While it’s not as big as an RPG like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Avowed is still a massive evolution for the Pillars of Eternity franchise. That series gave us slow-paced, isometric CRPGs, while Avowed is a more action-packed first-person RPG set in the same universe. Having gone hands-on with its Gamescom build at an Xbox event in Los Angeles, I was relieved to see that Avowed still retains the core DNA of developer Obsidian Entertainment.
The Avowed quest I played sported beautiful visuals, had excellent writing, and felt faithful to the wider Pillars of Eternity franchise. Clearly, a lot of effort went into reinterpreting what a Pillars of Eternity game could be like when played from a different perspective and set in a never-before-explored area of Eora called The Living Lands. In an interview, art director Matthew Hansen explained how the team approached that opportunity.
“If you’ve played both Pillars 1 and Pillars 2, you’ll see that Deadfire is a more vibrant setting than the Dyrwood is, and we wanted to push that further with The Living Lands,” Hansen tells Digital Trends. “There are a lot of pretty bombastic visuals, but it’s all still rooted in reality like the Pillars games are.”
My hands-on demo of Avowed involved playing through one of its sidequests. Entertaining sidequests are an ever-present quality in the best RPGs, and so far, Avowed is checking all of the right boxes. The quest began as I entered a dungeon while looking for a lost expedition. These caverns immediately felt intimate and bespoke, offering an up-close-and-personal level of detail that you won’t get from the first two Pillars of Eternity games. I came away impressed by its visuals, which looked rougher in videos shown off earlier in the year. This more close-up perspective was a major design challenge for Obsidian, but the team embraced it according to Region director Berto Ritger.
“In a first- or third-person setting, you have to be very careful about sight lines and make sure that you draw people’s attention to things. You’ve got to cover everything, make it look good, and guide them subtly in the direction we want them to get,” Ritger tells Digital Trends.
Combat feels a lot more aggressive and action-focused. I played as a mage, constantly using my wand for magical attacks and casting spells from my grimoire. There are guns and swords for players who want to get even more aggressive with enemies, and you can dual-wield all of the one-handed weapons. Avowed has the best-feeling combat of any Obsidian Entertainment game I’ve played — at least based on the small chunk I’ve tried out. Thankfully, that didn’t come at the cost of what the studio is best at, as its narrative chops are still on full display.
My quest to find this expedition ultimately took me to a godlike oracle named Sargamis, who tasked me with finding a relic so he could make contact with a god that he felt abandoned him. While I eventually retrieved the relic and returned it to him, his god still didn’t respond. While this could have resulted in a fight, I managed to talk him down. Some jokes were spread throughout this quest, but it had a very poignant thematic core in its story about how feeling abandoned and not getting love reciprocated impacts us emotionally.
I had my worries about Avowed’s narrative because of how action-focused its trailers have been so far. That is why I was relieved to see a deep dialogue system tied with RPG stats like intelligence that is full of unique options that can permutate the narrative in surprising ways. Plus, for those coming to Avowed from Obsidian’s other games, a Pentiment-like glossary of important terminology can be pulled up at any time during dialogue.
There’s a lot of Avowed I still haven’t seen. It’s not a full-blown open-world game, but it has several densely packed regions full of intriguing locales and quests left for me to discover.
I’m interested to see how the choices I make in the main story and in sidequests like this impact the adventure in the long term. And apparently, some parts of Avowed are going to get really weird.
“We set it within The Living Lands because, even within the lore of Eora, that’s the wildest place,” Hansen teases. “We’ve got one level we’re not ready to talk about yet because it’s one of the last levels of the game, but it’s real weird and very fun. I’m excited for people to explore it because it’s more in the family of what you’ll see in terms of pushing the envelope of weird, as you saw with the Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire expansions.”
Avowed launches on PC and Xbox Series X/S on February 18, 2025.
