Avowed Review

Amidst the brewing writer’s strike of 2023, television writer Lila Byock spoke to the New Yorker about the state of an industry living in the shadow of big streaming services like Netflix. Byock, whose resume includes some of HBO’s best works, lamented that a persistent note being passed down to writers from streamer execs was that their shows weren’t ‘second-screen content’, the idea for modern television being that it needed to be easily consumed by viewers who simply weren’t paying attention. If you’ve dabbled in any of Netflix’s original programming, you’ll undoubtedly have clocked the impact this has had on the quality of storytelling- characters repeatedly stating what they’re doing and why, important plot information and lore notes parcelled as dialogue to ensure nobody could possibly not get it.

Avowed, Obsidian Entertainment’s latest action-RPG, feels like it was made for a Netflix audience. Extrapolating the fantastical setting of the Pillars of Eternity series into a streamlined open-zone experience, Avowed takes a critically acclaimed world and redefines its parameters for a new age.

Avowed’s landscapes are frequently beautiful

Avowed’s single most interesting choice begins in the character creation screen where you assemble your ‘Envoy’. Dispatched to the Living Lands by an emperor intent on weeding out the cause of the Dreamscourge, a fungal plague infecting the land and causing its inhabitants to become violent thralls, Avowed casts you as an explicit coloniser of its vibrant world. Eora’s answer to a fabled pirate paradise, the Living Lands is a pastiche of Wild West frontier living and mariner romanticism, a place built on the backs of those fleeing imperial control and thus made in a loose image of freedom and prosperity. Infuse the land itself with cascading natural wonders painted in vivid colour and you’ve got a setting that feels immediately burgeoning if a little vaguely idealised.

As an Envoy to the Empire, you’re understood as interloper and harbinger of the iron fist. Obsidian is historically excellent at premises for its RPGs and this one ranks among its best work; to dispel, or at least diffuse, the inherent power fantasy of this type of adventure with a scarlet letter stapled to your character’s chest is bold and forms the basis for Avowed’s more interesting ideas. No matter how much you spec into certain skills, no matter your choices, there’s always someone in the Living Lands to note that maybe you’re not the person to be making these calls. This isn’t your home, this isn’t your land, this isn’t your fantasy.

Forty whacks with a wet noodle, Bart

And yet. Operating as the emperor’s hand, you’ll traverse four major regions of the Living Lands, assembling a motley crew of archetypal heroes who will clash with various factions and one supremely boundary crossing God to stop the Dreamscourge and restore balance to nature. If that reads a little boilerplate it’s because Avowed primarily keeps itself that way, a plethora of tropes delivered with rote dutifulness and endlessly, gratingly affable dialogue. While the initial tension of the Envoy is undoubtedly compelling, it’s cast into a game with anaemic roleplaying and inconsistent tone, an entire world of characters who espouse the basic words of ideas but are largely unconcerned with the heftier work of unpacking how those ideas might actually intersect with your narrative experience.

This isn’t entirely new ground for an Obsidian RPG. The Outer Worlds had already begun to move the studio toward a more digestible template, and while that game’s painstaking commitment to the bit had a flattening effect on its dialogue and tone, Avowed can’t muster the same ideological attentiveness. While there are a handful of core story beats that you can impact with your choices, the moment-to-moment roleplaying of an imperial enforcer is strikingly muted whether you reform your ways or lean into the political tyranny of colonisation. Your party will make note of your choices in quests, often chiding or complimenting, but never truly reacting the way you’d imagine a beset upon people would treat someone like the Envoy.

During a side quest (one of many to be found in Avowed, though after a certain number of Go Here, Kill This runs you might wonder why you’re still seeking them out), my Envoy made a fairly harrowing choice that caused nothing short of a shitstorm with my party. After taking turns to chew me out over this choice, which I met with staunch felty to the empire, my surly dwarf type threw me a little “You’re lucky I’m not in the mood to kill someone…ANYWAY let’s get back on the road!”. Obsidian understands the genre well enough to know it needs to offer these choices, these quests are full of them, but it can’t wrangle Avowed to truly react the way an RPG of its subject matter likely should.

