Overview
Avowed is an interesting beast because it’s a game I kind of enjoyed, but I was constantly nagged by how much better it felt like it should have been. That’s a step up from The Outer Worlds, which I thought was a badly designed experience from the ground up, but it’s still disappointing in its own way.
You can find a video version of this review on YouTube
There is a kinship between the two titles, though. Just like in The Outer Worlds, entire mechanics exist in a play pretend kind of way. You can point and say that there is a purple squirrel doing the Macarena in the corner of the room, but it’s not actually there. That works for a child’s imagination, but less so for video games that you actually interact with.
The thing about Avowed is that it’s not Skyrim, and that’s okay. But the intentional strides it takes to avoid being Skyrim harm the game. It was like they took a poll of what Redditors think about game design and just ran with it. I’m sorry, but those internet-bubbled echo chambers know as much about what makes a game fun as they do about touching grass and proper hygiene. Very little.
At the same time, Avowed does a lot of things really well. It’s a vibrant world with a great combat system and a story where the choices you make really do matter. It’s just that every step you take in the Living Lands has you tripping over some oddball design choice.
| Gideon”s Bias | Avowed Information |
|---|---|
| Review Copy Used: No | Publisher: Xbox Game Studios |
| Hours Played: 30+ | Type: Full Game |
| Reviewed On: Xbox Series X | Platforms: PC, Xbox Series |
| Fan of Genre: Yes | Genre: First Person RPG |
| Mode Played: Hard and Path of the Damned | Price: $69.99 |
Story Time (No Spoilers)
The writing and dialogue in Avowed are some of its strongest points, with a couple of caveats. While the actual plot is nothing extraordinarily innovative. The engine that it’s told through has a refreshing agency I haven’t really felt since the likes of The Witcher 3 and The Mass Effect Series.
To put it simply, your choices matter in Avowed. While many dialogue choices only change a character’s response, there are choices, both big and small, that can have a profound effect on the game’s world, the characters in it, and how the story ends. These aren’t all simple A or B choices either. Sometimes, it comes down to what you find when simply exploring the world and the ripple effect that something seemingly simple might have.
It’s difficult to talk about without spoiling everything, but there are events that seem set in stone when you first encounter them, only to figure out later, Either by reading online or via a second playthrough, just how much you could have changed them.
Furthermore, as the game went on. I had a harder and harder time deciding if the decisions I was making were the right ones. There is a lot of moral grey or ambiguity surrounding the plot as you advance, and even after the credits rolled on what I believe was a “good” ending. I’m left shouldering the consequences of a few decisions that I wish I had made differently in retrospect. It’s rare for a game to deliver that kind of moral burden without choosing between a black-and-white representation of good and evil.
Additionally, Avowed’s Living Lands are vibrant, full of color, and have an interesting lore. One that I definitely struggled to grasp as a newcomer to the Pillars of Eternity series, the world in which Avowed is set. There were many moments where the game assumed I knew what someone was talking about when I truly had no idea. Knowledge of the series definitely isn’t required to enjoy Avowed, but the context would have certainly helped.
The individual characters, on the other hand, were a lot less interesting than I had hoped. I cared just enough to feel the potential guilt of my decisions, but I simply didn’t get attached to any of them in the way I have in many other games. Some felt like they were trying too hard to mimic the personalities of beloved characters from other popular RPGs. Others felt like they weren’t trying hard enough, and some simply felt bland.
Combat
Avowed’s other strong point is the moment-to-moment combat. No matter how you choose to play, combat is responsive, reactive, and simply feels good. Enemies react to being hit by attacks; they flinch, stagger, and are knocked around. Blocking and parrying feels weighty, and projectiles from bows and guns feel impactful. The dodging system feels tight, and you always have access to a wheel of consumables and abilities that pause the game, giving it an ever-so-light tactical touch.
Frozen enemies explode satisfyingly, and you have a wide range of options and status effects you can use. You have the option of carrying two load-outs, each of which can have one two-handed weapon or a weapon in each hand. These range from swords, shields, and hammers to wands, spell books, and flintlocks. You can switch between load-outs on the fly to combo up your attacks.
Enemies also have stun gauges, and once filled, opens them up for a powerful finishing attack with whatever weapon you’re using. I spent the majority of my time as a Mage, using various spell books and wands. Although I did dabble in some warrior abilities. The thing is, Avowed’s skill system is open-ended; you can distribute your skill points as you see fit between a fighter, ranger, and mage tree.
However, I found magic, in particular, to be incredibly satisfying. The spell effects look and feel phenomenal in a way most games fail to capture. An exploding fireball, ice shards falling from the sky, or lightning arcing between enemies looks great and gives you great visual feedback as the enemies react to being struck. The spell tomes are a pretty nifty system. Each one is held in your offhand and has 4 spells that can be cast from it.
However, you can also learn these spells via the mage skill tree, allowing you to cast them without a tome. However, casting the same spell you already know from a tome casts the higher-ranked version, even if you haven’t unlocked it yet. So you have a lot of wiggle room between going full mage or someone that supplements other fighting styles with magic.
Avowed’s entire combat system looks and feels great, but magic, in particular, gives you the actual feeling of being a spell-slinging mage, and I thought that was awesome.
Unfortunately, the combat system is tied to Avowed’s nonsense tier, loot, and scaling systems, which can really bring the experience down.
Poor Game Balance
I played Avowed on Hard and Path of Damned because anything lower and the enemies simply fell over. You can’t experience the full weight of the game’s combat system when enemies practically explode the moment you look at them. The thing is, Avowed’s open zone, but not open world system, pairs with a wonky tier leveling system that ends up feeling pretty bad.
