Avowed First Impressions

A solid, yet middling role-playing experience

A look at some of the companions you can recruit, but I can only remember Kai's name, the blue guy in the back

Avowed is the latest RPG from genre-veterans Obsidian Entertainment, makers of titles such as Fallout: New Vegas, Pillars of Eternity, Tyranny, The Outer Worlds, Pentiment, and many more. It released on February 18th, 2025 to "generally favorable" reviews according to its Wikipedia page. The internet seems very divided on it, as per usual, so I'll throw yet another opinion into the void.

You begin Avowed as an envoy of the Aedyran Empire, sent into the Living Lands to investigate a plague called the Dreamscourge, which is threatening the continent. Your character also happens to be a godlike, a person who has a special connection to one of the world's many divine figures. I had no idea that this game was set in the same world as Pillars of Eternity. I didn't follow its development that much but looking back it seems like it was stated that you wouldn't really need to play those titles to get into this one, but I'm not so sure.

A fiery mountain area that I never got to yet. You can see it on the world map however

Even the fact that the game has a unique title seems to double down on the separation from that series, but it feels a little disingenuous. It may not be directly connected to the plot of those titles but it certainly builds upon that world's lore. When engaging in dialogue, you can pop open a little dictionary to read summaries of any proper nouns that come up, which is immensely useful and should be a feature standard in all RPGs.

As someone with basically no Pillars knowledge, I found myself using this in almost every conversation. And while it does help, it also bogs down some already long conversations with even more dense information. All of this serves to say that while the developers do give you the tools to figure things out on your own without any prior knowledge, I think some is required to smooth out the experience.

Some of the weird mutations you can place on your character as a "godlike"

For those that do possess the knowledge and are Pillars fans, there is definitely volumes of new lore to chew on, and I think those people will be very happy. As for me, what is there seems well written and probably interesting, I just didn't find myself engaging with it when I was still struggling to understand how animancers, adra, and souls work in this world. It gets very metaphysical and abstract but is central to how things were unfolding in the story.

You begin with a fairly average character creator that seemed to offer just enough customization to make the envoy your own but nothing we haven't seen before. Being a godlike manifests itself through some weird physical features you can choose from, and something I appreciate is that they let you hide them on your appearance if you wish. That way you still get the story benefits but don't have to see it yourself, as they were weird things like mushrooms on your head and fauna sprouting out of your face that I just didn't want to look at.

Engaging in dialogue. You can see the character's background coming into play as an option

Part of building your character is picking an origin and distributing attribute points. These are your usual fair, with stats like might affecting damage, constitution reflecting health, dexterity for attack speed, and so on. Picking an origin gives you a default spread, but you can then reallocate completely as you see fit. This is great for roleplaying, as for example, the War Hero origin is geared towards a physical, tanky, build but if you want that backstory and are playing a pure mage, you can still do that.

In my opinion, the combat itself is where the game shines. It feels way more arcadey, with quick movement and involved battles that are made all the more satisfying thanks to the punchy sound design. You are given an ability wheel similar to that from Mass Effect which lets you call on your companion's powers, drink potions, and cast your own spells without slowing down the flow of a fight. While this is all well and good, I find the actual abilities you can pick up very boring.

A look at the inventory and menu system. It's fairly straightforward and gets the job done

There are three main skill trees for you to invest in: fighter, geared towards heavy weaponry, ranger for stealth and quick movement, and wizard, for all the magic. Each level of the tree has one active power and a slew of passives, meaning each one has only four or five new castable abilities to pick. There are a few that are interesting, but this means that it is largely one of those RPGs where you are deciding whether you want better damage with maces or maybe faster stamina regen while blocking.

Respecing is made incredibly easy, being accessible on the skill menu at any time for a minuscule amount of gold. This is always great as it encourages playing around with different builds, which I did a lot. I started off focusing on axes but after finding a cool new grimoire (equippable books that give you new magic spells to cast), I ended up rebuilding as caster-focused. In theory this should always keep things fresh, but it also highlights one of my biggest problems with this game, which is the loot system.

The skill trees: Squares represent active abilities and circles are passives. You can see the disparity

As you explore in most open-world games, you will come across new pieces of equipment with higher stats and unique abilities, and sometimes there are ways to upgrade and improve this equipment through resources. In Avowed, power scaling seems heavily tied to your equipment, but I almost never found new unique gear while exploring. This could just be my experience in the world, but at the end of every dungeon or every chest that I discovered, I would almost always get exclusively upgrade materials.

