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Avowed – What’s My Motivation?
I haven’t written much because I’m trying to work my way through Avowed. And it really is work at this point, because Avowed is not a good game. But I feel it is not good in a similar way that Bioshock Infinite was not good: the most frustratingly nuanced ways imaginable.
One example is with the combat system. I’ve talked about it all before, in that Ranger was strong but boring, Warrior was active but weak, and Wizard was both active and strong. About halfway through the 3rd zone though, none of it really mattered – even the Wizard became a chore. There are a lot of little reasons that quickly add up in the background until it hits you all at once.
- Very few enemy species (mostly beetles, spiders, bears, lizardmen)
- Very few enemy types (shield guy, magic guy, healer guy, ranged guy, summon guy)
- Zero percent chance any dropped loot is useful in any way
- 99% chance all the encounters feature 6+ enemies
- 100% chance all the encounters play out the same exact way, regardless
- Leveling and upgrading largely become perfunctory starting in 3rd zone
Regarding the last point, Avowed has a really shitty talent/skill tree. It’s not something I’ve seen many other people talk about, but it’s one of the most uniquely uninspired one I’ve ever seen in a game. Seriously, look at this shit. Warrior has 6 buttons to press, Ranger gets 5, and Wizard… 21, technically. But look at the level 15 and level 20 bands, which is where one might assume you’re getting the biggest power boosts. Outside the active button, Fighter gets shit like… perfect (!!) blocks rebound arrows, and you deal 70% of the damage you received. Ranger gets increased crit chance (already 100% when you hit weak spots), and bonus damage on unaware enemies. Wizards get… increased elemental accumulation, but you have to spec into each element individually.
Oh, and on the ultimate level 20+ band? Fighters can… heal companions by 10% when you kill enemies! Rangers can… deal more stun accumulation with power attacks with ranged weapons! Wizards can… get fucking nothing, unless you want to learn Meteor Shower without a spellbook, which you never would because spellbooks give you like an 80% Essence discount on that otherwise meter-eating spell. Yes, Arcane Seal is something a Wizard can take at 20+ and effectively have infinite Essence regen. But at that point in the game, you effectively have infinite regen already from the hundreds of random vegetables you’ve collected throughout the game.
The other half of character progression is also shit. Getting Uniques out in the world has long ceased to be exciting. First time you replace a generic weapon with Unique? Fantastic. The second time? Frustrating, because you likely sunk a bunch of upgrade mats into the first one. Then you start to realize that none of the special abilities of Uniques matter all that much compared to the overall “tier” due to the asinine enemy “level” balance. If your stuff is blue and they are purple, you deal 35% less damage and take 35% more damage. Meanwhile, each time you upgrade a weapon or armor, you get silly shit like +9 damage or -4 damage received. Upgrading a Unique never boosts the special effects… why?
Finally, I want to talk about the story in general terms. I’ll throw a Yellow spoiler warning just in case, but the short version is: the game never answers the question of “what’s my motivation?”
The general premise of the game is that you are a godlike of an unknown god, working in the court of an Aedyran emperor. You are then tasked with solving the Dreamscourge plague problem in the Living Lands, an isle that the emperor is interested in taking over. You are sent over as an Envoy of the emperor himself, granting you leeway in resolving the Dreamscourge crisis in any manner you deem fit.
The problem is that all the Aedyran empire stuff just up and evaporates as soon as you step on the docks, unless you commit to being cartoonishly evil for the rest of the game. And if you do, all of your companions are from the Livings Lands, so they’ll be mad at you for everything you do. Having evil options in RPGs is a good thing even if players do not typically engage with it, but the problem is setting up your game to support it. None of your Avowed companions will leave you no matter what choices you make. There are no Aedyran or Steel Garrote companions, which would make such an evil playthrough more reasonable. And while I have not yet finished the game at the time of this writing, I haven’t really seen any good motivation to even care about the Aedyran side of things. Nobody is reminding you of your duty to the emperor, or even really questioning your loyalty.
