There’s an inertia for me, a palpable weight when it comes to diving into big RPGs. Part of this is born out of the desire, which I’m still trying to shake, of playing and reviewing 1 game a week on average. I’ve also come to realise that it takes me a good long while, going on 8 hours or so it seems based on my last couple reviews, before I actually start enjoying the game in any real sense. I’ve put down many better titles long before that mark so there’s always this friction to even starting them because I know it’s going to be a hot minute before I round the curve. Avowed was no different here, seemingly taking forever to introduce itself to me fully at which point I was finally able to start enjoying it on some level.
You are the Envoy of the Aedyr Empire and a godike, blessed by an unknown God with powers beyond that of your normal kin. You have been directly tasked by the Emperor himself to travel to far away to a place called the Living Lands. It’s a wild and untamed place, the people who live there being those who’ve fled (or been cast out of) other societies to find their homes in the untamed wilderness that this place is known for. Aedyr, wanting to expand its territories like all good empires do, has been making its presence felt there and not without a healthy dose of resistance from the locals. This has also seemingly coincided with the rise of a dreadful plague call the dreamscourge, an affliction that drives its victims insane whilst transforming their bodies into horrid mushroom laden monstrosities. Your task is simple: understand and eliminate the dreamscourge, all the while trying to stay alive in a land that has every intention of killing you.
Avowed is certainly at its best when you’re out in the game’s world, exploring the vast forests, caves, deserts and other biomes that are scattered around the rather large maps. The attention to detail is quite stunning with all the environments feeling alive and fully realised. Which is why it’s so weird that the animations are in such stark contrast to this with all the movements, transitions and interactions always seeming really stiff and awkward. The best examples of this are the jumping and vaulting animations which just don’t seem to fit your character at all or when you’re chatting with your party members, who stand rather unnaturally until they’re given a gesture cue. Usually these two things are never really out of step with each other but in Avowed the difference in attention paid to this to aspects is really stark.
Now I haven’t played an Obsidian RPG for some time, the last one being Neverwinter Nights all the way back in the day, nor have I played Pillars of Eternity so I was going into Avowed pretty blind. At its core Avowed is a pretty stock standard RPG, first asking you to craft your character and backstory to set the tone for how you’ll be playing the game. From there you’re slowly introduced into all the various mechanics they’ve built into it. You’ve got your standard attributes, talents and gear all of which you’ll be upgrading as you progress through the story. Combat is your standard action-RPG template with a few tactical elements sprinkled in as a nod to the RPGs of years gone by. A relatively simple crafting and upgrade system is also there, which is realised well enough to enable you to stick with your favourite items all the way through the game should you wish. The camping/rest system is built into the map itself with party camps scattered about the place at various intervals, hinting at the underlying intention of trying to get you to interact with your party at least at certain points during your playthrough. It’s comprehensive, well realised and more than enough to satisfy hard core RPG fans for a good 50+ hours.
I understand the need for extended tutorials for games with big vision and numerous mechanics but by golly does it ever get in the way of enjoying the game. It’s clear that the game has a lot of things going on but they’re not really put in front of you until you’ve spent an extended amount of time in the game. For instance it’s clear you’ll have a party, and it’ll be a certain size, but you won’t have that until you’re pretty deep in the game. There are other mechanics that are hinted at, like the totem system, but it’s woefully unclear as to how that’s supposed to act. Imagine my surprise after clearing half of the second area figuring out that those things actually gave you buffs when you put them down. At the same time, like all games with similar construction, the early stages of the game are plagued by your lack of options. Choosing a warrior this time around, because some habits die hard, meant that I was pretty hamstrung in the game’s initial chapters due to the build lacking good crowd control and regen. Of course I could’ve changed this but even after just 4 hours in you kind of feel committed to your build, even if it feels sub optimal.
