Avowed feels like a fun fantasy spinoff for fans of The Outer Worlds

Would you give a dying virgin a healing potion? This was the first moral quandary presented during my hands-on time with Avowed, Obsidian’s upcoming first-person RPG set in the Pillars of Eternity universe. Caedmon — a member of the missing Aedyran Expedition Team I was tracking — was complaining about the inhumanity of his approaching doom, given that he’d “never even touched a girl.” Out of all the dialogue options, the most amusing involved asking my scaly cerulean companion Kai to “help” Caedmon with his predicament, which led to some chortle-worthy protestation. If I gave Caedmon the healing potion, he’d offer some handy tidbits about the rest of the mission — and if I refused, he’d slump to the floor, and I’d be able to loot a powerful elemental resistance ring from his unsullied corpse. 

During my first playthrough of this demo dungeon, I backed out of the conversation and immediately lobbed a grenade at Caedmon. I figured it was more humane to put him out of his misery. However, like the other NPC I encountered in the demo, Caedmon was immortal in open play, shielded from a player’s intrusive thoughts or investigative foreknowledge, at least before a scripted dialogue decision. “I know it’s something that we’ve allowed in a lot of our previous games, but it’s also something that becomes a very expensive design decision,” said Carrie Patel, game director on Avowed. “Because in every single quest, every single piece of content, you’re always asking, ‘What happens if the player runs in here and [attacks] everything?’ And in a lot of cases where we often see players do that, it’s either an accident that they reload for, or it’s a third playthrough, like ‘I just kind of wanna see what happens.’ And those things are powerful and valuable, but we wanted to make sure that we were delivering on that core experience of the game.”

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At least in that sense, Avowed is not a return to the halcyon systemic depth of something like Fallout: New Vegas. Instead, it played like a fun, fantasy spin on The Outer Worlds, a sharply written but streamlined RPG that I ultimately found quite forgettable. 

Thankfully, there was still plenty to like about the Avowed demo once I accepted it for what it was and let go of my rose-tinted desire for what it could be. First of all, it was gorgeous. The demo opened with a blooming cavern vista, where fungal growths neighbored carved stone structures that flecked the rocky ceiling like authored stalactites. Instinctively, Kai puttered ahead and peered into the murky abyss, issuing a remark about the cavern’s grandeur.

I appreciated all of the steampunk-adjacent trappings I saw in Avowed, down to the bits of discarded ephemera, like wooden housings for glowing salt rock lamps. Face models were impressive, too, showcasing pockmarks on poor Caedmon’s skin and, later, the reflective golden dome of a 630-year-old oracle who was hell-bent on reincarnating a Once-Shining God. “One of the big touchstones of the [Pillars of Eternity] world is it’s a setting where reincarnation is real,” said Patel. “Every living thing has a soul, and on death, those souls go back into the Adra, into the center of the world, and come out and populate new souls. And that cycle, for centuries, has been controlled by the gods.”

But let’s rewind before we dig into the story at large and talk about how Avowed feels to play. First came the stealth mechanics, introduced as part of a light-touch combat tutorial. After skulking in the dark, I backstabbed a high fantasy Halo Jackal with a divine dagger as they dawdled carelessly in the half-light. Soon after came a full-blown encounter fronted by a family of spiders. The combat system in Avowed is an interesting beast. First-person melee and spellcasting often has a bit of jank to it, but Obsidian landed on something distinctly above-average.

Avowed‘s combat felt far less clunky than it looked during June’s Xbox Showcase. There’s a slight but satisfying slowdown when you strike an enemy, as well as Destiny-style damage numbers and handy diamond headshot targets baked into the UI for rangers, evocative of Ace Combat. Enemies also boast a stun meter as well as a health bar, and you can dole out a slo-mo synced attack that deals extra damage and knockback. You’ve got grenades on the right bumper and a spell wheel you can pull up to commit magic abilities or command your companion to perform a daring leap into the midst of an encounter.

I mixed and matched across Barbarian, Mage, and Ranger, wielding a wand and a pistol for some time, but I ultimately gravitated toward a Spellblade Grimoire setup. With this loadout, I could pull LT and tap the face buttons to activate a defensive buff or summon spectral weaponry, such as an icy spear or a massive staff that would ragdoll my enemies into the echoing cavern hollows. It felt like playing every class in the game at once, though Avowed is opting for a respec-friendly classless approach anyway, where you aren’t punished for the weapons you favor. I had another grimoire in my locker to swap to in combat, offering more standard elemental skills, like a bouncing electric bolt and a bubbling mist of deadly corrosion. The particle effects were dazzling, with believably smoky fire emanating from my protagonist’s palms.

