Avowed Review: Living up to the Pillars of a Phenomenal RPG

Before I started playing Avowed, I subconsciously slapped the "scrolls-like" tag on it. You know, those games that get invariably compared to something between Daggerfall and Skyrim as a touchstone to highlight certain features. Sword-and-sorcery high fantasy RPG? Check. Focus on first-person gameplay and exploration? Check. Pacing between tranquil moments of foraging in the greenery and terse combat with wicked blackguards? Double-check.

A good number of scrolls-likes (scrolls-lites?) are out there, from direct torch-bearers like Tainted Grail to whimsical departures like Lunacid. Yet, this tag is a disservice to both Skyrim and Avowed — their emphasis is on vastly different things.

What I presumed was a pocket-sized Elder Scrolls experience turned out to be a uniquely Obsidian-coded return to Eora that pays homage to the RPG classics but firmly plants its foot as a milestone affirmation of what truly defines the genre: choices and consequences.

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Avowed to solve Big Trouble in Little Eora, destined to get sidetracked

Somewhere in the distance, Aloth is still out there (Image via Sportskeeda || Obsidian Entertainment)

Avowed is set in Eora, an original world coined, chartered, and colored by Obsidian in Project Eternity in a bid to make CRPGs great again. This is a cross to bear as much as a boon to benefit from. Avowed carries it gracefully, extending the rich tapestry of Eora’s prefab world without straining the seams.

Newcomers to this world will find things explained to them with a handbook feature that can be consulted anytime in the middle of dialogues and cutscenes to get a quick summary of lore tidbits, fantasy unobtainium, and complex subjects.

To Obisidian’s great credit, Avowed strikes the perfect balance in how it expresses its world building. It doesn't do heavy-handed exposition dumps but also doesn't expect you to do prior homework in learning Eora or the Pillars games.

None of the events of Avowed are tied to the first two games in ways where it would not make sense in isolation. You don’t need to know about the extant pantheon of Eora, or the big plot twist at the end of the first game. But if you do know these things, it adds new dimensions to understanding certain plot points.

To accommodate this fresh start while maintaining continuity, Avowed takes place in a physically and metaphysically unchartered part of the world: The Living Lands to the far north. The premise is far more guided than the freeform beginning of the Pillars games: you're an Imperial envoy sent to the frontiers to investigate a medieval-fantasy Covid that turns people into mad mushroom zombies.

For King and Country, or none of those things

The size of some dungeons sneak up on you for a surprise reveal (Image via Sportskeeda || Obsidian Entertainment)

As the trusted agent of Imperial Aedyr, you are the avowed arbiter of the Emperor’s will. The hand-picked messenger of the king background may bring some flashbacks for Morrowind fans, and your very first step in Claviger’s Landing (right after a tutorial island) seems to be a visual nod to this from Obsidian. From there on out, Avowed also captures the freedom of role-play expression Morrowind allows you.

Keeping up with it, the Living Lands also plays the perfect canvas for you to paint said expressions. It is a powder-keg of geopolitical turmoil with independent petty kingdoms and a free (if lawless) frontier anxious about an impending Aedyrian imposition.

Pillars players will also find another familiar big bad, with Steel Garrote as the returning brand of Woedica-following zealots. If you so choose, said zealots can also be sided with. Herein lies the biggest strength of Avowed: you can be the emperor’s lapdog, a free North sympathizer, and different shades of grey in between.

Avowed may be seen as a spinoff more than the Pillars of Eternity 3 some would have hoped; nevertheless, it twines plot threads with big consequences for the world of Eora going forwards. It’s a quintessentially Pillars tale that retreads familiar themes — complete with politicking, backstabbing, grand plots, indigenous myths, and a mysterious benefactor backing you — but in a way that feels more canonically organic for our protagonist.

As much as it confines you to being an Aedyrian Godlike, Avowed fully designates you as the figurehead of an encroaching empire, standing on the point of intersection between various geopolitical (and supernatural) power struggles, and when your adventure is said and done, a natural mediator whose say is understandably important.

