When Obsidian Entertainment announced Avowed I was surprised at the shift in genre. I’m not a huge first-person RPG fan myself and had played the Pillars of Eternity series on the merit of it being an Obsidian game and a CRPG. But after getting my hands on the game for a decent amount of time, I can say that I’m genuinely interested in the new direction Obsidian has decided to take the series. Because it seems like the core aspects of what made the Pillars of Eternity series interesting is still very much there.
Avowed is a gorgeous game — it’s vibrant and rich and there is a sense of character to the world that left me wanting more. Even though I spent the majority of my time in Avowed, trapped inside cavernous tunnels and long-forgotten ruins, I loved every bit of it. Green overgrowths popped against sandstone walls, flooded caverns were full of vibrant blue and purple coral. But everything had an uncanny edge to it. It was familiar, yet unfamiliar, with organic shapes and growths curling over every surface, and sometimes in places they didn’t belong.
I picked up discarded books, rummaged through broken shelves, and [redacted] as I looked for a group of missing adventurers. Accompanied by my companion Kai, a hulking Aumaua with teal and blue-tinged skin, we made short work of the enemies that barred our path. I had the opportunity to test both the Ranger and Mage builds, and more or less went in guns blazing — literally in the case of the Ranger. I was outfitted with a bow and two pistols, and just to test the durability of a ranged and stealth-focused build I actually did quite well just firing from the hip and getting random crits here and there.
And with Kai to protect me, we killed waves of reanimated skeletons with little effort. The player can actually instruct Kai to attack enemies or draw attention away from you in hairy situations, and that came in handy when I played the Mage. I had a total of eight spells at my disposal, which I could thumb through by swapping out spellbooks. I could shoot shards of ice from my hands with a simple gesture or bathe my enemies in flame.
But magic has other practical uses in the world as well. The area was full of puzzles, with the level design more or less leading the player on through contextual clues throughout the zone to show you that using lightning magic or lightning-imbued skills can power up generators to open doors. Or that using fire on spiderwebs can open up access to other paths. It’s done in a way that isn’t obtrusive and makes you feel like you’ve really accomplished something just by looking around and picking up on little hints here and there.
While I was able to check out those two specific builds, I was assured by the developers that players can more or less pick skills from each class tree to customize their builds. Naturally, you will have some skills that will carry over regardless of what you pick due to being Godlike, like a special takedown you can perform when sneaking up behind an enemy. But if I wanted to I could possibly combine spells with some offensive options offered by the Ranger to really make a unique build of my own, catered to my playstyle — which is running and gunning. It’s cool to see this facilitated in a game, and I’m not sure why I was surprised by this option being available in Avowed.
I never found any encounter to be particularly difficult, but that could largely be because of my playstyle. Or that the section of the game I played was at the start of the game. I couldn’t tell you. But the most fun I had was figuring out the puzzles and more or less combing through the environment for more lore or contextual clues that more or less enriched my experience as someone that’s knowledge-hungry for any morsel of information I can find in a game.
And while Avowed will be a shift for the Pillars of Eternity series, making the change from a CRPG to a first-person RPG, that doesn’t mean the game won’t be heavily focused on story and character interaction. There were two NPCs I interacted with during my time playing the game. One was a part of the expedition I was looking for. I helped patch him up and learned that the team had ventured a bit further in the cave, and another was a servant of a hugely important character in Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire. For this specific NPC, there were a handful of different ways that conversation could go.
Some of these options were dictated by my stats or by bits of information I got by reading through notes and books scattered throughout the area. In one instance I broke the news to him that he probably wouldn’t be able to revive his god, and in another I encouraged his efforts even if they would mostly be in vain. Because of these factors I never had the same conversation twice, which was hugely impressive. Kai would occasionally chime in too, offering a bit of context to the conversation, and there was also an option to pull up an in-game glossary to fill gaps in the lore that I had forgotten.
Avowed seems to be shaping up to be an interesting new direction for the series, and one that I’m eagerly anticipating. Perhaps that’s because I enjoyed Pillars of Eternity, and its sequel, Deadfire. Or because there was enough lore and information fed to me through in-game documents that I was just eager to learn more about the events that transpired after Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire. Because if Obsidian is good at one thing, it’s worldbuilding. And it seems like Avowed will continue to extrapolate on the world of Eora and the various deities that inhabit it.
