Can you romance companions in Avowed?

With Avowed's release date narrowly following Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, some are eyeing the possibility of one big feature: romance. Unfortunately, the very simple and straightforward answer is no. There is no way to romance companions, or any character for that matter, in Avowed.

The most you get is some borderline flirtatious dialogue responses in some places, but these are just there for writing flavor, and lead to nothing.

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Why doesn't Avowed have romance options?

Avowed does have some romantic subplots, but you just aren't a part of them (Image via Obsidian Entertainment)

Romance is slowly starting to become an integral part of what we expect from the traditional adventure RPG genre. Rather than a cool side-activity, it has taken up a place of centrality in their narratives — The Witcher 3 (2015) and Baldur's Gate 3 (2023), to name the biggest examples. Last year's Dragon's Dogma II, or the very recent Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, proudly sticks to the tradition.

Avowed, however, is a departure from Pillars of Eternity II in that regard. To long-term Obsidian Entertainment fans, this does not come as a big surprise. They are in fact known for their reluctance to incorporate romance in their games, and Pillars of Eternity II was actually the exception in that regard.

This absence of romance is something of a studio tradition in Obsidian Entertainment, who continue to flout the trend of romance in RPGs. A very early example of this anti-romance stance can be found in one 2006 forum post from Obsidian studio design director Josh Sawyer, where he explained his trepidation against writing romance as some gamified flavor of life in video games. Too often, he says, romance goes down the route of "fantasy indulgence" and "gross pandering", which ends up diminishing characterization.

Admittedly, Josh Sawyer made this comment in a bygone era of video games where raunchy and surface-level romance as a gimmick was far more common in RPGs than the deeper interactions of Baldur's Gate 3. Pillars of Eternity II did, after all, end up caving in on that front.

Game Director Carrie Patel has previously gone on the record to confirm that Avowed won't have a romance. This is not due to some hardline studio-wide stance, but simply because Avowed does not have the right amount of scope to do it right.

So, regardless of the risque comments that your Orlan companion resorts to quite frequently, Avowed intentionally does not have any romance options.