Over the past few days, I’ve had the opportunity to explore the opening hours of Avowed, the upcoming fantasy RPG from Obsidian Entertainment, a developer best known for 2010’s Fallout: New Vegas and its series of excellent turn-based RPGs in the Pillars of Eternity universe. Avowed arrives early next year on Xbox and PC, and despite the existence of Fallout: New Vegas, this one more closely follows in the footsteps of 2019’s The Outer Worlds, a modest open world-ish sci-fi RPG that punched above its weight largely due to excellent writing.
Microsoft told me playing through the opening area of Avowed would take about two hours, but taking my time and poking about, my time in the Living Lands was closer to four or five hours. I talk extensively about my time with Avowed on this week’s Remap Radio, but that publishes tomorrow, and in the meantime, I wanted to jot down a couple of quick thoughts with the game.
- Reset your expectations. The game is what you think it is.
Since it was unveiled, Avowed has felt…off. I can’t put my finger on it. I am the target demo for a game like this and I found The Outer Worlds flawed but worthwhile and charming; Avowed should’ve been a slamdunk pitch. Instead, playing Avowed has affirmed my caution, because the combat is clunky, the world is a little lifeless, and seems, at least at first, to lack the kinds of compelling characters that took The Outer Worlds over the finish line. It’s impossible to make a complete judgment about an RPG based on a few hours with its introductory area, but you gotta start somewhere.
- Crafting the opening to an RPG must be hard, but this one doesn’t work.
The opening to Skyrim is a meme because it’s awesome, and tosses you into the world in the coolest way possible. I’m not a fantasy person but Skyrim had me by the collar from the jump, and I rushed to start poking and prodding at the world. I’m sympathetic to the notion that an RPG has a difficult job, because it needs to bring you into the world when you’re at your weakest as a character and know very little about the journey ahead. You’re not powerful, you’re not interesting, and you don’t know what you want to do. That could be an opportunity for good writing and clever quests to do the lifting, but I wasn’t able to find them. Instead I spent four hours desperately seeking things to do in the Living Lands’ opening hours that didn’t involve struggling to not die as a magic user, or engaging in shocking amounts of awkward platforming. A world, even one that’s only big-ish like in Avowed, needs to point you towards The Good Stuff.
- A potentially fatal flaw: quests without consequence, quests without motivation.
Avowed quite obviously does not have the budget or scope of a Skyrim, but again, part of the reason The Outer Worlds worked was because the combat was (arguably) serviceable, while everything else fell into the writing’s lap. I pushed through because the writing compelled me.
Truth be told, Avowed starts promisingly, with a strangely touching quest where you learn that, in this world, it’s possible to be born with half a soul. You meet such a person, an individual who’s spent their life desperately searching for the other half, but when they do, it turns out their “other half” is a lizard creature whose species has a penchant for violence.
You’re tasked with clearing (aka killing) the smaller enemies out of her home, before stumbling upon a larger variant trying to communicate with you. You can kill them, but my companion pointed out that maybe this was the (half) soulmate our quest giver was speaking of. Upon reporting back, I firmly suggested that, as odd as this situation might be, they should make the best of it.
Touched and deeply amused, I fast traveled back to their home, hoping to witness a lovely but awkward conclusion to this story. Instead, nothing happened. That was the end of the quest. All setup, no punchline.
It was a theme that repeated while exploring Avowed. Once, I cleared a cave of spiders preventing nearby fisherman from doing their jobs, but when the creepy crawlies were dead, no one came to fish. There was no one to thank me. All I had was a little more loot. Where's my impact on the world?
Or when I stumbled into a rickety shantytown on the outskirts of a great and rich city, figuring I could get up to some mischief—or at least an interesting side quest commenting on the game’s class divides? Instead, a soldier asked me to find four medallions that were hiding nearby. Alas.
- We do not live in a world of RPG scarcity. What itch is Avowed scratching?
“Launching a game in today's world is as challenging and big an effort as it's ever been,” said Xbox head honcho Phil Spencer in a recent interview with Game File. You can do everything “right,” by which I mean craft a seemingly objectively good game and spend time, money, and effort telling people about it. And it still might fail. There are no guarantees with video games these days, but step one is crafting an identity. Part of my early tepid reaction to Avowed was trying to puzzle out whether my reaction was purely because “hey, it’s not for me.” But upon playing it, I now wonder: is Avowed for anyone?
Avowed would not be the first video game to really get going hours later than it should. It’s a chronic problem with RPGs. I’ll be returning to the Living Lands in 2025. The only difference is that I’ll be walking through the door, digital wand in hand, with a little more skepticism this time.