Avowed, not Obsidian's Skyrim moment

Now look, I get it. If you read that headline and get mad because I am comparing Avowed to Skyrim, when after Obsidian said that Avowed is not Skyrim, and for those of us who have played it, we understand that gameplay-wise it really isn't very much like Skyrim. It actually is much more like Mass Effect than Skyrim. That said, you are being disingenuous if you don't think that any comparison could be made to 2011's Skyrim.

For an average person, and honestly, even if you are more than the average gamer, looking at Avowed from an outside perspective, it is hard for me to think of how that person DOESN'T think it is similar to Skyrim. Sure, Obsidian SAID that it isn't Skyrim, but when you make a game that definitely LOOKS like Skyrim, you can't be mad if the general casual audience thinks that is what it is trying to be. Especially when it is coming from Obsidian, a studio responsible for the best Fallout game and other dialogue-centered RPGs such as Pillars of Eternity 1-2 and Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II. On the other hand, just because the game LOOKS like Skyrim, does it deserve to be compared to it? No, on a deeper level, those who are saying this game is really not like Skyrim are right. Skyrim, at its core, is a sandbox RPG filled with 'toys' that interact with each other in a large open world. Avowed is a somewhat linear action RPG that focuses on doing quests and exploring the open zones and the choices made while in conversations.

Avowed is not an interactive sandbox; that wasn't the design philosophy. Avowed picks a few pillars of the action RPG genre: combat, dialogue/choice and loot/exploration, and is designed around streamlining those elements. I have seen plenty of comparisons showing people killing NPCs or stealing from chests/NPCs in Skyrim and then trying to compare that to Avowed, which doesn't allow you to do that. Those systems are not in the game on purpose; that isn't what kind of game they were going for. Now, does that make it good? Ehh, not really. The lack of interactive systems you usually find when playing a game of its type definitely left me a bit disappointed.

That being said, once that early disappointment wore off, I still really enjoyed my time with Avowed, because the pillars that they did design the game around were fun!

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Story, dialogue and choices

Avowed is set in the Pillars of Eternity universe, directly happening a few years after the conclusion of the second POE game. I have yet to dabble in the POE games at all, so this was all new stuff for me.

In the beginning, most of everything felt like typical fantasy hero story stuff: you were blessed by a god with special abilities, and you were sent as an envoy of the emperor to a foreign land with the aim of getting rid of the 'Dreamscourge' and helping gain control of the wild 'Living Lands.'

By the end of the game, I wouldn't say it really escaped the general hero fantasy stuff, but it did have an interesting take on a god with power in this foreign land who is trapped and really makes you think about some of the choices you have to make towards the end of the game, and those choices felt like they impacted the game as a whole pretty well.

I would have liked to see choices throughout the game have MORE impact in the world, especially one with a smaller scope of zones and limited sandbox elements to deal with. An example of a mid-game choice was deciding to go into a camp of soldiers and kill them all. I did so, and this lessened the damage done to the main city of the area when they raided it at the end of this section.

While it was cool to me, because I accidentally stumbled across this camp of soldiers and didn't realize this would cause that, in the end it didn't have much impact outside of some dialogue after they raided the town, and then at the end when an ending is decided for you by one of the characters based on your actions throughout its run time. I am guessing it would either have been fight said character or don't fight them based on what you did throughout the game. I would have liked to see things change in the game world more, rather than just talk about them happening.

A feature that was really awesome, especially for me, was the ability to see dialogue history and have explanations for things that happened/descriptions for words and things tied to the lore of the world. This is a great feature for a dialogue/lore-heavy RPG that I would love to see continue into other games in the future.

Companions in this were fine; they had cool little banters and comments during points of the game after fighting enemies or completing objectives and would even have some things that they would say to each other that had to be specific to having those two companions on your team at the time. They always inserted themselves into the dialogue to give their opinions on the situation. While you could do things they wouldn't like, they would tell you that, but it never really made anything different gameplay-wise. They just kind of followed you everywhere and told you how they felt, and that was about it. I liked Kai the most, but despite being the voice of Garrus, I just felt little to no connection or attachment with the characters, not in the way I can connect with characters like Panam in Cyberpunk or even Garrus in Mass Effect.