You get to decide the fates of the many factions and settlements you come across throughout the 60-hour-long campaign and seal the deal with a final impression in a kind-of-sort-of epilogue as one last hurrah for player agency.

The idea of player agency in storytelling is sometimes done dirty in these games. In some cases, it can become window-dressing to pick a banner between two, or bottled sidequests that let you pick one of a couple of endings, and then forgotten after the fact.

Avowed doesn't take any of these shortcuts. The world and people of Living Lands are a reactive bunch. The outcome of one quest can open or slam doors in others, seemingly self-contained choices can rewrite the fate of many. Avowed also doesn’t hold you back from making the wrong choices.

The Pillars universe is not a decidedly dark fantasy like the first two Dragon Age games, but Avowed still has serrated edges to the choices you need to make. Sometimes, you’re stuck between a rock and a hard place, and there’s no wriggling away with stat-check bypass mechanisms.

Where new AAA entries to legacy RPGs show a tendency to go toothless and sanitized, Avowed hardens up in pointed questions and hard decisions about the war, strife, the rule of law, and colonial assimilation, all under the existential threat of an inscrutable soul-plague. In such trying times, human systems of ethics are often challenged; Avowed is fierce in straining the envoy's role-played identity under the weight of this challenge.

Your reprieve from this is camping under the sky, where you convene with your travelling companions to get their bearings and their read on things. Companions are far more than just combat appendages — they're often important to progress quests and chime in between dialogue beats for quips, worldbuilding, and sometimes critical exposition. The party banter, conversely, mostly takes place in the camp, which means a lot of it can be missed with the regular gameplay loop.

If you wanna be my patron-god, you gotta get with my friends (Image via Sportskeeda || Obsidian Entertainment)

In fact, there’s a lot you can miss in one Avowed playthrough. There’s a good dose of marked quests, but one can easily overlook the unmarked side-content. Obsidian makes unabashed use of the age-old environmental storytelling trick through plaques, books, and letters forgotten in the wilds, and dossiers tucked away in corner table-tops, but a lot is also told through completely inconsequential NPCs you wouldn’t think of talking to.

No speech balloons or objective pointers highlight their untold story. There’s not too many of these — not all characters are lining up to spin you a new tale, but there’s enough to make the Living Lands truly alive as the wayward home of misfits and oddballs.

So…what kind of a game is Avowed?

Of course there are treasure maps, what did you expect? (Image via Sportskeeda || Obsidian Entertainment)

For many who will pick it up as a free Game Pass offering, this is the question. The answer is a (sort-of) open-world action RPG with a simplified mechanical core, and a big stress on exploration.

The way the game structures its world into various chapters is most comparable to the Dragon Age games. Obsidian, doing its sparse marketing for Avowed, were adamant in calling it open-zone and not open-world.

But after trying to comb through it all, I find it open-world enough for me. Despite the lack of emergent encounters, it's easy to get sidetracked in the Living Lands. Your journey takes you through a handful of these diverse open-zone biomes, each of them the size of a Skyrim hold, and packed to the brim with secrets, bosses, and unique trinket collectathons to tend to.

Verily, there’s so much hidden treasure and secret stash to find that a few hours and some operant conditioning later, you'll be actively sniffing out a distinct twinkling that gets progressively louder as you’re nearing a loot stash. Other than coins to fatten your coffer, the main reward you get for exploration is unique equipment, as well as the material needed to upgrade them.

And you do need a lot of upgrading. Avowed has a de-leveled world, but it doesn’t assign levels to enemies. Instead, its approach is to categorize them by Quality tier, which indicates the recommended tier of equipment to take them on. Your character level plays no part in this. Instead, the burden falls on to your equipment’s upgrade level (conveniently color-coded as you progress through the break-points).

Instead of predefined classes, Avowed has a classless system where you can respec very cheaply on the run to try out different builds and see what kind of playstyle works for you. The big operational cost of these respecs is swapping equipment, as you don’t want to sink too much upgrade material into a weapon you don’t want to use later.

