Avowed

Avowed is the first game from Obsidian Entertainment under Microsoft that was of interest to me -- Grounded and Pentiment were not that. I expected the same kind of mediocrity The Outer Worlds was made of and pretty much got that. Avowed is a professional production that feels smooth and fun to play but at the same time is limited in scope and ultimately a shallow experience.

An easier-to-approach foray into the Pillars universe

Avowed is set in Eora, the same world as the Pillars of Eternity games but, as is shown, the game's title carries no franchise identifier. They did kind of a reverse unnecessary-colon thing there. I think it's unusual to not invite an already-existing audience even if this game is of a slightly different genre. Maybe they trusted that the fans of the niche CRPG titles would find Avowed regardless and this way the title would seem more attractive to a wider audience that is ready to play a new, mainly-first person fantasy action roleplaying title.

I realized, many hours into the game, that the premise of Avowed is similar to Spider's GreedFall to the point that I suspect it was straight up copied from it. In GreedFall, you sail to Teer Fradee as a legate appointed by Prince d'Orsay of the Merchant Congregation to find a cure for the malichor plague, while in Avowed you sail -- shipwreck -- to the Living Lands as an envoy to the Emperor of Aedyr to find out where the Dream Scourge plague is coming from. GreedFall's De Sardet has a conspicuous birthmark on their face while the Envoy in Avowed is a godlike, their whole head possibly covered in fungal growths.

Which god's godlike you are is a mystery -- no other godlike is known to have had similar features -- but it's damn obvious that it's related to the Dream Scourge. Really, the whole main story has very little to give, everything is so predictable. After I had completed the Woedica totem in camp at the end of the game's first region and got a glimpse to the god's intentions in the area, the whole plot was laid bare for me. And that was barely 1/4 through the game.

It takes most of the story for the characters to fully figure things out. It's also ridiculous how one tip from one of your companions, Marius, could have skipped at least half of the game. If he had just said: "Oh hey, by the way, I've seen your godlike features before, back home." They tried to reason it by Marius being slow to warm up and him having a deep-rooted trauma in his childhood, preventing him from talking about his home. It was disappointing how I wasn't able to properly address it.

From the oil slick visuals associated with the Dream Scourge and the mystery god, it's obvious that the film Annihilation was a source of inspiration for Avowed. I don't think I will ever understand what people see in the movie; my disdain for it just keeps growing. Outside that, Avowed is pleasant to look at even on the medium-ish settings I played. It's definitely more demanding than Eternal Strands but I was positively surprised to unexpectedly get above 30 FPS in an Unreal Engine 5 title once more.

Lacking payback

I chose the "merge" ending because it felt like it would lead to a reasonable outcome. But I think the god may have tricked me; the ending didn't leave me with entirely good vibes. The companion reactions to the last dialogue from it were also hilarious poorly written and then completely forgotten in the following final cutscene. "Envoy, that's not who you are!" Like, what the fuck, Kai? What do you know about how the Envoy is? And speaking of: the 'fucks' still sound so off in the setting. There are a few times dialogue in general sounds like current day language -- immersive in-universe writing such a challenge these days.

After the fact, the "deicide" ending felt like what I should have gone for; fuck the god and the Living Lands. But I had decided early on not to be too antagonistic towards the god because that role was kind of taken by Inquisitor Lödwyn who leads the Steel Garrote paladin force in the Living Lands. Lödwyn is on the side of the Aedyr Empire too but she is also there to fulfill Woedica's will regarding the mystery god. Lödwyn appears in a formulaic manner at the end of each region's main quest.

It's amusing how much Lödwyn was like my Pillars paladin character: the Steel Garrotes are only a single different favored behavior off from having the same disposition set as the Bleak Walkers. As a Finn, it bothered me how the ö in Lödwyn's name is pronounced as /u:/, instead of being the proper letter ö, pronounced /œ/.

Kai having been voiced by Brandon Keener (Garrus Vakarian in the Mass Effect trilogy) provided a surprise nostalgia experience ince again. Like in The Bureau: XCOM Declassified or Fallout 4, I expected to see Garrus whenever I heard Keener's voice and it's even worse -- or better? -- in Avowed because Kai talks a lot more here. One of Kai's end-of-combat quips even is: "Just like the good old days!" Indeed, Garrus. Indeed.

Not overly numerous character options

Avowed is yet another recent-years game that makes you pick between body type 1 and 2, instead of a gender choice. I feel the assumed-female body type is the losing one in these titles because it's every time just a smaller, less bulky version of the assumed-male one. I hated how my character's body looked fridge-shaped in lighter armors and like a chonky, shapeless ovoid in heavier ones.

