I Have Played ‘Avowed,’ And Here’s What I Thought

I will admit I have been pretty skeptical of Avowed from its inception, wishing that a Microsoft-purchased Obsidian would head back and do some sort of interim Fallout spin-off, since Microsoft now owns that too. The game looked…odd, in trailers with its rainbow palate and somewhat stilted combat, and I wasn’t quite sure how this was all going to go.

I mean, I’m still not, but I’m definitely more reassured now that I’ve gotten my hands on Avowed with an early preview build. Even for a brief period of time (two-ish hours, one for story, one for messing around), I can easily see this being something worthwhile, which I suppose is no great shock coming from Obsidian. But as a skeptic, this did a lot to alleviate my concerns.

You are a hero tasked with heading to a treasure-filled island that is currently under siege by a sort of supernatural fungus, spreading through the landscape strangling flora, corrupting fauna and brain-invading people. You have a clear goal to solve the problem, and you are also going to be sidetracked ten thousand times from that goal.

Much of this demo was a perhaps overly-long tutorial that teaches you the basics. Things get somewhat unique when you find that you can have a spellbook that casts a specific roster of spells, but you can also map spells or skills straight to your hotbar that you unlock separately from these. It’s a little convoluted and mana is very scarce at the start here, but I do not expect that will be the case over time.

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I think what I’m most impressed with here is the combat. Yes, it feels like Elder Scrolls at baseline, but it’s very much better, and if Elder Scrolls VI feels like this? I’d consider that a win. Weapons feel meaty, smashing and bashing through ragdolling enemies in a way that feels more substantive than we usually see in this genre. And this is even on PC with no tactile controller feedback. Spells are a touch more basic but again, these are just the starter fire/ice/electric ones.

There’s also a whole lot of mixing and matching. You can go sword and shield, bow, dual wield axe or mace, two-hand hammer or greatsword, pistol and axe, dual pistols, spellbook and sword, spellbook and shield, spellbook and wand, wand and sword. You get the idea (wands were probably my favorite in terms of how they felt, like Harry Potter wielding a fast-action revolver). If it’s already fun at low levels, I am imagining higher levels will be even better. You also will have companions to aid you, and the first one you get can be hotbar-summoned to shotgun an enemy at close range, and they will be upgradable in time.

In these early stages you can also get a taste of signature Obsidian “this looks like a simple quest but it’s not and you must make important decisions that may or may not haunt you later” type missions. Every quest I found felt like this in some form or another, and so did even random encounters like running into a pack of graverobbers, where I thought they’d just turn hostile and kill me, but instead I could talk to them and chat about how cool graverobbing is or say I was going to murder them. I split the difference. I let a scared guy run away after threatening them and killed the rest of his buddies. Will I run into that guy later? Who knows. There are a few different situations like this you’ll come across even this early.

Exploration is also on the menu, albeit I am not exactly sure how big this map is going to be compared to its sprawling counterparts in the genre. But in this limited trial space (limited especially by some higher-level enemies that mulch you if you wander too far away), there was plenty of room for exploration. I found an unmarked long climb to a ruin full of ghosts, I killed the ghosts, kept scaling the building and reached the top to find a unique pair of boots with their own ability and lore. Then I found I could keep going up into the cliffs where I found some sort of collectible talisman I’m supposed to give to the gods or something later. This is very much a “wander around and randomly find cool things” in ways that I think players will like.

Expectations should still be kept in check, of course. This is not Elder Scrolls VI. This is a smaller scale game that I don’t know if it should be considered “AA” or not, as that may be semantics, but you’ll have to get used to things like say, lower quality character conversation models than elsewhere. But if the writing’s good, how much does that matter, really? And so far, it’s good.

It’s very early, but it was hard to find any glaring flaws here, and it does feel like the kind of open-world action fantasy adventure that we’ve been missing for…a very long time. It’s not Baldur’s, Dragon’s Dogma or Dragon Age. It will obviously be closely compared to Elder Scrolls, given Obsidian’s past Fallout outing and how Avowed feels. This is their own IP, but it very much has that overall vibe. With Skyrim released in 2011 and ESVI not here until perhaps the tail end of this decade, it feels like this might hit at just the right moment, if this early quality expands to the rest of the game.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.