To alleviate this resource-commitment anxiety, all the unique equipment in Avowed scales to the upgrade level of your currently equipped weapon when you find them. The signal is clear with this quality-of-life feature: Avowed wants you to experiment with its classless system to try out as many combinations as you want.

Unfortunately, between this charitable allowance of respecing and the limited choice of variety, Avowed doesn't fulfil many class fantasies if you're coming from Pillars of Eternity games. There’s several interesting class niches the developers thought wouldn’t translate very well from a RTwP CRPG to a first-person action game, so it sticks to the basics.

Returning to the wheel without reinventing it

There's many ways to yeet other than kicking (Image via Sportskeeda || Obsidian Entertainment)

The Pillars games made their own DnD mock-up system from the ground up, while Avowed only takes a highly caramelized extract from it. The tradeoff means you don’t get to play a shapeshifting Druid, a mind-bending Cipher, or the fan-favourite Chanter.

Instead, all you get are different abilities partitioned into three broad classes - Fighter, Ranger, and Wizard. These gel together for a multiclassing approach more than you’d expect. The game actually nudges you toward it. If you want to play a shield-brandishing pure tank, you will have to pick up the parry from the Ranger tree rather than sticking to Fighter.

All classes can do a one-level dip into pocket stealth gameplay with the Shadowing Beyond skill, and there’s no downsides or disadvantages the game imposes for it. Just like that, your wizard can transition into a shadow-mage, your barbarian into a guerilla commando.

The effect is a very accessible, streamlined game which makes it easy to make your own homebrew class. As long as you have the right upgrade levels on your equipment, almost any Frankenstein build can get the job done.

In a different context, gate-keeping encounters behind upgrade levels would be a big sore spot. Same as The Witcher 3, Skulls next to an enemy’s name means you have an artificially imposed handicap on damage and survivability. But the system is just functional enough as a yardstick to challenge your build-crafting theories because all the other combat tools are fun enough to offset it.

Fun is put on the forefront with Avowed combat. Spellcasting has a stylized flourish as its main hook, and the arsenal of highly interesting and diverse spells you unlock keeps things interesting. Melee gameplay, similarly, has a good degree of oomph, with great hit feedback, a functional dash/dodge system, and an adequately punishing stagger system to incentivize it.

Between meaningfully different weapon types, a swift dodge, and a highly satisfying block and parry system, Avowed presents some of the best first-person combat. It takes cues from a lot of visionary games in this domain — from Dishonored to Darktide — and weaves them into a cohesive system that is easy to pick up, but provides deceptive depth.

In the harder difficulties, hybrid builds in this game provide some of the best first-person combat I have experienced in any RPG, with precipitate challenges and various tools to tackle them.

My only gripe with it all is third-person animations. It has the difficult task of keeping full parity with the first-person moveset for balance reasons, but the movement feels particularly janky. Avowed has the goofiest sprinting animation I’ve seen in a long time for a AAA game, and its overtuned inertia makes you drift like a car with bad handling. The combat animations felt overall serviceable if simple, but this floaty movement made the third-person combat unplayable for me.

Thankfully, the world of Avowed is meant to be experienced in first-person. When you’re not fending off xaurips, outlaws, and various agents of the hostile wildlife, you're out foraging for berries and mushrooms on your wayside. A lot of the gameplay loop feels like a happy cross-breed between Far Cry 3 and Skyrim. I make this statement in a positive light — why fix it if it ain’t broke?

It doesn’t, of course, have the immersive sim aspect of scrolls-likes. Avowed steers clear of the immersion territory where KCD2 rules; instead, it is self-aware about its scope and the kind of game it is.

It's not a Skyrim-killer, nor is it a CRPG brought to the first-person perspective. It distils the gameplay elements to its bare minimum products — a cooking system with thirty-odd recipes, an ability wheel similar to Dragon Age: The Veilguard, a crafting system with intuitive upgrade materials, and all the basics of fluid action combat.

