What to Expect From Avowed’s Gameplay

Posted by By our-little-miss-is-home February 12, 2025 13 Views 15 Min Read
What to Expect From Avowed's Gameplay



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Obsidian Entertainment’s fantasy RPG, Avowed, is set to continue the developer’s rich history of creating deep, meaningful video games where player choice and world-building are key. The studio behind Fallout: New Vegas and The Outer Worlds knows a thing or two about the components needed to make up an RPG that sticks in the players’ memory long past the end credits. Set in the same universe as Obsidian’s Pillars of Eternity series, Avowed is set to iterate further on this formula when it releases in a few weeks.

Game Rant caught up with Lead Area Designer James Agay to discuss Avowed‘s gameplay in detail. He talked about several of the game’s most prominent mechanics, the vast built variety on offer, and how the skill trees work. Agay also broke down how Avowed approaches exploration and puzzles. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

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Avowed’s Gameplay is Varied and Engaging

Q: Avowed’s mechanics allow for a wide variety of character builds and experimentation across skills, abilities, and weapons instead of locking players to a specific class. What was the primary reason behind this design choice?

A: We started with defined classes, true to the older Pillars games, and they were part of the game for a while. The trouble was that it felt too constraining. Avowed is a game with a big story, and by the end of the game the player will have experienced it, and the story will have been told. Some people will certainly replay the game, but we need to assume most probably won’t, and we don’t want to limit most players’ experiences by a choice they made before they started playing and when they had little game knowledge.

Instead, we gave players the freedom to make their characters be whatever they wanted them to be. You can still go into the game with a specific character type in mind, make that character, and play it that way end to end. However, being locked into a single style is the player’s choice, not ours. You’re free to change things up and evolve your character in new directions as you get new gear if you are inclined. The classic RPG roles define the spectrum of choice and the player is free to find any point within it they like.

Q: What were some of the most fun or interesting spells/combat abilities to design and iterate on the above?

A: I think everyone on the team will have their answer to this one. I think some of the big spells that are visually spectacular will rank near the top. We have one called Grimoire Snap where you slam your spellbook shut, and it sends a giant shockwave out that blasts back everything around you that has a delightful absurdity to it. Currently, my favorite build relies on Blood Magic, a passive that consumes your health and turns it into essence allowing you to keep casting. I pair that with Corrosive Syphon, which blasts a beam that eats an enemy’s soul, poisons them, and returns health to the caster. There’s an obvious synergy there that works well, especially if you pair that with a gun, which I always do. I let my party tank for me and anything that gets through is usually an easy close-range headshot with a pistol.

How Avowed Balances Melee and Ranged Combat

Q: Inherently, to some degree, most fantasy settings treat firearms or magic as more powerful than melee in combat. Can you talk a little bit about how Avowed tackled this balance?

A: Our philosophy in Avowed is that all the weapons, spells, and abilities available to the player must always be viable, and in the right circumstances, situationally best, yet never always be best or always worst. That means if you’re trying to optimize your play, you’ll occasionally swap weapons but you should never feel you have to. Also, if you have a favorite weapon and want to use it all the time, you can. It will be effective in some situations and less so in others. For example, we have enemy types that will swarm the player, so sniping them with a long reload gun like an arquebus won’t be ideal, you’ll probably need to use your party if you want to stick with that weapon in that case, but if you could also use a spell such as Fan of Flames to burn everything down, or blast a pack with a grenade, or cleave them with a two-handed sword or great axe. Everything is viable. Some things are situationally better, but everything gets its chance to shine.

Avowed’s Skill Trees Explained

Q: Can you discuss the design behind the four skill trees in Avowed? What are the benefits/drawbacks of focusing on one, just one or two, or dividing evenly among them?

A: The Fighter tree is focused on defense, damage mitigation, two-handed weapons, and mobility. If you stayed exclusively in this tree, you could make a damage-focused Barbarian who does massive damage with huge weapons, charges and jumps about, and generally smashes things. The Ranger Tree is a mix of one-handed weapon skills, stealth skills, ranged weapons, and evasion. Staying only in this tree, you could build a dual-wielding stabby character, a stealthy sniper with huge crits, or a ranger with a bear pet and crowd control skills. If you want to be a tank with a shield, you’ll likely dip into this tree to boost your one-handed damage and parry.

