Avowed Is Full Of Discoveries And The Freedom To Find Them–Or Not

Much has been made about Avowed‘s approach to its setting, the Living Lands, and the fact that it is not an open-world game. Instead, Avowed’s world is made up of “open zones”–large geographical areas that are interconnected with other large areas, much like a previous game from developer Obsidian, The Outer Worlds.

At least in the first of Avowed’s areas, that means that Obsidian has put a focus on making sure that the entire space provides interesting adventures. Whether you’re chasing side quests handed out by random characters populating the Living Lands’ biggest city, Paradis, or just rambling through the area to see what’s there, there are plenty of rewards for exploration. There are bandit camps, ruins, half-destroyed hovels, and groups of dead soldiers surrounding the corpses of huge bears. The Living Lands is a place dense with stories and thick with secrets to uncover, and even wandering aimlessly through the wilderness feels like an adventure unto itself.

“We have these open zones, and they’re expansive, they have a lot of breadth of them, but they’re manageable enough for our team size to be able to handcraft every part of them and to fill them to the adequate amount of density that we want in that environment,” said region director Berto Ritger in an interview with GameSpot. “So we don’t want big, big, long expanses, of just grass, that has nothing going on. There are moments of serenity and calm in the environment, but there’s always a little bit of something. And we try to have enough variety as well with those things where you’re not finding the same corpse of the potion in his hand over and over.”

We recently played the first two hours of Avowed during a preview event at Obsidian, which provided a sense of the way your path through the game’s world begins to unfold. Notably, it’s not long before you wind up with more or less complete freedom about what to do and how to do it, and even in the early going, Avowed provides you with a ton of freedom about how you want to approach the game, its story, and its combat systems.

After delving into Avowed’s expansive character creator, you’re thrown into the world. Obsidian has previously detailed the setup for the story: You play a character named the Envoy, traveling to the Living Lands by the orders of the leader of a major nation of humans and elves, the Aedyr Empire. The empire has interest in the Living Lands, a somewhat isolated island known for its harsh wilderness and harsher denizens. The place has a sort of Wild West frontier vibe–people head there when they are searching for a better life, or when they want to disappear. It’s not a completely uncivilized place, but plenty of the people who’ve made the Living Lands their home are the kind of rough-and-tumble folks you wouldn’t want to tangle with.

Into this individualistic, slightly lawless society comes the Aedyr Empire, establishing a foothold in the Living Lands that the locals view suspiciously as the first steps of colonization and the establishment of order. As the emperor’s Envoy, most people immediately view you with anything ranging from mild distrust to outright hostility.

But the Living Lands also have a major problem: the Dream Scourge, a “soul plague” that’s infecting people, wildlife, and the island itself. Essentially, those afflicted succumb to madness and fungal growths, and with no indication as to what it even is, much less how to stop it, the emperor has dispatched you to conduct an investigation and find a way to deal with the problem. The Dream Scourge is a major threat to life in the Living Lands, and you get a first-hand look at the effects of the madness it inflicts when the Aedyran outpost–filled with your allies–fires its cannons on your approaching Aedyran ship. You survive the wreck and find another crewmate on the beach, and together head to the outpost to find a way to continue your journey to the Living Lands.

This early tutorial section is mostly about fights with Xaurip lizard people who’ve taken up residence in the outpost after all the soldiers seem to have lost their minds and murdered each other. Right from the start, Avowed emphasizes its open class approach to combat. Part of character creation is picking your backstory as the Envoy, with options like setting yourself as a war hero or arcane scholar, and what you pick determines your starting weapon. You’re not locked into that choice, however, and as soon as you start finding other options, like spears, pistols, swords, shields, and spell-slinging grimoires, you can wield them with no prerequisites or requirements.

I previously got to try Avowed’s combat during an hour-long preview at a Los Angeles Gamescom event, but that demo provided a shorter and more focused look at fighting within the game, with character builds that were set ahead of time by developers. Starting from scratch, things felt a lot more open. I quickly tossed aside my starting dagger for a sword and grimoire, so I was able to slice through enemies or blast them with a flamethrower from my hand, watching their health tick away as they smoldered and charred.

Fighting enemies is snappy, fluid, and cinematic. As Obsidian worked out how to do first-person combat that felt good, while also utilizing elements from its top-down Pillars of Eternity games (Avowed and the Pillars series are set in the same world), developers found that getting the right feel for combat meant tuning the timings of attacks so they became quicker, making the whole system feel more responsive.