Essentially, your level doesn’t matter too much in Avowed. The level of your equipment does. Gear has 4 (5 for unique) tiers and 3 levels within each tier. Pratically speaking, these tiers correspond to the game’s 4 zones respectively, which you explore in sequential order. You use basic materials to level gear within the same tier, but you need special Adra to advance a tier. This system grinds my gears for multiple reasons.
First of all, Avowed doesn’t have any kind of enemy scaling. As I explored the open zones, I found that enemies were almost always too high or too low for my gear. You can’t predict which parts of the zones have what tier of enemies until you go look. So what often happened is I would see something I wanted to explore, upgrade my gear to fight the enemies in it, and then found that I was then capable of molly whopping the entire zone.
Outside of the main story, fights rarely felt equal; they were extremely easy or too tough, with no middle ground. If I upgraded my gear to meet the tougher challenges, I erased any kind of friction from the zone.
Furthermore, loot distribution is pretty lopsided. The game focuses on unique weapons and armor, most of which are found by exploring the game and taking on side quests. However, finding the right gear to match a build idea or playstyle is a crap shoot. For example, I didn’t start out as a Mage. I wanted to be a cool rifle gunner, but I simply could not find a unique rifle in the first zone. By the time I found one in the second zone, I was already committed to being a mage.
Avowed lets you respec your skills and seems to encourage swapping playstyles at any time, but the game mechanics don’t support it. You are encouraged to disassemble unique weapons in order to obtain the Adra needed to upgrade your current gear. Getting the basic materials to level your gear is easy, but the Adra required to advance tiers is quite rare. In fact, despite exploring everything I could, I rarely had enough to upgrade both weapon load-outs.
This means switching playstyles is rarely viable unless you choose to disassemble everything from your previous playstyle so that you can’t ever return to it. As much as I wanted to supplement my Mage build with a Rifle, I couldn’t get the mileage out of it without sacrificing my current gear. Furthermore, enemies and materials don’t respawn, so I think it’s technically possible to soft-lock yourself if you sell or disassemble too much stuff. Though I didn’t attempt to test that theory myself.
Pretend Mechanics
I’ll start off with the most egregious example of a pretend mechanic in Avowed. Encumbrance. Items have weight, and you can become over-encumbered, which is pretty standard for RPGs. However, it’s actually completely fake in Avowed. At any time, you can open up your inventory and send items to your stash at camp, and you can access camp at any of the many Adra crystals throughout the world. So encumbrance effectively doesn’t exist.
Whether or not you think Encumbrance is a fun or compelling game mechanism is irrelevant. Your might stat affects encumbrance, and there are unique items to give you bonuses to it. All of it is a waste of programming space because encumbrance doesn’t exist in any practical manner.
To go even further, since you progress through the zones in a set order and the unique weapons in each spot are preprogrammed, certain builds won’t be effective until almost the end of the game. Furthermore, a bunch of loot you find in the last zone may as well not exist, you don’t get any time to use them. This is further exacerbated by the fact that there is no new game+, and you can’t keep playing after the story ends.
The open zones are another issue. They serve as a great way to allow you to explore, in theory. But honestly, I feel that if Avowed was determined not to be an open-world game, they should have just thrown in the towel and made it linear, because, in some ways, it kind of is.
Without scaling, you have areas that you simply can’t explore until you upgrade your weapons. An impossible enemy for your gear tier is effectively the same as a wall there that says you can’t go there yet. Upgrade your gear to break that wall, and the whole zone is under-scaled to face you. The expectation with an open zone game is a more hand-crafted, carefully balanced experience. In Avowed, it’s unbalanced with none of the benefits you get from an Open World game.
I rarely fast-travel in games, but in Avowed, there is no reason not to. Enemies don’t respawn, and there is nothing dynamic happening. So it’s just walking, defeating the purpose of the zones being open in the first place.
Since the enemies don’t respawn, loot is set in stone, zones are sequential, and most of your experience comes from quests, a replay of Avowed means you are going to have the same skill points and gear at the same beats of the story as your first playthrough. Plus you gain skill points so slowly that you will end up halfway through the game before your build even begins to bloom.
The open zones allow you to do a handful of things in the order you choose but not much else.
Verdict
I mentioned before that Avowed feels like a game designed by an internet bubble. It’s as if it took design cues about someone screaming that level scaling is bad and open-world games are bloated without understanding why those games exist the way they do and how they work. Avowed attempts to “fix” those issues without understanding what the issues are to begin with. It comes out as a convoluted mess with its own array of weird problems.
It’s a shame because parts of it are really good. The combat really shines in the fleeting moments where it feels like the enemy is on even ground with you. Magic looks and feels fantastic, your choices matter, and the world is vibrant and interesting. But the scaling and loot system largely breaks it. The tier system is a scaling system, but it completely untethers itself from the person playing the game.
It would be like a Dungeon Master in Dungeons and Dragons untethering the balance of encounters from the people playing with no direction. It sounds good on paper, but it would instantly become a dumpster fire. They would either crush everything, die instantly, or soft-lock themselves from progressing.
The open zone aspect of the game feels like a hindrance and wasted potential rather than something that adds anything meaningful to the game. At times, it can even feel grindy as you seek out the limited materials needed to advance your gear to the next tier for the next zone. All without having any of the flexibility that Avowed seems to indicate it would have by allowing you to respec your skill points.
Avowed is almost a good game. Its meaningful choices and excellent combat are held back by a trite gameplay loop of open but not-quite-open zones with poor scaling and a bafflingly bad tier system for your gear.