The Living Lands houses some neat playgrounds

This is, in part, due to the narrative enormity of the game’s premise colliding with its boundaries as an action-RPG, but Avowed’s writing woes run deeper than genre limitations. There’s rarely a time in Avowed where it feels as if you’re having a conversation with a person, each interaction another in an endless spiral of lore dumps and plot reminder notes, only ever really broken up by beats that feel overly familiar at best. It creates an arch impression of the Living Lands and its people, a skin-deep consideration of larger ideas as delivered by a supporting cast of pleasant but forgettable party members and quest givers.

There’s a distinct lack of juice to the game’s story presentation that runs wild interference on its nature as an explorative RPG- it doesn’t matter how big and beautiful your world is if I feel no desire to meet its denizens. Worse still, Obsidian’s misguided efforts to appease to a very particular subset of fans sees the return of static, down the camera line delivery. For a game so riotously gorgeous at times, its such a starkly anti-cinematic choice, the camera whipping back and forth between stoically standing character models while a vibrant landscape shimmers just out of focus around them. My kingdom, my empire, for one of these games to figure out how to frame a dialogue exchange.

Flinging magic rules

The holistic experience of Avowed is at least partially held up by the action part of its action-RPG nature. First-person melee combat has a pained history, but Obsidian has managed to craft a satisfying and weighty system that give the Envoy access to a nice variety of builds that can be combined and remixed with the usual assortment of gear. My Envoy deployed a couple of grimoires in his left hand and an enchanted spear in the right, deftly ducking and weaving across the battlefield thanks to the game’s extremely generous movement options. Nimbly sliding away from an enemy’s sword swing just to lob a storm cloud of ice down on its head never got old.

Elsewhere you can use a range of guns, melee weapons, shields, and wands to punch up combat as the game begins to lose its grip on balancing in later quest stages. There’s an innate satisfaction to Avowed’s combat that rubs up against its concept of escalation, rarely changing attack patterns or even enemy types but instead simply adding more of them to any given encounter. The thing about weighty, deliberate combat is that it works exceptionally well against small groups and becomes a nightmarish balancing act against a dozen foes. Likewise, the same generosity afforded to your movements is given to enemies resulting in some truly astounding gap closing on their part. I’d also implore you to never touch the third-person mode, a gangly and unsatisfying compromise of a perspective.

Peppering all of this is the expected RPG-lite systems, from colour graded loot to skill trees to item gathering for crafting and cooking. Much like the game’s loose relationship with narrative roleplaying, Avowed adopts an efficient and formless approach to these genre staples, offering up some linear pathways to improved damage and baseline stats. It’s all overwhelmingly fine, exactly the array of options and systems you’d imagine you’d find in a game like this and about as thrilling in turn. Again, Avowed reminds you of a Netflix production, hitting the requisite elements of a genre work, and doing them well enough as to not rouse the viewer, but likewise never truly engaging them either. To even describe them in detail here feels like folly because you already know what this game is.

The Living Lands themselves are a welcome balm and provide a (near) endless run of aesthetically pleasing vistas and locations. The four explorable regions are geographically diverse enough to cover for some repeated content, the lands a gorgeous array of dense forestry and cragged, violently upheaved stone. The game’s dungeons are often breathtaking, bespoke instances that, despite featuring level design befitting Skyrim’s now fifteen-year-old playbook, still offer up some of Avowed’s keenest art direction and vibes. Exploring these spaces is also a true joy thanks to the heft of movement transplanting nicely into first-person platforming – one instance saw me outmatched in a city brawl so I fled to the rooftops and cracked a real smile as I realised the game would actually let me jump and vault my way across almost every surface in sight.

Final Thoughts

That euphoric sense of freedom hit as hard as it did if only ever in contrast to Avowed’s otherwise lethargic, if inoffensive, ambitions. There’s a fine enough time to be had in the Living Lands, combat systems to be enjoyed and visual spectacle that tells of a studio that understands the sincere joy of escapist worlds. But Avowed seems uninterested in being anything but escapism, its potentially sharper edges smoothed to a fault while its revolving door of forgettable, entirely too pleasant, characters prattle about you with proper nouns and lore in place of depth and vitality. Avowed is a game you’ll likely binge on Game Pass and never think about again, the video game streaming model finally catching up to its television counterpart.

Reviewed on PC // Review code supplied by publisher

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