I think overall, by the end, with the more interesting choices having an actual impact on the way the story played out and finished, I enjoyed the dialogue and choice-making in this more than Dragon Age: Veilguard, but not by like a ton.

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Combat/leveling

I think the combat in Avowed is simple, does what it is supposed to do, and doesn't really branch out past that. I did not really use books or wands here, so maybe on that front it is a different story.I was using a sword and shield for a while until I got a unique great sword and used that for the rest of the game. You have 6 abilities on a hotbar, yet the game gives you like 20 abilities by the end, so you have to do the Skyrim thing where you go into the menus during combat all the time. This felt weird for what felt like it was supposed to be more of an action RPG compared to something more 'tactical.'

That said, even though it felt simple, it was fun; I enjoyed using my roar for a bunch of buffs, then hitting a whirlwind spin like it's Diablo, and then finishing off an enemy with a heavy swing.

Leveling was basically just as simple: do quests, kill enemies and gain experience to level up character level; get skill points; pick a skill on the character page (not really a tree); and that was about it. I think this was the biggest area I felt could have been more like Skyrim; in a game full of weapons of different kinds, being rewarded for using a type of weapon and having attributes that were more tied to that play style is so much more fun. Sure, there were abilities better for certain weapons, but nothing felt like it was "Oh, this perk is what will make MY build better." It is more like, "Oh, this perk will make me stronger in general." I don't know if that makes sense.

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Crafting/looting

I think of the main elements of this game; this is the weakest, and sadly it is tied to exploration, a part that I think the game did really well.

In the different zones of this game, each is laid out with lots of nooks, crannies and waterfalls to find glowing chests and loot of various colors. Exploring the world felt fun: climb this building here, walk through this cave here, and each little path of "ohh, what's down this way?" had something of value at the end.

That being said, the crafting and upgrading system here felt simplified to the point of early access survival game level. Each zone had 3-4 of the next rarity of resources that you gathered and used that to upgrade your weapons and armor to the max tier of each zone.

If your weapon was under-leveled for the zone, it was much weaker, meaning you had to walk around and loot crafting resources until you had enough to match your gear to the zone. To me, this made exploration a requirement and became a checklist of "Let me hit as many of the crannies as I can" until I have max gear for the zone. Once I was at max with my favorite sword and armor, I had little reason to look around for more resources, and it just became monotonous gathering loot in each zone.

My other problem, which might have been better if 1. I experimented with more weapons. 2. Could try different enchantments. So, once I found this unique great sword that applied poison, I didn't use another weapon all game. Only unique loot could get enchantments, and once you enchanted a weapon, it was locked in on that one. There was like a ton of different enchantment materials that I never used once my main sword was enchanted, and I couldn't change it at all. Had I played with a ton of different weapons, I may have been more likely to use them, but I wish I could have had more of an enchantment tree to build my perfect sword and be able to interchange enchantments on it over the course of the game or something. The same thing applied to my chest piece, the only 'levelable' piece of armor; I got a good unique early on and never really found a chest piece better than it, and it was just stuck on one enchantment the whole rest of my time.

This was an area that disappointed me the most because with a game that had a really fun world designed to explore, the loot did not entice me to explore it. Maybe this complaint is coming from a perspective of really enjoying customizing builds to make the most of each piece of armor and ability, but it felt like they simplified it TOO much and left a lot to be desired from the loot system.

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I played this with Game Pass and really enjoyed the 35-ish hours I spent with this game. I think using Game Pass or waiting to get it below $50-60 is the appropriate price to pay for this game. Though seemingly simple in the beginning, towards the end the dialogue routes and choices you make do actually have impacts on the characters and story. The loot system felt too simplified to the point that it left a lot to be desired, and the combat was fun enough that I enjoyed fighting the bears even after the 100th bear.

I started this off by saying that the game shouldn't be compared to Skyrim because that is unfair; they aren't even the same kind of game. BUT, this was Obsidian's opportunity to make a game to take the western fantasy RPG crown from Skyrim while Elder Scrolls 6 hype is at an all-time low and while Bethesda is not holding favor in the general gaming climate, and I think they really missed that opportunity here.

Have you played Avowed? Let me know your thoughts on it in the comments. Or let me know why you might be passing on this game!