With this, Obsidian has managed to concoct something greater than the sum of its parts, and something much more complete than their original systems of Outer Worlds. Console gamers will have a grand time with it, experiencing the best of both worlds in what modern RPGs have to offer.

The artificial difficulty problem

The more seasoned Pillar-heads and build-crafting junkies might need to curb their expectations, as this distillate sacrifices complexity to put the focus on fun. The simplified framework of Avowed does not have enough variety to fuel multiple playthroughs — certainly not as many runs as its branching story paths warrant.

The combat mechanics are solid and fun, and even the switch to a classless system proves much more sufficient than expected. The problem is a lack of flavorful enemy encounters. Over repeat playthroughs, the challenge becomes tedium, as encounter design resorts too often to drab zerg-rushes and ambushes with the same three (or fewer) enemy archetypes.

Bounties and bosses often feel like missed opportunities, as they tend to get by on brawn and damage rather than throwing surprise tricks and proper boss mechanics at you. With my ongoing second playthrough, I often feel the urge to turn the difficulty down to cruise through it to get to the really good part of Avowed (the story beats).

The great leap from Infinity to Unreal is no easy feat

This is the greatest swamp-draining campaign of all time (Image via Sportskeeda || Obsidian Entertainment)

Avowed had the deceptively tall order of 3D-fying the distinct art and tone of the Pillars games. In my view, it has succeeded within the limited bounds of Unreal Engine (I find most Unreal Engine games look too similar).

The colors feel a little off, the hues a tad too vibrant, the corners a little too dark. I diagnose this as a flaw in the typical Unreal Engine lighting setup. The Living Lands has some very memorably iconic landmarks, but some forgettable midlands featured prominently in the second half make for an overall hit-or-miss experience.

It’s perhaps subjective and not everyone will feel the same way about this, but barring the second area, Avowed cannot get away from the visual fatigue of UE5 homogeneity. This is not to sleight the art direction, though. When it hits the right notes, the world of Avowed bobs gracefully between rustic bluffs and whimsical high-fantasy.

The swampy wilds and quasi-solarpunk settlements of Emerald Stairs, the second area, arguably represents the best-case scenarios where Avowed showcases the most visual personality. It's quite ironic, because these are permanently dull, cloudy wetlands where the sun rarely shines through. And therein lies the true strength of Avowed: turning even the uninteresting into something extraordinarily compelling.

The verdict

Patrolling the Shatterscarp makes you wish for a volcanic winter (Image via Obsidian Entertainment)

In some spots, Avowed shows its edge of being less than a full-on AAA studio product. The vast majority of generic human NPCs use barely touched-up variants of the same face templates that you get in the character creation. More often than not, they become the missing link between comically plastic Outer World characters and what a medieval fantasy Pixar movie looks like in our collective imagination.

Yet, their lively animations and charming writing far more than make up for this divisive design choice and immersion-breaking template repitition. For every little flaw I could nitpick in Avowed, it abundantly compensated by delivering in departments that define the strengths of the RPG genre.

This game is touched by the same magic that made Fallout New Vegas a miraculously good cult classic cobbled together in a frighteningly short amount of time. With Avowed, of course, the development has been ongoing for nearly seven years. Regardless, there are some palpable signs of compromised concepts on the altar of budget and development pivots, and regardless, the game is phenomenally good despite said cut corners.

I’ll finish this by recounting what can be considered some very mild spoilers. In an unmistakable parallel to Baldur’s Gate 3, some sort of guardian figure beckons you and charts your journey when you first hit the shores of the Living Lands. This disembodied voice in your head visits you in your dream every so often when you sleep after camping. Instead of merely giving you further quests for main story momentum, the voice asks you about your actions, learns from them, and grows from them.

Your mysterious benefactor is your Pokemon to train, and the chaotic world of the Living Lands is yours to tame or set free.

Avowed is a masterclass in making a world that remembers, and a story that moulds itself to your footfalls, and yet remains equally compelling all the way through. In doing so, it rises beyond all of its shortcomings, and with its release, the pantheon of role-playing games have gained a new God — one that’s here to stay.