What this feels like to me is that it is designed around finding one weapon to center your build on for the whole game and improve it as you go. It doesn't need to be a loot extravaganza like Borderlands, but something I love about RPGs is discovering a hidden ruin, fighting your way to the end, and finding a special sword. This isn't to say it never happened, but it was shockingly few and far between.

Dual wielding pistols, one of many weapon combinations you can try out

It stands out when you're given so much flexibility with your skills and then feel locked to a certain weapon. I had picked an axe build at first because I found a unique one with frost powers, but I never came across a single other axe that wasn't the common one. I also devoted so many materials to it that when I did switch over to magic, I couldn't afford those improvements.

Exploration as a whole is another high point of Avowed. The world is broken into four smaller zones as opposed to one singular world, and there is so much to find. Every corner feels dense with points of interest and quests to discover. Most of these quests that I tried boil down to the usual RPG affairs like fetching items and clearing certain areas. They get the job done but none of them were particularly memorable.

Attacking a Xaurip, the race of lizards, with an axe

I made it through to the third zone before I decided to stop playing, and I'm not sure if I'm going to go back to it or not. By this point in the game, the loop started to feel a bit repetitive to me and I didn't feel incentivized to explore another area. The main quest was interesting enough that I was going to just focus on that path, however one of the central mysteries that I was curious about got resolved by this point, and I kind of lost the desire to see that to the end.

Something else I didn't mention was how lifeless the world feels despite its density. Npcs are largely stationary, nobody can be attacked, quest givers just stand in place waiting, and even the mobs in the world seem to be standing around specific spawn points waiting for you to approach. I heard that it was originally going to be a multiplayer game before switching, and that makes complete sense. Nothing feels organic in the world because it was probably supposed to serve as a backdrop for you and other players to never look that closely at.

A pillar of adra, some kind of important material in the world somehow involving souls

The game itself has gorgeous visuals, and I have to admit that it might be the best AAA use of Unreal Engine 5 that I have seen. It runs pretty fine, and other than shader compilation upon opening the game, it was stutter free and didn't have any of the trappings that UE5 has been known for. I still think the engine needs a ton of work, but it goes to show that a team who knows how to utilize the tools properly can avoid those famous shortcomings.

Avowed is a weird one for me because on the surface it should check all of my boxes, and I think a lot of its individual pieces are great. Like I said, the combat is a ton of fun, the world is full of detailed stuff to explore, and I think the story is rather interesting. When it all gets put together though, something about it feels disjointed.

One of the grimoiries used to cast magical spells in Avowed

In Obsidian's defense, it is clearly meant to be an arcadey, story focused RPG over something like Skyrim or Kingdom Come: Deliverance and so the comparisons people keep making are a bit misguided. Things that I complained about such as npcs being static are the way they are because it was never intended to be more than that. I'm sure that if they wanted to make a Bethesda styled world, they could, but Avowed isn't supposed to be. While it absolutely deserves some slack for this, I still have to admit that it leads to an empty feeling that I had while visiting this world.

I never came across any choices that seemed to make that big of a difference in the story path but you still get plenty of conversation options as well as skill checks based on your stats which I always love to see (Obsidian is still the master at this). How I feel comes down to a quote I saw from a YouTuber, but can't remember his name unfortunately: "I like when evil choices exist in RPGs not because I play the bad guy, but it makes being the hero feel more consequential knowing I didn't have to be". Maybe it comes up more after the point I stopped, but up until then I never got this feeling.

One of a few dozen bears I encountered, albeit one that looks a little cooler

Ultimately I think the people that are going to enjoy this game the most are existing Pillars of Eternity fans. It is full of great writing, fairly interesting companions, and plenty of Obsidian charm that you would come to expect. It just didn't do a lot to pull me, someone new to this world, into the experience. The gameplay was a lot of fun, but my disinterest in the skills and loot made me fizzle out in that department as well, leaving me with not much desire to keep going.

As a whole it seems to be a largely well made game, but one that just didn't fully click with me. It does everything as typical as you can get for an RPG of this kind, so your level of enjoyment is probably dependent on your interest in this world. If you have Game Pass then it's definitely worth a shot, but if you are interested in buying, I would probably wait for a sale. I'm not sure if I'll pick it back up or not, but I might enjoy Pillars of Eternity down the line.