It’s lazy to compare Avowed to Skyrim. It’s not necessarily unjustified, but that comparison rests on a surface-level reading of Obsidian’s latest role-playing game. Yes, Avowed is a first-person open-world fantasy RPG with a strong focus on story, but the decisions it makes when you get past the big picture are so different from Bethesda’s hoary oldtimer that it’s not even worth mentioning that game. Everybody will, though, so let’s just get that out of the way from the start: Avowed is its own distinct beast, and not some Elder Scrolls acolyte.
Obsidian, of course, is known for its RPGs. This is the studio that gave us Knights of the Old Republic II, Fallout: New Vegas, and the idiosyncratic one-off Alpha Protocol. It’s also the studio behind Pillars of Eternity, a crowd-funded isometric RPG from 2015 set in an original fantasy realm of Obsidian’s creation. That game owed a lot to the Baldur’s Gate series and classic Dungeons & Dragons concepts, and Obsidian clearly saw a future for its fictional setting of Eora. A sequel followed, and now, a decade after the original Pillars, Avowed explores a new part of Eora, and from an entirely new perspective.
Avowed reintroduces Eora through a first-person, open-world, story-heavy, action-oriented role-playing game. It’s a direction that should attract many players unaware of Pillars of Eternity, especially with Microsoft, who bought Obisdian in 2018, promoting it. I never played Pillars, so I can’t speak to how well Avowed translates its world into a different style of RPG; I can say that Avowed is a perfectly decent game that gets a much-needed jolt of energy when its personality is allowed to shine several hours in.
For its first several hours, Avowed doesn’t do much to distinguish itself. The game’s first setting—an area named Dawnshore, with a central city called Paradis, within the remote, untamed region of Eora known as The Living Lands—sticks to an overly traditional and familiar brand of fantasy, without the wit and ingenuity Obsidian are known for. The one early flourish is how the game visualizes the Dreamscourge, a mysterious mind-destroying disease that’s cutting through Eora; instead of incurring the grotesque markings of leprosy or the bubonic plague, victims sprout bioluminescent plants from their body. It might not be healthy, but it usually looks pretty cool; it’s a lot like that Alex Garland movie Annihilation, complete with some characters ultimately turning entirely into human-shaped plants. Beyond that most of the game’s earliest section lacks the kind of narrative vision you expect from Obsidian. It’s enough to make you wonder if it’s intentional, like the goal is to be as normal as an Obsidian game can be at first, and then reveal its real personality once players are in too deep to quit.
Avowed comes into its own after that lengthy first act. When you leave the opening area and enter a part of the Living Lands called the Emerald Stair, you immediately meet a deeply sensuous fur-covered wizard named Yatzli. She’s basically Rachel Dratch’s “Love-ahs” character from SNL, but, well, a fur-covered wizard, and although Avowed tries too hard to make Yatzli too much, it’s an instant course correction, and a reminder that this is an Obsidian game and not a stock Elder Scrolls wannabe. The Emerald Stair’s whole deal—it’s a region ruled by a widely banned science/magic called Animancy, whose practitioners experiment on souls separated from bodies, using the empty physical husks that remain for manual labor—lives up to Obsidian’s history of smart, eccentric writing, and quickly rights what had been a listing ship. I don’t want to share too many specifics, but weird, unexpected notes start to pop up throughout Avowed’s side quests and main plotline once you reach the Emerald Stair, and they continue into later acts.
It might take the story a few hours to get interesting, but Avowed’’s approach to character progression is unusual from the beginning. Most notably, I can’t recall another RPG where beating enemies is such an insignificant source of experience points.
Enemies don’t level up alongside your character, and they don’t respawn; they’ll be waiting for you when you’re ready for them, basically, and once they’re dead they’re gone. Completing quests gets you the lion’s share of your experience points; even minor side quests will bring in magnitudes more XP than beating standard enemies. This doesn’t mean combat is optional, or sparse, but it minimizes what is typically an RPG’s main incentive for fighting. There are definitely rewards for clearing out enemy camps—money, items, new weapons, small drips of XP—but by limiting the last of those it underscores that combat is part of Avowed’s kit but not its primary focus. You can’t really grind in Avowed, and there’s no way to farm; the best bet is to stick to the story and fit in as many of the side quests as possible, as they’ll bring in substantially more experience points than randomly getting into fights.