Your character's head is cursed to look horrid as well because you have to pick from various fungus growth options, some covering the whole face. However, I found one that would definitely look like decorations on first glance, and wouldn't provoke the horrified reaction from the first Living Lands denizen you talk to. You can create surprisingly beautiful faces otherwise, even if your preset of choice slightly limits your options.

Avowed does not offer the same expansive class options as the Pillars games. Instead you have three freeform perk sets -- fighter, ranger, and mage -- from which you can pick-and-choose, more perks becoming available with character levels. Such a limited set of options may disappoint but it's pretty much what I was expecting from the game.

Average first person action

I decided to go for shield and spear because the combination is rarely offered in games. I stuck with it till the end without respeccing, even though the experience didn't prove as cool as expected for few different reasons. One reason was how this -- and about every other game ever -- gets shield combat "wrong", doing it differently from how it would work in real life. If you have a shield, you always want to keep it between you and the enemy; you don't lower it to strike.

A spear is theoretically a good combination with a shield due to its reach; easy to poke with from behind cover. Avowed's spears, however, are the saddest, shortest sticks you've ever seen, pretty much the length of a one-handed sword. No point using spears of that length when a full-metal sword would be more durable and not even be that much heavier.

Melee combat can get rather monotone regardless of your weapon of choice if you don't pick active skills, although with spears it's particularly so with the same stabbing animation every time. You don't have a huge amount of points to spread around thus investing on many actives will leave you with fewer points to spend on helpful passive perks. Charge is an obvious ability choice if you go melee, and is useful for getting to places otherwise too.

If I were to start the game now, I'd probably go magic with a pistol to have the greatest variation in one loadout. That was in fact my secondary weapon set because there are obstacles that require either fire, ice, or lightning to get through. I had a lightning damage pistol while fire and ice came from a grimoire of the elements.

Surely this is meaningful

The amount of loot is comparable to The Outer Worlds but to Avowed's credit, only body armor and weapons weigh. You can loot everything you want without care -- stealing is not even a thing. It's questionable that the game even has carrying capacity in the first place because you can move items from your inventory to camp stash at any point. Albeit it is a tad inconvenient to go to your camp just to collect sellable items from the stash -- they could have made it possible to sell items from the stash at vendors.

In the middle of my playthrough, Avowed got an update that added a setting to have chests visible on the minimap (which the game calls a compass). That made finding hidden ones so much easier: before that one had to locate them only with the aid of a tingling sound. With the sound it is easy to start getting paranoid: Is that a chest nearby or just your ears ringing? At the end of the game, I doubted if it had really been worth it to fight every mob group I could see and open every single chest only to have mountains of unused crafting materials.

Odd UI choices but also good customization

Jiggling HUD is a questionable design choice, especially with how heavy the movement is in Avowed. It gets particularly distracting when your action bar and such get faded out outside combat but the minimap stays there, bouncing every time you jump. Movement drawing attention is UI design 101 stuff; there's zero reasons for the player to pay attention to the minimap when they jump. There is in fact a setting to disable the HUD bouncing but I couldn't find it until the aforementioned update. Either it was added then too or I had simply been blind.

A very neat interface option rare few first person RPGs have, is being able to have a dynamic change on which hand each mouse button controls.. With a shield in off-hand, the reverse sides don't matter for me because RMB being block/parry is common place in games; it's not confusing for me if block comes from the left hand on the screen and attack with LMB from the right hand. But while dual-wielding a melee weapon in main hand and a ranged weapon in off-hand, my brain starts having issues. I remember struggling with the setup quite a bit in Dishonored when I had the crossbow drawn. In third person, it might matter less but I found the perspective not as polished in Avowed, the game clearly having been primarily designed for first person.

Obsidian is churning games out this year. In the Xbox Games Showcase yesterday, Grounded 2's early access was revealed for next month and The Outer Worlds 2's release date was announced for the end of October. I'm quite intrigued to see how much they manage to improve the latter one over the first game -- because surely the sequel won't be as mediocre when they already have a base to build upon: not another Game Pass fodder title.

In the The Outer Worlds 2 Direct that followed the showcase, they told that the reason Halcyon lost contact with other colonies is because the faster-than-light drive they use does something to spacetime. I'm not sure if that was ever stated in the first game but there it is, I guess. I wonder if they took that from Death's End by Liu Cixin.

June 26 Addendum

Before I forget -- and I already did once -- few months before Avowed's release, there was a bit of drama with the game's art lead Matt Hansen. I looked up the original post that caused it and I'd say it wasn't as bad as it was made to sound. Still, he should probably remove himself before doing any race-based hiring -- as much as an art director has a say on that in the first place.

The whole game's director, Carrie Patel, also left Obsidian after the game's release to join Netflix. For some reason that felt like a golden parachute move to me.

Edited 2025-06-26