Enemy variety was decent, and there were a few occasions where I had to strategically focus on a healer to untap the health bar of a more dangerous close-quarters opponent. Regardless, I still beat the demo’s skeleton miniboss in a deeply ungratifying fashion by melting the “Godless Executioner” with a flurry of hand grenades. I felt slightly let down by the level of environmental reactivity in Avowed — there were dangling pots, but I couldn’t shoot them to create oil spills, and my arrows didn’t catch on fire if I held them over a cauldron of flame. I was not expecting Tears of the Kingdom-level nuance, but I guess I was left yearning for a unique dimension to Avowed‘s combat that would distinguish it from peers in the genre. “It’s not going to be a fully systemic game, like a Breath of the Wild,” Patel said. “But you can burn away certain barriers, and there are some fun moments where you can freeze ice platforms to reach locations that you can’t otherwise reach.”

As the story goes, our protagonist is an envoy of the Aedyr Empire who sails to a frontier called the Living Lands to investigate a mysterious spiritual plague called The Dreamscourge. The Dreamscourge enthralls its subjects with a unique and terrifying madness, coating them in violent fungal growths. From what I could infer from the demo’s dialogue and menus, the protagonist has a mysterious voice in their head and coral-like protrusions lurching from their eyebrows and hair — and they’re trying to figure out the patron deity it could connect to. “Your growths are the result of being a Godlike of an unknown god,” Patel said. Per the Pillars of Eternity wiki, Godlikes are blessed by the gods before birth, resulting in mystical powers and unique physical aspects like “aberrant head shapes,” which would explain our hero’s busy bonce. When I enquired further, Patel said that finding out the god you’re aligned to is something you will “explore over the course of the game.” Obsidian hasn’t explored or really talked about a potential new game plus, but there won’t be any open exploration after you finish — Avowed will feature a clear point of no return. 

The Dreamscourge is an eerie New Weird concept that I’m excited to see Obsidian expand on, especially with the studio’s pedigree for world-building. Speaking of which, it’s important to clarify that Avowed will not be open-world and will instead offer a series of interconnected areas. “One thing that we found with The Outer Worlds is that we could make a really strong RPG experience using these open zones,” Patel said. “And we could use that to give each location a very clear character and its own internal story and also to help the player make sense of the world and their progress through it.”

In Avowed‘s “open zones” there’ll be encounters and overland points of interest like ruins and towers, as well as settlements and dungeons, like the one I found myself in during the Gamescom demo. Players will follow a critical path through these zones, but there’ll also be jumping-off points for side quests and ancillary content. “Following that structure allows us to tier up the difficulty as the player moves through the regions, balancing the enemies and the gear you’re getting from moment to moment, and tell a consistently escalating story,” Patel said. I didn’t encounter many memorable investigative opportunities during the demo, but I was told there’ll be plenty of environmental storytelling in the rest of Avowed so that players can build their understanding of the Living Lands beyond the confines of dialogue and narrative. 

If players find Adra Pillars in an open zone, they can set up a party camp, described by Patel as a “roving home base” where they can rest, upgrade, and enchant their gear, craft food items, and get to know their companions.

You won’t be able to romance your companions in Avowed, a decision made by Obsidian to prioritize developing their backstories. “That allowed us to build on these companions as people who have roots and relationships outside of the party,” Patel said. “One really cool thing in Yatzli’s story is that she has a very committed relationship outside of the party, and so hearing her talk about that, and kind of reconcile her future and her ambitions with her home life… just really kind of having her heart in two places at once is, I think, really relatable.” 

My concern for Avowed stems from the environment it’s spawning into, especially in the wake of an uncompromising genre-definer like Baldur’s Gate 3, which delivered a cast of characters that fans won’t forget in a hurry. Players have very recently experienced tabletop levels of role-playing depth, so what makes Avowed special, beyond the obvious RPG pedigree of the studio making it? Patel said that companion-related storytelling has been a considerable focus for Obsidian, and it’s easily the part of the game I’m most excited about. I’m keen to go on more adventures with Kai, whose sarcastic one-liners brought refreshing levity to the oracle’s jargon-heavy lore dumps. “I’ve done the majority of Kai’s writing — there’s a real story of regret and loss at the center of his personal journey,” Patel said. “Beneath all of this banter and jovial exterior, there’s a lot of pain that he slowly unearths, and hearing the way he performed a lot of those lines and the vulnerability he brought to them was incredible.”

Like in Pentiment, you can pull up definitions for lore-related words during conversations in Avowed, which will be helpful for those who haven’t played previous Pillars games — I counted 11 gods to chew on in the in-game Cyclopedia. I’m by no means averse to reading in my RPGs (I was more than happy to imbibe Disco Elysium‘s million-word script), but there were a ton of one-page diary entries to pick through in my Avowed demo, and not all of them held my attention. The time pressure of my 50-minute appointment has to be considered here, though. I just hope Avowed‘s opening does enough to ground me in the setting so I can better appreciate the game’s abundance of prose.