Avowed Review - This was not worth my time

Avowed is the newest game from fan favorite developer Obsidian Entertainment, a first person action RPG set in their Pillars of Eternity universe, promising a rich world full of interesting characters, deep character customization and vast regions to explore. While it’s not hard to see where the game draws it’s inspirations from, Obsidian clearly set out to improve upon the formula set by it’s peers through open ended class builds, strategic combat and their signature quirky writing providing plenty of role playing opportunities fueled by player choice. It’s easy to look at Avowed and think, oh yea they’re trying to give us a better Skyrim, which is not only reductive, but also an insult to both games. I can confidently say Avowed feels like it’s own thing and in some ways actively goes against the frameworks we’ve seen in franchises like Elder Scrolls, The Witcher and Baldur’s Gate. It’s unfortunate then that while it desperately tries to leave it’s own mark on the genre, it comes up short in nearly every single aspect, ironically solidifying it as a smaller, cheaper imitation of all the big players in the space. From a slow burn narrative with very few interesting characters written in ways that’d make even the MCU blush, to an embarrassingly shallow combat sandbox that’s hamstringed by one of the worst gear progression systems I’ve seen in the genre.

I’m also sad to say it’s all wrapped up in a world that feels lifeless and empty, full of repetitive, unrewarding exploration. The few moments where I sat there thinking “ya know, I’m glad Obsidian did their own thing” were heavily overshadowed by the moments I wish they had just copied Skyrim. They set out to fix what wasn’t broken and in the process managed to overlook the very basic fundamentals that were established well over a decade ago. While this is certainly not a bad game, it’s complete lack of originality, repetitive moment to moment gameplay and painfully slow, exposition heavy narrative all hold back any of the potential that manages to occasionally shine through. There’s no doubt that a lot of players will enjoy the game as it does offer a complete RPG experience in a dense world with tons of sights to see and quests to complete, however for me the entire game felt like a series of mandatory checklist features. Nothing particularly stood out as memorable and I think that’s ultimately going to be the sad fate of Avowed. A painfully average game that’s forgotten in a week, even by it’s biggest fans.

Before we get into the game, let’s quickly talk about hardware. I’m playing on PC, a decade old PC actually, rocking an i7 67k with a gtx 1080. It was a bit of a gamble buying in, unsure of how well it’d run on my ancient hardware, but I am happy to say the game was very much playable from start to finish for me. All footage is captured on low settings with AMD FSR set to quality and my FPS sat in the 45-60 range through most of my playtime. It definitely dipped to the 30’s in some areas, but overall the game was perfectly playable and not too bad on the eyes. In fact if I wasn’t recording footage I would have locked the framerate to 30 and played it natively on medium settings. So because of all this, I can’t speak much on the games performance other than to say it didn’t give me any problems. I never crashed or experienced any major dips that negatively affected the gameplay and as far as graphical fidelity goes, the game still looked fine. If you’re on similar hardware or barely squeaking by the minimum requirements, I’d say so long as you’re okay with locking the framerate to 30 and or using FSR in performance mode you’d likely be able to play through the game without too much issue. Obviously if you’re looking for a more comprehensive breakdown of the games performance, there’s plenty of other reviews that got you covered.

Avowed takes place in Eora, a world that’s many lands are watched over by different gods, some loving and others not so much. Your homeland has been neglected by your god and so your people seek to find a new sense of purpose in the Living Lands, a hostile region in which the land itself seems to fight back against all efforts of colonization. Like any RPG, you were born into this world a godlike, an individual whose very soul has been touched by a god granting you unique abilities and physical features. As usual, this is seen as both a blessing and a curse as you find yourself a member of the kings court before you’re sent out as an envoy to the Living Lands, your mission to determine the cause of a spreading corruption that threatens the regions inhabitants. After you create your character in a serviceable, but not amazing character creator, your ship gets attacked and you find yourself ship wrecked on an island just off the Living Lands.

Now if you’re keeping track, you’ve probably already hit a trope bingo and during this entire opening sequence I was immediately concerned with how all of this was being presented. Exposition dumps over some slide shows aren’t all bad, but something about this opening felt really phoned in to me. The game was already knocking me out before it even started, especially with the jarring and seemingly random shifts from the unique art style to the cinematics that I felt didn’t mix well. Throw in that all of the exposition was literally fantasy tropes 101 and yeah, I already had some doubt, but hey it’s only the opening of the game, no sense in judging it so harshly based off the first 5 minutes.