This is not the first place Avowed leaned so far into “roleplay” that it fell directly into RPG mad libs. There are frequent dream sequences throughout the game where you are asked to choose how events in the past played out. Some of these choices lead to you getting one godlike ability versus another, but the majority of it is just… there. I understand that there are (presumably) people who like this sort of thing, but Avowed just sort of drops it on your porch and leaves. There’s no context, no sense of purpose. Again, what’s my motivation? Am I training somebody to be more forgiving or spiteful, depending on my dream answers? Or am I literally playing one-person mad libs?
I get that this may not sound all that different from all the normal RPG choices you encounter in the genre. In Baldur’s Gate 3, you can choose to free a gnome strapped to a windmill or send him flying by cranking up the speed. That choice doesn’t matter too much in the scheme of things, either way. Except, of course, to the gnome, and possibly some party members. But that at least has some immediate context and consequences and feels like a real choice. There are some quests vaguely similar to that in Avowed, but they all ring hollow. Perhaps in the abstract the quests are identical, and I’m just not invested in the world of Avowed in the same way as BG3 or Mass Effect or anything else. Or perhaps the devs simply were painting-by-numbers and forgot to include a soul in their creation.
And that brings me back to the Bioshock Infinite comparison from the top. There are some games in which I can understand people enjoying, even when I do not. League of Legends? That’s definitely of no interest to me, but I get it. Overwatch 2? Sure, I enjoyed the original for a time as well. Call of Duty? I prefer the Battlefield series, but a more arcade feel can be fun.
If someone says Bioshock Infinite is one of their favorite games though, my eyebrows go all the way up. Maybe the DLCs fixed the plot later, but Bioshock Infinite’s story was otherwise objectively terrible, like Mass Effect 3 original ending terrible. I feel the same way when I see people online say Avowed is a 9.5/10 or they are eager for another playthrough. I don’t even want to finish this first playthrough, let alone running around opening chest after chest of the same random crafting materials again. Some aspects of Avowed are fantastic genre improvements, like the feel of melee and the feel of exploration via jumping/traversal. Unfortunately, tragically, there is just no follow-through, no stuck landing.
The only way I can see Avowed being someone’s favorite RPG or deserving of a high score is if they simply haven’t played better games before. Which, given that many of my own favorite games came out 10-20 years ago, might be increasingly understandable. What a bummer.
I suppose there is still time in the 4th Act and resultant endings for Avowed to pull a miraculous redemption. Well, aside from the combat and itemization and character progression and world interactivity – those ships have already sailed. We’ll see if the plot payoff was worth the pain.
Avowed – Veneer Off
I have added another 16 hours into Avowed (total: 32), clearing the entire second zone. And while some of what I reported earlier is still accurate – traversal is fun! – the game’s veneer is definitely rubbing off.
Combat, which hitherto has been fun, is now very rote. For the first half of the second zone, I respecced into a Ranger gun build and almost ended up abandoning the game entirely. There was… just no buttons to press. Sure, Ranger has a sort of vines CC ability, but aside from that, it was power attacks from pistols and nothing else to actively press. Technically I could have grabbed some more active buttons from Wizard as well, but Ranger is the only real splash-class, and trying to elevate your Intellect stat to the point where spells are relevant is a fool’s errand without just being a Wizard.
During the last half of the zone, I went into Fighter, first with a 2H weapon focus and then 1H with shield. Fighter had some more buttons to press – including a very satisfying Charge – and was a more dynamic experience overall with the Parry mechanic and blocking. The issue is that the DPS was just not really there. Avowed loves to throw groups of 5+ enemies at you, which is understandable considering Rangers/Wizards will nearly one-shot most of them from range in the opening salvo. As a Fighter, it’s not satisfying at all spending all your Stamina trying to block/dodge so many enemies. Although you do have two squad mates to help spread aggro around, the reality is that so do Rangers/Wizards, and those classes can actually eliminate enemies quickly. Which technically goes against the “gameplay” of Fighter, as if things die before you get into Parry chains or full attack combos, a lot of the Fighter-based weapons are useless. Which they are anyway, since they don’t kill quickly.