Something which seems to trip up far too many people is the fact that the game can be played in both first and third person. Why you’d want to play in first person is somewhat beyond me, RPGs are always better when you’ve got the better vision afforded to the third person view, but each to their own. The only downside to this though is that it seems like all the interaction points were designed for first person, your cursor needing needle like precision to hit things should you want to do something with them. This wouldn’t be too much of an issue but since you’re opening up chests every minute or two it becomes this rather tiresome exercise of figuring out which parts are the ones you can click on.
Combat starts off very vanilla and repetitive, just you engaging in a game of whacking NPCs, blocking when you need to and dodge when you can’t. It gets better later on when you get a bit more variety in the skills and weapons you have available, allowing you to craft a build that’s a bit more active and enjoyable than it first was. I started off with a simple sword and board build, which works well enough, but felt like it was severely lacking in damage later on. I ended up switching to a stun focused twin mace build that could absolutely wreck faces when paired with the unlimited stamina ability, although that was unfortunately on a long enough cooldown that spamming it wasn’t an option. Overall I’d say combat is enjoyable, but certainly doesn’t fulfill that same power fantasy like I got with Dragonage: The Veilguard.
Which is very much by design though. Whilst raw stats and damage numbers are a core part of the combat loop the main determining factor of how fun or frustrating an encounter is will be determined by the “quality” of your kit and the enemy. Common items vs common enemies? Yep you’ll do full damage. Common vs Fine? You’ll be whacking them for much, much longer and they’ll be dealing a whole truckload of damage against you. You can kind of outfox this system a bit, aiming to get your gear upgraded long before you meet enemies at that level, but even then that’ll only get you so far ahead before you start meeting more enemies at the same quality level. It was a somewhat frustrating realisation I came to, knowing that I could never really be completely overpowered in the constructs that the devs had created. It is bad game design? Not at all, it just doesn’t fulfil the power fantasy that I hope to get out of RPGs like this.
Crafting is done well enough, although it’s not particularly deep. Your core equipment can be upgraded through all the quality levels with the right materials and unique weapons can have their enchantments upgraded/changed once to better suit your playstyle. I did like the fact that basically all the weapons in the game are viable, from a base damage perspective, and it just comes down to how you want to play it. When I found out I could really juice the stun numbers by using 2, 1 handed maces suddenly stunning everything in sight (which then triggered a black hole, super cool) having those maces for as long as I wanted them was really nice.
There were a few technical issues along the way, most of which are par for the course from these large scale RPGs. I had a couple crashes to desktop for no reason I could discern which was made all the less frustrating thanks to the game’s aggressive checkpointing system. Performance drops noticeably in the more populated/detailed areas and, unfortunately, I couldn’t seem to get the NVIDIA app to optimise the settings (and it wasn’t enough to make me do some manual adjustments). Likely these issues will be less prevalent as more patches come out, so expect a much smoother ride if you’re playing this well after release.
The narrative is…fine. I’m not sure how much of the universe is shared between PoE and Avowed so I can’t comment on whether or not this has anything that fans of that game might enjoy here. On its own though it’s ok, with the highlights mostly coming from the side missions and companion quests rather than the main campaign. I got invested in Kai’s story pretty heavily, not least of which because it’s the same voice actor for Garrus from Mass Effect, and the other party members quests mostly rounded them out well as supporting characters. The main story though? Eh, again it’s fine enough to keep things going but nothing that’s going to leave you thinking about it for long after you’ve finished the game.
Avowed is a competent, well realised action RPG. It takes probably too long to reach its stride, but when it does you start to appreciate the craftsmanship in all the little details around the world. This shines the most in the quests that aren’t in the main campaign, something which I’ve routinely ignored in the past. This time I didn’t and I feel the game was much better overall because of it. I think time is definitely on Avowed’s side here as the incremental improvements and potential DLC in the future could take this game from good to something great. Time will tell if we get that though as it seems these large RPGs aren’t the drawcard they once were.
Rating: 8.5/10
Avowed is available on PC and Xbox Series X/S right now for $119.95. Game was played on the PC with 25.7 hours of total playtime and 40% of the achievements unlocked.
