RPGs often have a lot of things to do that are easy to miss, but for one Avowed developer, that’s “the core” of the genre.
There’s a bit of an obsession with completionism these days in video games, especially with trophies and achievements helping to justify spending countless hours playing through everything a game has to offer. Back in the day, though, a lot of players missed plenty of things, and for Obsidian Entertainment region director and senior area designer Berto Ritger, that’s almost the point of RPGs. Speaking to GamesRadar about the upcoming Avowed, Ritger shared that he thinks “the core of RPGs that makes them special is missable content, to be honest, and it makes the experience feel so much more personal to how you play the game.”
Ritger believes that having all these options in RPGs is helpful for talking about them, as not everyone is going to have the same experience. “If you talk to somebody like, ‘Oh, I found this thing under the docks. There’s this little secret under there on the eastern side of the docks that you can find. And you can also climb up to the top, and there’s stuff up there.’ But if you find that, and your friend doesn’t, they found something else, and it creates a very interesting dialogue about the game.”
Of course, that doesn’t mean there aren’t still specific things that Obsidian wants you to see, with Ritger explaining, “We want to draw your attention to things that we want you to engage with. The lighthouse is very tall, and so everybody’s going to see a big, tall thing and want to go climb. And so we want to support that as well. And you can do that, and you can jump off into the ocean, if you like. And so we try to draw your attention that way.”
Personally I miss the days when we didn’t know every single thing there is to know about a game, it really is fun having a chat with friends about things you’ve seen that they haven’t, so maybe if you’re planning to pick up Avowed, take the road less travelled and find something cool.
fbq('init', '1749355691872662');
fbq('track', 'PageView'); window.facebookPixelsDone = true;
window.dispatchEvent(new Event('BrockmanFacebookPixelsEnabled')); }
window.addEventListener('BrockmanTargetingCookiesAllowed', appendFacebookPixels);