The other major issue that I glossed over previously was the world in general and interactivity in particular. Avowed is not Skyrim. Which is fine, most games aren’t. But as a first-person fantasy game that came out 14 years after Skyrim, Avowed is incredibly static. NPCs barely move (if ever), there is no world reactivity, there is no “stealing,” and every object out in the world is bolted onto the floor, aside from some breakable crates. To be fair, this is more an intellectual criticism, as I hardly noticed anything amiss in-game. But now that I have, I see signs of a Hollywood set everywhere. Which might have been fine, if this were not a fantasy RPG released in 2025 for $70 MSRP.
The final thing that is really dragging me down is the upgrade system and Unique weapons. I have been playing the game “as intended” when it comes to looting and experimenting, but have come to find out that the devs punish that playstyle. For one thing, all the respeccing I have done required me to upgrade several weapons that, oops, I am no longer using. Then I found out that all unique weapons in the world scale to the highest upgraded weapon you own at the time of pickup. What this means is that if the best weapon you have is Fine (blue quality), all the uniques you discover will be Fine. However, if you funnel all your upgrades into one particular weapon and get it to Exceptional (purple), those same uniques would have been Exceptional. And this works all the way into Superb (red) and Legendary.
Do you like exploring the map and picking up things organically, doing a few upgrades here and there? Punished! Because now if you decide to go with another weapon or playstyle, you will need to double (or more) the upgrade materials required to level them up. Which, let me remind you, is very necessary because weapons and armor get a debuff if they are more than a few “tiers” below the enemies you are facing. Also, remember that enemies and money is finite in this game, so it is very possible to just screw yourself and be locked into something that is no longer fun.
Which might just be the entire game itself for me, at the moment.
I don’t know, guys. Not everything I play needs to be Game of the Year material; lord knows I play plenty of trashy survival games for hundreds of hours. But, truly, Avowed feels like a game that would have been really great… in 2015. Or maybe 2010. Obsidian is not Bethesda, yes. But this also ain’t New Vegas. And between this and Outer Worlds, I’m thinking that Obsidian needs to stick to what they do best: iterating on the shoulders of better games, rather than trying to make their own.
Grounded was great though, so… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Avowed – Early Impressions
I have played about 16 hours of Avowed via Game Pass. Early impressions: mostly great!
Although I have not yet stepped outside the first area, Avowed is a very gorgeous game. More than that, it is a joy to walk around in. It cannot be understated how much I like a first-person perspective in exploration games, which is elevated further when the character actually feels competent within it. There are marked ledges with the stereotypical yellow ropes, but there is almost no areas in which I felt I could not reasonably scramble up. This isn’t climbing sheer cliffs BotW/Genshin Impact-style, but it’s enough to feel like the world is explorable. It honestly feels one step below Dishonored in how good it feels walking around – if more games could have shadowstep-like abilities, that would be great.
Combat also feels really, really good. I am currently focusing on a Wizard character which gives me, honestly, too many options. The great thing though, is that there is a lot of variety in builds (on default difficulty) and how you engage with enemies. For example, I was rocking the standard wand + spellbook loadout, but I didn’t like how short range the wand ended up being. So, I have a pistol + spellbook. Plus, I have chosen a spellbook that allows me to conjure up a magic staff to beat people with if things get too hairy in close-quarters. Honestly, I kill most things with alpha strikes from a bow and follow-up pistol shots, so I’m leaning towards respeccing more into the Ranger class altogether. Which is easy to do, as it only costs a small amount of currency to respec, which is another plus.
I’m not going to comment much about the story, especially given how early in the game I am. What I can say though, is that I like how the game takes itself seriously without also being too far up its own ass. Being able to view a glossary of all the Proper Nouns during a conversation is helpful, but it’s not always necessary either. Which is great! I did play the original Pillars of Eternity enough to get some of the references, and there were plenty of references to the second game I did not get, but still understood from context clues. I never fully expected Avowed to follow The Outer Worlds irreverence, but nevertheless I am glad the slapstick is relegated to only minor side quests.
Having said all that… yeah, I do have some criticisms.