The Wizard tree is all magic. The player can find new spells in the world, in tomes called Grimoires. These Grimoires are weapons, held in the offhand they can be upgraded to make their spells cheaper and for faster casting. From the upgrade tree, you can put points into spells to learn them, giving you access to them with or without the Grimoire, and also modify them, making them more powerful. Other parts of this tree give access to powerful passives that modify how spells work and your defenses and let you specialize in types of magic.

While a melee-focused player could entirely ignore this tree if they wanted to, I think most will pick out something they like to augment their character. Going deep in this tree can result in a classic Glass Cannon build, but you have other options. If you choose Frost you have more crowd control options, or you can go with Decay and Poison. As for the last tree, we want players to find out more for themselves when they hop into the game.

Some of the most interesting builds mix all the trees. Barbarian with a two-handed axe and corrosive magic? You can do that. Blood Mage packing a gun? Yup. A Sniper with a pet bear who also can freeze things to shoot them in the head? Sure. If you stick to a single tree, it’s probably because you have a specific character in mind, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s your choice.

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Exploration Plays a Huge Part in Avowed

Q: Can you talk about what role exploration plays in Avowed and how players are rewarded for going off the beaten path?

A: Oh boy! We built a big world filled with nooks and crannies to explore. Our game allows the player to climb everywhere, by default, rather than just places specially set up to be climbable objects. This comes from our philosophy of putting player choice first, rather than sending the player down a super-curated path with no wrong turns. This means players will find their way onto rooftops, cliff faces and other far-flung locations where no quest ever directs them to go. We know it’s not for everyone, but some people love to explore, so we’ve built content for them.

We did not fill the world with hundreds of tokens to collect or counters to fill—that’s not our style—but we’ve had an internal mandate to always reward player effort and curiosity, and that means if you see a weird old ruined tower in the distance and find your way to the top, you will very likely find something that makes it worth your while. Maybe it’s a corpse clutching a unique weapon or treasure map, or a fragment of a God Shrine Totem, or just some loot or story examinable. Avowed‘s world is filled with hidden treasures, exploration challenges, and hidden, buried places. If you only play the quests and finish the story path, there’s a ton we don’t direct you to find because it’s better if you discover it on your own.

Avowed Doesn’t Do Puzzles in the Traditional Sense

Q: What was the overall philosophy behind puzzle design in Avowed?

A: Avowed does not really do puzzles. We have no “adjust three levers to find the combination that opens the door puzzles,” because players will just brute force solve that and, in my opinion, it does not feel rewarding. Instead, we built content that requires thought, not just reflexes or combat prowess. Here are some examples: we have lots of interactions in the world, both conventional things like pressure plates, traps, walls that can be exploded, swinging knives, secret switches, and the like, but also more novel mechanics like freezing water.

In Avowed the player can freeze water with spells or magical items. This is any water, coastal, rivers, lakes, and being able to freeze a chunk of water lets the player walk on it and climb up to new places. We have built climbing and exploration challenges in the world that require the player to explore a space and figure out a path through it. In our world, if you can see a crack in the wall giving you a glimpse of someplace, there will be some way in for you to find. Some are more obvious than others. Each large region has a special God Shrine Totem that’s been broken into fragments, and they can be found and the totem reconstructed, with the player’s incremental progress rewarded with powerful buffs.

The designers were tasked with hiding these fragments in far-flung places in the world, places only determined explorers might find. In testing, we found that no one could find them, so we made most slightly easier and then added some clues. In each region, you can find a document in verse that drops hints. People who know our lore will have a slight advantage here, but it’s doable by all and should be a fun self-directed adventure. One tower in a late-game region is basically a funhouse for all our traps and parkour mechanics. It’s not a maze per se, but it should be a bit of a head-scratcher to work your way to the top.

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