It takes a while to level up, and the benefits aren’t always that significant. With each level you’ll get one point apiece for two different skill trees. Attributes are your main character stats, with six total: Might, Constitution, Dexterity, Perception, Intellect and Resolve. They’re all pretty self-explanatory, although in an unusual touch Might dictates the strength of not just your physical attacks but your magical ones, too. You can also get additional points for different attributes as passive buffs from equipping specific items; so if your Dexterity is 2, and you’re wearing a medallion with +1 Dexterity, you’ll effectively have a Dexterity of 3. Since conversations will occasionally have optional choices that require a minimum score of a particular attribute, those items can be very useful.
Abilities, meanwhile, are different skills and attacks broken into three basic class types: fighter, ranger, and wizard. Avowed doesn’t lock your character into a defined build, and you can spend your points freely on attributes from any class at any time. Fighter attributes impact your physical offense, boosting damage from specific melee weapon types or unlocking new special attacks like a ground pound. The ranger track focuses on ranged combat, defense, and stealth, and the wizard abilities obviously deal with magic and spellcasting.
Every time you level up you get a point to spend on an attribute and another to spend on an ability, and it never feels like enough. Leveling up takes a while, so new abilities and attribute boosts are slow to come; every time I got new points to spend I felt like I was somehow falling even further behind. Surprisingly that isn’t all that frustrating, though; it’s prevented me from ever feeling overpowered, a condition that can happen too often and too early in RPGs. Even though my character is a “godlike” who can commune directly with an ancient eldritch power, the game’s stinginess when it comes to progression makes them feel like a part of this world and not some colossus towering above it.
And there’s a whole other wrinkle to this progression system tied into your gear. Attributes have some impact on how much damage you can inflict or withstand, as do the stats of whatever weapons or armor you have equipped. The quality tier of your weapons and armor is a far more important number, though. There are five tiers: Common, Fine, Exceptional, Superb, and Legendary. If you’re facing an enemy whose own weapons and armor are a higher tier, you’re going to have a much harder time beating them. Weapons do significantly more damage against armor that’s a lower tier and less damage against a higher tier. So if you rush into a cave full of assholes stocked with Exceptional gear, and your threads are merely Fine, you’re probably going to get crushed. To complicate it even more, each tier has three different levels; so even though you can upgrade a Common item to a Fine one or higher, you’ll have to upgrade it three times before hitting each next tier. And with each tier you’ll have to gather increasingly more and harder-to-find crafting material if you want to upgrade anything. That hasn’t stopped me from regularly upgrading the same mace I’ve been using from the very start—what can I say, I hate change, and I love thumping fools with a short, thick stick—but I’ve regularly swapped out armor, shields, and my off-hand weapons as I’ve acquired new ones, because it’s almost always easier to find more powerful alternatives than to keep leveling up the stuff I already have.
This might all sound a little too wonky or obtuse, and it all takes a little bit of time to get used to. It’s not hostile to the player, but it’s definitely more indifferent than you normally see from games. It’s ultimately a smart way to differentiate Avowed from other games in this space, though. Yeah, Avowed has some obvious similarities to other RPGs, but its details are unique.
Oh, hey: did I imagine companions yet? There are a few of them. You can have two in your party at any time. You can talk to them, swap them out, and upgrade your weapons at camps, which also restore your health and essence (your magic points). It’s very Baldur’s Gate 3, but the way you control the companions in combat is straight-up Veilguard: there’s a radial menu from which you can activate your companions’ special moves, and you can assign one special move to a hot-key that can be triggered without opening the menu. Companions have their own individual skill trees, but earn skill points far less often than your main character, so their progress takes even longer. They talk a lot; a couple of them are well-written and have relatively deep backstories, another is good for comic relief, and a fourth is a bit of a drip—a blunt, gruff, cynical dwarf who feels like a cliche for too long. I tended to let that guy hang out at camp while me and my cooler friends went to save the Living Lands.
If I have any advice to give about Avowed, it would be to have patience. It does not start off great. I don’t know if I would have gotten that deep into it if this wasn’t my job. Eventually, though, Obsidian’s voice arrives with a shout, reminding us that this game comes from a studio with a track record of smart, funny, interesting games. Avowed gets there: it just takes longer than it should.
Avowed was developed by Obsidian Entertainment and published by Microsoft. Our review is based on the Xbox Series X version. It’s also available for PC.
Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, TV, travel, theme parks, wrestling, music, and more. You can also find him on Blue Sky.