First, enemies are finite – once you clear an area, it stays cleared. I’ve seen some people praise this as being “immersive,” but it honestly leads to un-immersive player behavior. For example, I was walking in an area and saw some of the lizard creatures battling with spiders. That is great dynamic happenstance (assuming it wasn’t scripted)! But instead of letting them duke it out and attacking the weakened victor, I immediately jumped into the fray because I realized that any incidental monster deaths was a permanent reduction in my possible XP. Now, I am assuming that there is a level cap that can be reached way before the end of the game proper. But this is also a game that gives you more abilities than you have points for, and thus I want to get any many as I can, as soon as I can.
It did occur to me that the original Pillars of Eternity – and most CRPGs – also have the “feature” of finite battles. So perhaps that is not entirely out of place. But even aside from the metagaming aspect, combat itself is fun enough to want more of. I’m seeking out more of these random battles because it’s fun to push the buttons. Which is great! But I hate the idea of knowing they are a dwindling resource.
Another metagame aspect I do not enjoy is the carryover of The Outer Worlds’ “unique item” system. Essentially, the progression mechanic in Avowed is to choose amongst the the items you pick up and then upgrade a few of them over and over. Indeed, almost all of the loot you get from battles and hidden treasures are simply upgrade materials. The problem is that Avowed is also peppered with unique items that have bonus effects that regular items do not. What this means is that if you really like using Bows as a weapon, you are wasting upgrade materials on any regular bow, and should use something else until you get a unique Bow. The problem with that strategy is that weapons are debuffed against enemies of “higher quality” than the weapon used, because… reasons.
So, remember how I said I was using guns instead of wands for my wizard character? Aside from my range concern, what pushed me towards guns was the fact that I found two unique pistols and no unique wands. Without looking it up, I don’t even know if I’ll find a unique wand in the second area either. Which means I either waste upgrade materials on a regular wand so I can keep up with mobs, or I do something else. Similarly, upgrading spellbooks feels bad because you are locked into getting bonuses to just four spells. You can spend your precious few skill points to memorize spells without needing a spellbook, but you don’t get those bonuses that come from an upgraded spellbook.
Pressing buttons feels good, but each level up (and item upgrade) leaves me feeling unsatisfied.
Overall though, I do anticipate playing Avowed to completion. Perhaps the Wizard life is not for me, and the Ranger will be straight-forward enough to feel satisfying to level. It also helps that I have those unique weapons for the ranger already. Will I grow bored of using just those though? Well, it hasn’t happened yet. And perhaps I’ll accumulate enough Wizard uniques by the time it does.
…and hopefully I’ll still have enough upgrade materials to get them up to speed.
Let’s see how it goes.
In An Age 
Avowed – The End
Mar 29
Posted by Azuriel
Got the end of Avowed after 66 hours.
Despite souring on the combat, I did not rush through the end. Aside from a few hidden treasures in the last zone, I otherwise completed all of the side-quests available. Due to the strange open-endedness of Avowed, sometimes it was not clear whether these were legit side-quests or just required story beats done out of order. Either way, I wrung out every ounce of whatever value Avowed had.
And in the final analysis? Avowed was not redeemed in my eyes… but it got closer than I expected.
To me, there was a disconnect between the story and the plot. Maybe those are the wrong terms, but follow me for a moment. I consider the plot to be the main quests and decisions you make in each of the four zones. None of those bits were especially interesting, and not just because I didn’t know what my motivation was supposed to be – the “choices” were just too comically extreme. For example, the game tells you Animancy is banned in your empire, that it’s dangerous, etc. What the game doesn’t do is show you it’s dangerous, or why it’s banned, just that it is. You then get asked if you want (or accidentally allow) every Animancer in the area to die. Huh? The fourth area was even worse.
The broader story on the other hand, I did find more interesting. Each zone has a god totem you can put together from pieces hidden about, and the first time I completed one and then heard their conversation… I was quite intrigued. I did not finish the first Pillars of Eternity game, but I am vaguely aware that the gods get involved a bit more personally in the setting (although what RPG endgame doesn’t, amirite?), and I’m all for it. That bit was very interesting to me, and may be a seed that grows into a desire to play PoE 1 & 2 later. Then again, I technically already know what happened.
In any case, I have zero interest in any future Avowed DLC and have already uninstalled the game.
Posted in Commentary, Impressions
1 Comment
Tags: Avowed, Ending, Plot vs Story, Redemption Denied