Unfortunately the tone that the opening set kind of lasted throughout the entire main story for me. Now I don’t want to spoil anything, in fact I’m not gonna show anything passed the first two areas because the fun of these kinds of games comes from that genuine sense of wonder and surprise, something I don’t wish to rob you of. This makes it hard for me to fully express how I felt about the main story, but I can say this. Through the entire game nearly every single main quest is exposition dump after exposition dump, full of the most generic go here to do this or get strung across 3 NPC’s around the map trying to learn about the mcguffin objectives. It’s painfully slow burning and frankly uninteresting for large portions of the game. Exposition is fine when it feels like it’s leading up to something or expressed in a way that makes the player feel involved in the world.

Avowed instead insists on telling you everything about it’s world as if you’re sitting in a lecture, at times not even taking a breath as it drops made up fantasy jargon back to back. I’m sure for people that have played Pillars of Eternity, a lot of these terms and callbacks are clever winks and nods to something greater, but to everyone else it’s just noise. Many times I found myself just completely knocked out of any sense of immersion as the NPCs droned on and on with excessive dialog that barely gave me any real information towards the plot, instead guiding me to the next exposition marker on the map that’ll surely give me the answers I need. I found it absolutely exhausting and towards the mid point where the plot was pretty easily deciphered if you were paying any sort of attention, I found myself desperately racing towards the end, hoping for a random plot twist or something, anything interesting to happen. Sadly nothing I didn’t already see coming for hours happened and by the end it was the same trope filled cookie cutter plot I had feared from the start. Honestly I could live with a generic plot, but Avowed took itself so seriously and insisted on lecturing me about it’s world for hours on end instead of simply showing me from time to time that the narrative actively annoyed me and by the end was a bad experience.

All this actually touches on something I’ve felt in every Obsidian game I’ve played, they’re great at writing a world, but not presenting that world to the player. Half of what’s said about the Living Lands in the oppressive dialog is hardly conveyed when you’re out actually experiencing it yourself. They’re very much a tell don’t show developer and for me that’s always been their biggest flaw. I noticed it in The Outer Worlds, here and even Fallout New Vegas to an extent. Their dialog is always engaging, there’s no doubt about it and even here in Avowed I felt conversations were mostly written naturally and in engaging ways. However I never feel that what they’re telling me is actually expressed in the gameplay or the world itself when I’m out engaging with it. I’m told the Living Lands is this dangerous hostile place full of horrors and mysteries, but when I’m out in the world it’s just the same few enemy types scattered around the map in a very video game fashion. It creates this huge disconnect for me and as a result I feel myself constantly knocked out of any sense of immersion.

That immersion is further broken by the world design. Avowed is split into 4 large regions instead of one huge map, each region is fully explorable with it’s own zones to towns and dungeons. This in itself isn’t a problem, I don’t mind splitting the game up like this and in many ways could work in it’s favor. My issue with it is, they tried to replicate a huge open world by making every inch of the map overly dense, you literally cannot walk 10 feet without something to loot or fight. It’s not an exaggeration to say that you’ll often have no less than five things to loot nearby at all times, from the abundance of chests sometimes comically close to one another, static corpses, plants to harvest and objects to destroy. This sounds like a nitpick, but the game absolutely refuses to let you just breathe and take in the sights. There’s hardly a sense of wonder when exploring because you’re constantly stopping to look at a chest that’s often placed out in the open for no reason. The loot itself is usually the same exact set of bland upgrade materials too, further cheapening any sense of accomplishment when you do find one. After a few hours of play, it just feels like a collectathon with no real substance. I was constantly thinking back to games like Oblivion, Skyrim, Witcher 3, Cyberpunk, Elden Ring, Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, where exploration was a delight. Especially those last three titles that actually let the player breathe and wander around, with loot hidden off a beaten path instead of showering you with it constantly.

