Avowed
First impression: wow, that opening cutscene after character creation is straight-up cinema.
Overall, Avowed is fantastic visually: on High settings + Ray Tracing + ‘Epic’ Reflections, it is a spectacularly beautiful game to look at, with Obsidian clearly putting in extensive work to ensure that the game’s visuals are uncompromised by the tradeoffs required for an open world environment. I particularly want to give credit to the rock textures, which are often neglected in other games (cough Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth) but are rendered fantastically here. Such striking visuals, however, do not compromise performance to the extent that I would expect: the above settings run on a Ryzen 7 7800X3D and RTX 3070 at 60 fps in Paradis, and 70+ fps in the wild open world, using DLSS Balanced (overriden with the latest transformer model to improve image stability and compensate for sometimes poor denoising) at 1440p. The CNN model used by the game by default does do a relatively good job, still, but on shadow, lighting, and global illumination settings lower than ‘Epic’ some noise artifacts are visible through the upscale, so whilst the transformer model is slower, I’d recommend it for image quality.
Character design is another strong suit of both Obsidian’s games in general, and certainly of Avowed; models are rendered exceptionally well, with good appreciation for subsurface scattering, speckling, and overall good presentation. Such models are not (unlike Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, for example) compromised by poor open-world lighting, either. I’m also a fan of the character creator, which has a strong selection of settings to make your character look as close to what you want as possible, including a plethora of makeup and face marking options, heterochromatic eye options, sufficiently many varied hair options that I didn’t feel I was lacking in choices, and some interesting choices for ‘Godlike features’. The Godlike features provide a nice disruption to the otherwise classical character appearance, though they can be visually disabled entirely. It doesn’t, however, break new ground in inclusion (most notably, body proportions (height, etc) are entirely governed by body type, not a separate control), but it does follow recent games in being more accommodating nevertheless. That all said, the animations used during - for example - dialogue are relatively stilted; it does not appear that the game used motion capture, instead falling back on traditional facial animation techniques. I think this is fine, personally: Obsidian have consistently used such an approach in the past, and I don’t regard mocap as a necessity for games with such a wide array of characters in particular. In any case, it’s certainly good enough to convey characters’ personalities and emotions, supporting the strong character design Obsidian is known for.
World exploration is categorically not Ubisoft-like: indeed, if I had to compare it to another game, I would regard the exploration as a variation on Elden Ring’s approach: the map starts out blank, and exploring unveils it; however, there’s a limited set of “map markers” (which are mostly just fast-travel beacons or camps, a la ‘Sites of Grace’), and finding locations of interest is a simple matter of running around and actually finding them - for example, maybe a group of enemies over there are guarding the door to a ruin, et cetera? Discovered points of interest don’t tend to add map markers either, though can lead to text being written on the map (such as “Godless Ruins”), helping you remember such areas in future. I’m a huge fan of the game’s exploration, as I think Obsidian has nailed it - much like my views on Elden Ring’s own exploration.
Combat is generally quite fun, though not quite as smooth or well-polished in my opinion as, say, a FromSoftware game: dodging, for example, is bound to the same key as jumping, but these are determined by which direction you’re moving (forwards will be a jump, whereas sideways or backwards will dodge instead). I think this would play better on controller, however the controlscheme mandates that attacking is with the triggers, which I don’t vibe with these days; given the lack of controller rebinds, this really makes controller a no-go for me. (This may not be an issue for you if you’re willing to remap through Steam, but I dislike mismatching button icons.) Beyond some unfortunate complaints about the input schemes, the feel of combat is fantastic: Obsidian has made eminently effective use of hitstops, time distortion, and appropriate sound effects to make melee combat an incredibly good experience, and spells are actually handled incredibly well! I played in third person (I’m generally more of a fan of third-person than first-person across the board for RPGs), and it felt fantastic: for an analogy, I’ve modded my Skyrim install over the years to rework its combat, as the basegame Skyrim combat is awful - but recent mods have actually resulted in some of the best combat (namely Modern Combat Overhaul, Precision, Poise, and Dodge - MCO), which Avowed is strongly reminiscent of; whilst Avowed’s animations are, in general, designed for a first-person perspective (and this is sometimes a little obvious, such as with the camera behaviour when opening chests), combat still feels great (and it doesn’t really hurt the gameplay overall). That is incredibly good, in my opinion. It’s just missing directional movement.
And finally, the writing is - in my opinion - somewhere between fine and fantastic: Avowed features some of the most interesting in-world writing I’ve seen in a while, and certainly more enjoyable to read overall than, say, Skyrim. Dialogue is also handled well; specifically, I maintain that dialogue should be appropriate within the context of the world, and who the player character is: in this case, the player character is an Imperial Envoy of the Aedyran Empire, and an “extension of the throne”[1] - this positioning would encourage people in a position of relative authority to provide context, background information and - from our perspective - lore. I think this is handled well, with such characters often doing so; I didn’t observe an excessive amount of forced loredumping, but did notice that - for example - the companions and Ambassador’s secretary have a deluge of dialogue options to ask for more information: this is a good way to allow the player to learn more than is naturally presented to them, in case they haven’t played a previous Pillars of Eternity game, and I note that Obsidian does make the responses appropriate to the character’s personality (for example, the secretary discusses matters from a clearly Aedyran stance, whereas Kai presents a more balanced view - albeit that of a layman). Where context is so innate to the world that it should be assumed knowledge - such as the existence of elves and dwarves, and high level context around those - I view that it does not make sense to have a character explain such to the player; Obsidian provides a healthy middle ground, allowing you to refer to a mini glossary mid-dialogue to learn or refresh your knowledge of specific in-world terms. All in all, I think the writing is rather good on the whole, and compromises are well-considered to ensure that the worldbuilding isn’t itself compromised in the pursuit of ensuring players understand the world they’re exploring.
TODO: Narrative / story
I have seen at least one external review comment on the game’s “lack of reactivity”, pointing to the fact that crime doesn’t really exist for the player, and thus picking up other people’s items is fine. I think the player being an extension of the Imperial Throne would imply that, in Paradis specifically (for example), the player would have effective diplomatic immunity (especially where the game’s events lead to the Aedyran Ambassador having the most authority). I’m unsure about for other cities, though other ingame events could also be considered to make people generally fearful of angering the player…
In any case, I think it’s acceptable for a game to betray the fact it’s a game; if I wanted reality, then I would go outside, and clearly roleplaying crime was not on Obsidian’s agenda. ↩