The land of Eora, home to the Living Lands, is already a wonderful tapestry of fantasy role-playing due to its place in the Pillars of Eternity duology. Those games, built to emulate dense, systems-driven games like Planescape and Baldur’s Gate, might be prequels in a narrative sense to Avowed, however, neither are what I’d call required reading when it comes to jumping into Obsidian’s latest title.
For all intents and purposes, Avowed is the perfect launching pad for people looking to carve out their path in Eora. By design, its systems are crafted to be more accessible and easy to grasp, especially if you approach Avowed expecting something palatable like The Elder Scrolls, and in that respect, Obsidian has nailed the brief. It mightn’t have Skyrim’s sheer size or scope but the nuts and bolts, save for a few key differences, appear to be in place.
If The Outer Worlds was Obsidian’s Fallout, Avowed is undeniably their Elder Scrolls, albeit a little “simpler” and pared back to keep players in the action.
The game opens with a shipwreck that leaves you stranded on “tutorial island” just off the coast of the port city Paradis. You’ve been sent by the empire of Aedyr, serving as its envoy, to investigate and bring about the end of the Dreamscourge, an organic plague that’s gutting the land, corrupting its essence, and turning its people into waves of mindless thrall. My party quickly enjoyed a boom of recruitment, including my ride-or-die for the whole story in Kai, and I bounded off into a giant fantasy world where allies and enemies were made based on the game’s very grey scales of morality and politics.
There mightn’t be a reputation system to speak of, but the repercussions of choices made do reverberate throughout the game’s narrative and create important touchstones for the game’s story, which I’d clock at around fifteen hours for a golden path run. Of course, there are countless, small stories to happen across in Avowed’s world, and the pull of the “!” is as real as ever, it constantly drew me from the main path and into the company of characters like Argamis, the devout, murderous monk I encountered in my first hands-on with the game. As much as I did enjoy the golden path and how it ultimately brought my party of oddities together, the game’s Return of the King-like conclusion, which reminds you of so many of these chance encounters and how your impact was felt, was a beautiful pay-off to an ultimately grand fantasy.
Similar to how reputation is streamlined, companions and your control over their place within the story is also kept simple. Although you can only have two in your party at any given point, all of the four allies you pick up along the way have their own plights you can involve yourself in if you choose to. Currying favour with them doesn’t seem to have grand implications to the game’s end game, at least in a Mass Effect suicide mission sense, as there’s no friend-or-foe slider to keep in the green. Of course, helping them find a sense of closure with what troubles them will likely yield a more satisfying narrative resolve, but that’s entirely up to you. Outside of this, companion skill trees are much leaner than the player-character, and you’ve no control over their equipment which keeps you in the action, and out of menus, for the most part.
It’s within that very action that you’ll find one of Avowed’s biggest strengths. Where most titles of this ilk will lock players into any number of prototypical archetypes, Obsidian emerges as a champion for player freedom, choice, and class fluidity. Skill trees still exist with the kind of “class structure” you’d regularly expect, there’s one for ranger, one for wizard, and so forth. Where it differs is you’re free to unlock and apply upgrades from any tree without being pigeonholed into one lane, so to speak. In a game that offers so many different offensive combinations, I think it’s incredible what they’ve been able to do and keep things so open.
The combat itself is rather tight, while maintaining the usual amount of jank you’d find in a “Bethesda-like”. Companions, even without direct orders, handle themselves well enough and the enemy A.I. is engaging without being brain dead—although any enemy who engages with you at range is a dead eye, which can be horrendous in wider arenas where you’re flanked by archers on multiple sides. As you’re able to have two active loadouts that can be hot-swapped with a single button press, I expect most will approach gear as I did by having both a close-quarters and a ranged loadout—I rocked a shield and spear most of the time but would swap to a pistol whenever the need arose.
Given enemies don’t level scale to match the player’s power, the Living Lands can seem a treacherous place for the first handful of hours. Exploring off the beaten path can definitely lead to some tough, emergent battles that give a real sense of accomplishment, although that does dissipate in the late game when you’re on a more even keel with the threats out there. Similarly, each piece of gear will fall into one of a few determining qualities, whether it’s good or superb, which’ll determine its stats. What I do like about the game’s relatively simple upgrade pathing for weapons, specifically, is that you’re able to pour collected resources into a mid-tier sword to turn it into a superb-rated weapon. It’s clean and elegant, and justifies to a degree the carting around of junk you’ll be doing. Rather annoyingly you’re unable to craft or spruce up a weapon out in the world, the function is limited to the quiet moments at your party camp—which isn’t infrequent by any means, you’re able to camp at any of the several adra crystals around the map.
And I must say, for a game that never boasted to be an open world, the map is far from small. Rather than boasting one enormous island playground to explore, the Living Lands is a group of contiguous zones that offer an unprecedented amount of biodiversity, whether it’s lush like Emerald Stair or parched like Shatterscarp, I found every new region to have an identity that felt in keeping with its people—which is another area where Obsidian have flexed an impressive amount of racial and cultural contrast.
In terms of performance, Avowed is largely faultless. Of the modes available, I opted for performance and found the gameplay to remain rock solid in terms of frame rate. Oddly, the only time I experienced significant dips or shuttering was whenever I’d speak to certain characters. For some reason, Kai’s on-screen time seemed so polished when compared to the fur-coated Yatzli, the last recruit of the tag-alongs. As terrific as the game’s writing is, the performance issues only served to compound the already woeful lip-syncing and dated character models that tended to be exposed during general banter.
Criticism of the game’s audiovisual design ends there, however, as there’s nothing bad that could be said for the work done by the environment and world-building artists. I was constantly astounded at how vibrant and unsurprisingly alive these Living Lands looked. From the moment the game’s iconic key art was revealed, there’s been a sense that Avowed wouldn’t at all be the dark fantasy its first teaser suggested it might be. The forested areas, devastated by overgrowth and the Dreamscourge’s fungal takeover, are obviously more appealing to the eye than an arid, rocky plain bordered by volcanoes, but every area is its own character.
The vocal performances are fine on the whole, with Brendan Keener of Garrus fame being the obvious standout. On the other hand, the orchestral score, composed by Venus Theory, might be serviceable while playing its role as the sonic framework for this grand adventure but I fear it’ll ultimately fall into the category of pleasant yet unmemorable.
Being Obsidian’s take on a fantasy odyssey in the spirit of Skyrim, so much of what Avowed delivers is ultimately surprising to me. It’s definitely a nerd’s fever dream when it comes to the story possibilities, politics, and combat fluidity, however so many of its systems feel pared back enough that I kind of see it as Skyrim-lite—which is by no means a condemnation, I’m more surprised Obsidian—the team who made geeky ass shit like Pillars of Eternity and Pentiment—would take refuge in the safety of ease of entry rather than double down on stat sheets and min-max mastery.
