Avowed launches on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, and PC sometime this fall, and will join the games coming to Game Pass when it launches. We’re still some time away from seeing it launch, so we’re yet to see the Avowed achievements, but you can be sure that we’ll let you know when they arrive.
“Welcome to the Living Lands, a mysterious island filled with adventure and danger. Set in the fictional world of Eora that was first introduced to players in the Pillars of Eternity franchise, Avowed is a first-person fantasy action RPG from the award-winning team at Obsidian Entertainment,” the game’s description reads. “You are the envoy of Aedyr, a distant land, sent to investigate rumors of a spreading plague throughout the Living Lands — an island full of mysteries and secrets, danger and adventure, choices and consequences, and untamed wilderness. You discover a personal connection to the Living Lands and an ancient secret that threatens to destroy everything. Can you save this unknown frontier and your soul from the forces threatening to tear them asunder?”
The new deep dive with Xbox Wire explores the same region we saw during Xbox’s Developer Direct, Shatterscarp, which is just one of several diverse biomes we’ll explore in Avowed. It’s an open-zone game, and Gameplay director Gabe Paramo says that the zones are “comparable to The Outer Worlds areas on the larger side, and [with] multiple paths essentially to tackle combat situations.” The area explored during the deep dive is “absolutely missable” as well, so players could end up having differing experiences as they work through the game.
“Discoverability and letting players be the authors of their own experience is obviously very important to us,” game director Carrie Patel says. “So, the content you’re seeing here, the quest you’re encountering, the little stories and nuggets of adventures you’re finding — that’s really for players who go out and seek it out.”
The discoverability of the world is just one part of Obsidian’s “player-centric approach to role-play,” which feeds into Obsidian’s “your worlds, your way” style. “The way we really approach consequence and choice is giving players the opportunities to define who they are in this world,” Patel says. “how they want to behave – what fantasy, what challenges they want to undertake.”
As with the best Xbox RPGs, Avowed gives us control over our character’s build, such as we’ve seen with the weapon loadout system, but Obsidian has confirmed that skill trees will be featured too. We’ll likely need to change our loadouts frequently to adapt to various combat situations and make use of the elemental system attached to many weapons. Avowed won’t feature classes, and instead gives you the freedom to build your own skillset while adventuring, many of which have been pulled from the Pillars of Eternity universe, as well as a respect system to change things up.
“We wanted to be able to grab as many abilities from the trees as possible — and categorize them a little bit differently so that the player doesn‘t feel locked into a single choice at the start of the game,” Paramo says. “They can mix and match between different abilities to get some variety. You can commit to being a fighter, but it’s not an enforced class setup.”
Avowed is a single-player game, but we’ll not be left wandering The Living Lands on our lonesome, as a companion system will offer us AI friends to adventure with. “They all have deep ties to different regions of the Living Lands, and they all have their own personal reasons for wanting to ally with the player and help them resolve the big conflicts that you’re encountering over the course of the game” Patel says. “They’re your allies — in some ways your advisors, your local guides. They provide a lot of additional commentary and context that reveals something about their character, but also about the corner of the world you’re exploring.”
The news that a skill system will be in place is great to hear, but many of the questions I have about Avowed still remain unanswered. Combat still looks stiff, and we’re yet to learn about cosmetic character customization, but I’m hooked on the choice-driven gameplay Obsidian is going for. We’ll let you know when more information is revealed.
