performance – Balanced, while Series S only supports two. The Performance option, which will offer a frame rate of 60 fps, is not available on Series S. While both options in Series S support 30 fps at 1080p resolution, fps support is 40 on TVs over 120Hz. Ray Tracing and unlocked frame rate options are also active. Even if we can make these selections from anywhere in the menu, I didn’t see them despite looking for them. I think the selection is automatically activated when we connect the console to the device.
Even though the visual difference between PC and Series S is noticeable, I have no complaints about the view I saw on Series S, it looked very good. I didn’t experience any significant fps drops in the more intense areas as an effect. There were no annoying slowdowns even after casting 3 area-of-effect spells in a row in the volcanic area. You can also play the game from a third-person perspective, by the way, but since almost everything is done in first person, it’s not very comfortable. Still, it’s an option for those who can’t play from the first perspective on consoles.
The voice acting in Avowed manages to deliver the quality I expect from Obsidian games. I played most of the game with Kai just because of Brandon Keener, the voice actor for Garrus from the Mass Effect series, and the other actors also gave very good performances. I have no complaints except for the dialogue overlapping at times. The music is very nice, complements the atmosphere, but how memorable it is is debatable. I played for almost 50 hours, and apart from the menu music, there is not a single combat song that I remember.
Conclusion
I spent almost 50 hours with Avowed, and during that time I never said “I should just end this and leave now”. Aside from the combat system that has a reasonable mix of action and RPG balance, it has done a very successful job in presenting the stories it tells, the characters it introduces, and the effects the player leaves even with small choices. Avowed is not a game that will take hundreds of hours of my time, or that I will put aside for a while because I constantly forget about the main quest, and that’s a good thing. But it definitely won’t appeal to everyone.
It seems a bit difficult to be a candidate for the best RPG game of the year, especially since it would be a bit unfortunate if it coincides with the current Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 wind. Just like Outer Worlds came out at the same time as Disco Elysium. But if you like more console-focused games like Fable – Kingdom of Amalur, give this game a try. It will also be added to the Gamepass library on release day. If you like the Pillars of Eternity series, definitely give it a try, even if it is not directly related, you will encounter many nice references and familiar faces and voices.