“Because we started with [a] first-person [perspective], first-person almost necessitates a little bit of brevity in what you do, because if it’s third-person, you can see everything that’s happening,” said senior combat designer Max Matzenbacher in an interview with GameSpot. “With a limited perspective, there’s your hands, and there’s only so much that you can do there. If you lose control of your character because they’re recovering for a long time, that’s a major forcing function of just making it feel responsive.”

There are a lot of options for any given fight, too. You can store two weapon loadouts at a time and swap between them instantly, even mid-attack combo, which means it’s easy to alternate between two completely different setups. Hitting enemies damages their health while also pushing up a meter that tracks their stamina; when it maxes out, your opponent will be stunned, leaving them open for a weapon-specific special move that triggers automatically for a ton of damage. Stealth is also always an option–enemies often won’t detect you right away and you can sneak up and clobber them from behind by moving through tall grass or avoiding their sightlines. And there are environmental elements you can utilize to help you out as well, like fiery berries you can shoot with a bow to start a blaze.

In both previews I’ve played, I’ve vibed pretty well with Avowed’s combat–although even in the tutorial area, it can be tough. The moment-to-moment thrust is in managing a stamina meter that dictates your attacks and, more critically, your quick, agile dodges that can get you out of harm’s way. Some enemies come at you with unblockable attacks, leaving you no option but to get clear, and staying alive means a lot of sidestepping to slip past a blow and land one of your own. Most attacks land quickly so you can strike back and then get clear or block an incoming attack, although you can also gamble with stronger charged-up blows using most weapons. Everything is quick and fluid, though, and the ability to constantly dual-wield weapons, whether two of the same blade or a main weapon like a spear and an off-hand weapon like a pistol or grimoire, means it always feels like you have something up your sleeve.

While you’re given a lot of freedom in how you want to engage with enemies, the leveling system is more structured. You can spend skill points in any of several skill trees, each named for a different character class, like Fighter or Ranger. That makes it a little easier to get a sense of how you’re building your character along traditional lines, without Avowed locking you into a particular class. You also unlock special abilities that run on cooldown timers, and these give you easy ways to mix together the capabilities of different disciplines without really worrying about the skill tree at all. For instance, you can get the Fighter’s dash-tackle ability, which you can use to wallop enemies for a big stun, or the Ranger’s entangling magic vines that temporarily root enemies to a specific spot.

Uncovering the mystery of what happened in the outpost quickly brings you to your first major RPG choice in Avowed. You discover a local resident of the Living Lands locked inside with a dead soldier. As a representative of the Aedyr Empire, she’s immediately distrustful of you and gives you a sense of how the residents of the island see outsiders. Your crewmate doesn’t think it’s a great idea to let the smuggler out, but you need a boat to reach the Living Lands proper. Whether you choose to trust the smuggler or leave her to rot, however, is up to you.

With the smuggler in tow and some more sneaking around and assassinating Xaurips, we eventually made it to Paradis. After parting with your crewmate pal and reluctant smuggler buddy, your journey in Avowed gets its real start, and almost immediately, you’re let off the leash to do as you will. Landing at the Paradis docks, you’re met by a local militia representative, a put-upon guard captain who makes it sarcastically clear she’s not thrilled to see you, and Kai, a guy who’s looking for the “clavager”–essentially Paradis’s mayor, such as there is one. It turns out that the Aedyran ambassador, who you need to speak to, has headed out to investigate some possible Dream Scourge-related weirdness with the clavager, so Kai decides to join you in going to track them down.

Paradis is a big place, but for the main point of civilization in the Living Lands, it immediately gives a strange impression. It’s both a bustling city full of people and a place that looks like it’s half-collapsing, combining new structures and crumbling ruins.

“One of the things that I was trying to say, the story I was trying to tell, was that this is a really, truly untamed, untamable place,” said lead environment artist Dennis Presnell. There have been numerous civilizations that have tried to stake their claim, and they have come and gone, and you see evidence of that at the start of the game. When you get to the docks, you see it’s new built on old. But even the new looks like it’s old, and it’s trying to weather the storm, but it’s barely holding on. And when you get to Paradis, you see the same thing. It’s new built on old, and it’s a collection of different cultures that are all trying to make their way in what is probably the safest and most secure place in all of the Living Lands, and yet, it’s not.”