There’s also weird design decisions that feel like they serve only to check off a box, like having boarded walls to break down to reveal a chest, only it’s not like these walls are subtle or hidden, why even have them? Or these comically overused ability checks that require an element to destroy or activate. In the first area there’s like a hundred of these checks that require fire to remove, but your first companion has the skill to burn them down. In the opening tutorial you got a grimoire to cast a fire spell, plus the game showers you with consumables that can burn them down, so what exactly is the point of them being there in the first place? It feels so contrived and like a complete waste of time. Whenever you come across an inaccessible area like a boarded up door, there’s often several convenient holes in the wall that show you exactly where to go. Locked doors can often be lockpicked which is fine, but 9 times out of 10 the key is no joke 10 steps from the door. All of this combines into one of the most shallow exploration experiences I’ve had since swearing off Ubisoft titles and after the first few hours of play, you’ve seen all the games tricks and will find loot and pathways nearly blindfolded moving forward.

It’s a shame because from a level design perspective the world is actually a delight to traverse. Player movement feels tight and responsive, you can climb most obstacles and get to several areas you may think inaccessible with a little parkour problem solving. There’s also a great sense of verticality, giving you plenty of opportunities to run around rooftops and high ruins. Throughout my time I was pleasantly surprised with just how much I enjoyed running around and climbing everything, throw in the abundance of loot around every corner and the game almost starts to feel like a speedrun collector trial. It taps into that desire to simply do cool shit like making death defying leaps of faith while running around a town completing fast laps of a course you made up in your head. Definitely not something I was expecting from this kind of game going in, but was a very welcome surprise and definitely the highlight of my time with it.

Speaking on design, while I enjoyed the level design I cannot say the same for the design aesthetics. Personally I flat out dislike this games design and before you say it, no, this has nothing to do with playing it in potato mode. The actual design language is so off putting to me that I couldn’t help but constantly stop to analyze what the hell I was looking at. From main characters looking like an NPC from Oblivion to the design language of architecture heavily clashing with it’s surroundings, I was taken aback by how much I actively disliked what I was seeing. Part of it is from the overly dense maps, too many different areas are smashed together in nonsensical ways, especially within the towns or enemy encampments where several different real life cultural inspirations clash. You’ll often run 20 feet from a settlement to suddenly approach some spiked fences to encounter generic lizard people with a pet bear, that apparently live in basic straw or canvas huts. Turn the corner and they’ll be standing out in the open chilling, not really doing a damn thing.

They don’t even seem to live off these lands, nothing in their design reflects their environment, in fact, where the hell are they even getting the materials to craft their gear? I don’t see the straw they use for their huts anywhere, the birds whose feathers they use for their arrows and decorative pieces or the animals they hunt for leather hides. Why do their clay pots look the same as most other clay pots in the game? Where is all this lumber coming from to make the great walls they’ve erected throughout these lands? What even is their culture? I know there’s in game text to provide me with a long exposition dump about them, but whose their god? Why aren’t they creating shrines to pray and leave offerings at? This kind of stuff applies to everything you encounter out in the wild, sure the game may lecture you about how and why all my questions are answered, but it never once actually shows it. All these issues compound into the biggest complaint I have in that it all feels very video gamey and not at all like a living breathing world.

But hey that’s fine, it is a video game after all, so let’s look at what you’ll be spending most of your time engaging with, the combat. When looking at the combat, it’s clearly meant to be this tactful dance you’re expected to maneuver, weaving in and out of each encounter utilizing the unique kit you’ve put together. In practice it’s more like this clunky uninspired soulslike mod for Skyrim that’s still in alpha. It all stems from with how shallow and basic it is, to start you can attack, heavy attack, dodge back left or right, block and switch to a secondary loadout like a bow, wand and grimoire. The weapon types are what you’d expect, the standard fare with the grimoire being the most unique of the bunch. Skills and spells cost essence which is just mana while Dodging and attacking has you managing your stamina, which is where I feel they made their biggest mistake. It’s as if they thought simply adding a resource to manage was in itself enough to make it strategically engaging, but forgot to give us any meaningful enemy or attack variety to justify it’s existence in the first place. Sure we can dodge, but most enemies in the game have one or two attacks that are long telegraphed basic swings. This isn’t Elden Ring where you’re expected to manage your resources against an onslaught of unique spells and abilities, here even main bosses barely offer much more than a big red circle to dodge out of. It doesn’t help that the combat is almost as floaty as a bethesda game anyways, with attacks lacking any real impact most of the time. Enemies barely react to being hit unless you’ve built up the stagger meter and perform a pretty bad finisher animation. There’s some consumables like different grenades that apply a status effect or a bunch of food types that heal or buff you, but nothing is as interesting as say alchemy in The Witcher 3.

Perhaps whats even more disappointing is the embarrassingly generic skill tree that commits the sin of locking basic pieces of kit behind several skill points. Things like parrying, flat damage bonuses and shield bashing are locked behind skills. When you strip out all the stat stick or basic kit skills from the tree, there’s only a handful of active abilities left and they’re bangers like charge, shout, stealth, root and whirlwind. It’s so generic and uninspired that I was genuinely shocked the first time I opened it, immediately signaling this game was in trouble. The wizard tree fares a little better, but the way combat is set up it doesn’t feel good mixing melee with spell casting unless you’re going to commit to using a grimoire since you get a much larger boost for doing so. On the lower difficulties it almost doesn’t matter how you build your character, but on the higher ones combat is an absolute chore unless you commit your skills and resources to one straight forward build. I started on the highest difficulty, the path of the damned, with all the accessibility features like incoming attack prompts and all the auto locking stuff off to really feel what the combat sandbox had to offer. Well after about 10 hours I just couldn’t take it anymore, the combat is so shallow with skill progression as painfully slow as the narrative that I had to start bumping it lower just for the sake of my sanity.

You fight the same enemies over and over again, even when you get a new enemy type they’re nearly identical to the rest of them. There’s ranged enemies that stand in the back shooting projectiles you can barely see at you constantly, there’s the run at you and do one long telegraphed attack enemies, there’s the sprint at you and fall enemies, the one combo string then they’re tired enemies, a single projected area of effect enemies and of course enemies with a shield. That is it, there is no variety beyond these very basic archetypes. It’d be fine if there was more depth to the combat, but frankly it’s all about mashing, leaving yourself just enough stamina to dodge away from their one telegraphed attack, waiting for some stamina or mana regen and doing it over again. Skills and abilities don’t add enough variety to the mix, I mean seriously look at this shit. I can unlock shield bash, then drop 2 more points in and by level 5 it pushes enemies back further with more stun. Or this, my charge goes further with added stun. Or look I can slide into enemies, or slow time down while I aim or whirlwind like it’s still the early 2000’s and this is a unique ability. Seriously this shit is criminally generic and hardly changes how you engage with combat at all, it’s like this is from a team that’s never played an RPG before.

You do always have 2 companions with you each with their own skills you can level up, but they fall into the same generic categories as the rest. There’s not much synergy besides the obvious stuff like a tank, crowd controller or healer. There’s also no positional advantage in combat, you can’t backstab once engaged or flank a shielded foe, so once you get a successful rotation down you’ll basically be spamming that through every encounter. Playing a wizard is at least a bit more engaging simply because you’re likely squishier, requiring more positional awareness while you weave in and out regenerating mana and opening your grimoire to cast. While playing strictly as an archer or gunner is so brain dead with absolutely no unique active skills to utilize besides rooting enemies that I couldn’t imagine going through the entire game like that. I mostly stuck to being a generic 2 handed warrior, pumping my stamina stat so I could swing away and get combat over with as soon as possible.

Early on I was happy to see we could reset our stats for a cost and figured sweet I’ll try out a bunch of builds, but with the way the gear system works, if you’re on anything higher than normal you’ll be severely punished for drastically changing your loadout because of how upgrades function. Throughout the entire game you’ll forever be looting the same basic weapons of varying tiers of quality, each requiring ridiculous amounts of materials to upgrade further. You’ll quickly run into enemies that require a certain quality tier just to deal effective damage to them, essentially locking you out of encounters if you wasted your upgrade materials on a weapon you didn’t like or decided to respec into an entirely different play style. This design decision is absolutely baffling to me and feels like a complete untested after thought, it resembles the kind of bullshit you’d find in a free to play game that’s designed to suck your time dry. Playing on the higher difficulties really highlights this problem as you absolutely have to explore every inch of the game for those upgrade materials you’ll desperately need, god help you if you decide to change your build or spent your money on anything other than more materials. Unique items don’t fare much better, requiring a separate material to further enhance it’s enchantment, which by the way, all uniques in this game have similarly uninspired stats like, does fire damage, does more stun damage, increased critical damage and so on. It’s all just so boring with no meaningful build variety to speak of and by the end of the game I saw maybe 3 items with a unique effect.