You’re ostensibly sent to find the ambassador to advance the plot, but once you have Kai with you, you’re free to wander off the beaten path. As you set out, you start to get a sense of what the Living Lands are really like. Presnell described the location as more of a living organism than a location, and part of Avowed’s personality is how it treats the Living Lands as something of a strange place that’s not easily understood.

Treating the environment itself as a character is so helpful, and that’s true for any component of the game, because you’re trying to empathize with a piece of land or a particular tree or whatever, but kind of putting yourself in the position of, ‘Okay, if I was this tree and I was mad that I had new neighbors and I had the agency to do something about it, how would I go about that?'” art director Matt Hansen said. “And so there’s a lot of that that’s going into it, as far as how to push that sense of a weird and wondrous frontier.”

Side quests are available immediately–I ran into a woman not far from the docks who needed a hand with Xaurips invading her house on some nearby sea cliffs. After clearing them out, I found a strange mural they’d painted in her living room. When I confronted the woman about it, she told the story of how she has dreams about the Xaurip and is worried that, more or less, the Xaurip is her literal soulmate. I offered her some useless words of encouragement, took my reward, and wandered off, wondering what the hell that could have been all about. (I asked developers about that quest, and apparently there’s more to the tale of the Xaurip soulmate.)

“Side quests very much, especially the larger ones, will impact your main story and vice versa,” Ritger said. “Companions will react to those things in real time. Those choices will also heavily impact individual characters, groups of characters, and entire settlements, factions of people, and the states of the regions that you go through. They will also impact the choices that are even available to you. Later in the game, you’ll be locked or locked out of or presented with new choices based on the choices you made much earlier in the game.

Even on the short walk to the next location for the main story, though, there was plenty to see. The area around Paradis is objectively not huge, as I discovered wandering around it, but it’s not especially small, either. Importantly, though, it feels bigger than it is, thanks to how much interesting stuff Obsidian has packed into it. Cutting to one side of the area, I stumbled on a tall ruined building or tower of some kind. It wasn’t marked by an icon or any other clues, but just looked interesting. Climbing in, I found tripwires that triggered huge swinging blades, a set of barely working traps designed to keep people out that were now exposed to sunlight and easy to dodge. Further on, I was attacked by phantoms, which look like spectral, smokey ghosts, and killing them allowed me to reach a chest filled with a high-quality piece of armor. The entire affair took around 10 minutes and was totally optional, but exploring that little tower was a rewarding diversion that gave a little more of a sense of the Living Lands.

Avowed appears to be littered with situations like this. I found a decrepit, abandoned house not far away on the river, where journals told me about the struggles of the farmer who used to live there. A little way down the stream was another set of ruins where bandits had set up camp. They promptly killed me as Kai yelled in the background to warn me my weak starting armor couldn’t handle their much better weapons. And that was all just stuff I happened across on my way back to town.

The two-hour demo we played also included some early bits of Avowed’s story–you track down the ambassador, have a weird encounter with a voiceless entity that seems to be the spirit of the Living Lands, and kill a huge bear afflicted with the Dream Scourge that’s angry and covered in beautiful, horrific mushrooms.

Those points are compelling, but maybe even more so are the little things that Obsidian has seeded throughout the Living Lands that you might miss, like that ailing farmhouse or those weird ruins. That also goes for the time you can spend with your companions; it’s possible to set up camp at certain places where you can tend to things like improving your gear, and during those moments, you can also talk to your pals about whatever’s going on in the plot, their backstories, and more. Even 10 steps off the dock, I was surprised at how deep and expansive my camp conversations with Kai could be. There’s a ton of story material in these moments, but it’s all optional, allowing you to dig as deeply into the narrative and characters as you want.

“Ultimately, what we want is for the player to make the experience that they want to have, and that means being able to dig really deep into conversations if they want to, or to minimally engage with them,” said narrative designer Kate Dollarhyde. “And that does, you know, create some design challenges. But ultimately, I think having content that’s missable or skippable or that can be done out of order is ultimately better than the best, most polished linear presentation, because at the end of the day, it just feels more personal. And to me as an RPG player, that is almost always more important to me than a really linear experience.”

Though we still have only seen a small portion of Avowed, it’s the freedom to explore and the density of things to find, whether in combat, out in the world, or in conversations, that has me most intrigued. Avowed feels packed with things to discover for yourself, whether you’re following the story or making your own way through the world. What we’ve seen of the Living Lands is full of life, and Obsidian’s willingness to give you so much to discover that you’ll miss some makes Avowed seem like the kind of game it’ll be great to get lost in.