If combat is going to be this basic then there’s no reason why the gear system couldn’t have been more randomized and free flowing. Let us apply enchantments to items, roll the useless stat stick abilities into the equipment so finding new gear felt rewarding and encouraged us to respec and try it out. Give us some crazy effects like we’d see in borderlands or shit man look at Diablo 2, a 20 year old game and learn what build variety through itemization actually looks like. At this point dare I say to even copy Diablo 3’s fluid skill system and let us change builds on the fly for free. This is basic stuff man and all this combined with the combat system solidified my dislike of the game as a whole.

Sometimes these games can live or die by their side quests, well I completed the first 2 areas in their entirety and can assure you the side quests are, you guessed it, the typical fetch quest drivel you’ve all done countless times in the past. The dialog for most of them doesn’t even really contribute much to the world, this isn’t The Witcher 3 where even simple fetch quests had fascinating well written characters holding them up, a lot of Avowed’s quests are bottom of the barrel slop. There’s a few standouts and I appreciated how completing some of them certain ways changed the outcomes of other quests or story beats, even discovering some quests before accepting them can lead to different outcomes. Most of them aren’t too drastic, but it’s nice that it’s accounted for. The same can be said for the actual dialog options, there’s plenty of opportunities to utilize your stat points in conversations, but not a whole lot of it is actually meaningful. Baldur’s Gate this is not and while there’s definitely some major decisions to make, the majority of your choices won’t amount to much more than a different line of dialog. There’s also a lack of many big set pieces or long reaching quest lines with a satisfying conclusion.

I don’t know man, I didn’t want to tear into the game this hard, but upon reflection there’s just far too many things holding it back. When I think of my list of positives, there’s really only that I enjoyed the parkour and mindlessly running around collecting shit. Not in an exploration is super rewarding way, but in a monkey brain is occupied by speed running way. Oh and that the first companion you get is Garrus, finally got to see what he’s up to after a decade of calibrating engines. Seriously, listening to Kai was one of the highlights of this game, but also upset me a bit since now I associate Garrus with some of the terrible companion dialog. These people do not shut up, constantly quipping and dropping exposition you didn’t ask for, it’s brutal. There’s a lot of other weird things too like the really poor voice in your head moments ripped straight from Baldurs Gate 3, the bonding at camp dialog also from Baldurs Gate 3, which hey why are there even camp locations on the map anyways? We can fast travel to them at nearly any point anyways and on top of that we can choose to return to the previous location or the camps location… so why not just make the camp an option from the menu and give us more fast travel points? You can also drop loot off at your camp directly from your menu… so tell me, why even have an encumbrance system in the first place? I appreciate the added quality of life, but let’s be real just remove the restriction you placed then, why take these half measures that don’t really make sense when you think about them. There’s more but I’ve already gone on for too long about this game.

While I’m sitting here writing this I realize that while I don’t think this is a terrible game, I’ve certainly written as if it was. The thing is, it’s just so overwhelmingly average with some really bad design decisions and personal grievances that try as I might, it’s hard to focus on the positives. I know this is an average game and that most people will probably enjoy it, even if it’s forgotten by next week. For me however there was far, far too much dead weight holding it back from being anything more than a below average experience on the whole. There’s far better games within the genre that I’d rather revisit or pickup on a steep discount due to their age and that’s what I’d recommend most of you do. When looking at media through a critical lens I ask myself a few simple things, was it worth my money? My time? Did it offer anything unique? Would I ever return to it? My immediate answer to all of those is a big no, but this game is on the gamepass and there’s a high chance that if you’re even remotely interested in it, you’re likely within the xbox ecosystem and thus probably have the gamepass already. To that I’d say, sure, just give it a try, what’s there to lose besides some bandwidth. If you’re thinking about picking up the game for full price as I did, then hell no this game is not worth it and I’m not even sure I’d recommend buying a month of gamepass for it. At the end of the day this game was simply not worth my time and so sadly, I do not recommend Avowed.