Avowed Lacking One Modern Feature Feels Like a Huge Missed Opportunity

Posted by By our-little-miss-is-home February 23, 2025 6 Views 6 Min Read
Avowed Lacking One Modern Feature Feels Like a Huge Missed Opportunity
Views: 0

When Avowed was first announced, it wouldn’t have been out of the realm of possibility to perceive it as a dark fantasy epic along the lines of The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim or Dragon Age: Origins. The reveal trailer for the game had a dull, gray color palette, and the tone of its music and narration gave off the impression of a grim and serious game. Avowed went dark for several years following its initial announcement and, when it was finally re-revealed during the June 2023 Xbox Games Showcase, it looked a lot different from what the initial trailer depicted.

The second trailer for the game had a far more vibrant color palette than most were expecting, and its tone didn’t seem to be nearly as dark as early marketing materials suggested. Although it’s understandable why some could be disappointed about the matter, Avowed is still a beautiful-looking game in its own right. The game’s environments are stunning, and some of its areas really pop on an OLED screen thanks to the use of vibrant colors. Avowed is, without a doubt, one of Obsidian’s most impressive games yet from a graphical standpoint, and this makes the lack of a Photo Mode especially unfortunate.

Feature image depicting Henry from Kingdom Come: deliverance 2, Dying Light 2, and Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord

Related


9 Best First-Person RPG Combat Systems Like Avowed

First-person RPG combat has been innovated on countless times, and while Avowed is the latest to do it, many other RPGs have tried it before.

Avowed Really Needs a Photo Mode

Photo Modes Weren’t Commonplace in AAA Games, Until Recently

Back during the early 2010s, Photo Modes in video games were practically unheard of. In most instances, gamers could only take screenshots of games while playing them, and that’s it; any image editing would be done in a separate program on a PC or a mobile device. As the graphics in games improved, however, the demand for in-game photo-editing tools started to increase. In response to these requests, some developers began implementing Photo Modes into their games. These modes made it a lot easier to take artistic and cinematic screenshots of video games, and they allowed for greater experimentation with camera angles and filters.

Photo Modes were once a niche feature, but they’re now widely used in the AAA gaming space. These days, many companies, especially PlayStation-owned studios, are adding Photo Modes to their games in post-launch updates. Several recent titles, such as Red Dead Redemption 2, Horizon: Forbidden West, The Last of Us Part 2, and most notably of all, Ghost of Tsushima, have had really impressive Photo Modes. One of the few major companies that has yet to embrace this trend, though, is Obsidian since the only game it has ever included a Photo Mode in is the 2022 survival game Grounded.

Grounded is the Only Obsidian Game That’s Received a Photo Mode So Far, and Avowed Should Be the Next

Grounded is a cartoony, all-ages game with a fairly simple art style, so it’s somewhat surprising that it has a Photo Mode, but Avowed does not. Sadly, there’s no indication that this situation will change in the near future. Obsidian has discussed the possibility of developing sequels and expansions for Avowed, but it has not once brought up any plans to make a Photo Mode for the game.

The lack of a Photo Mode in Avowed feels like a missed opportunity because, as previously mentioned, the game has impressive graphics. Obsidian’s latest RPG takes full advantage of Unreal Engine 5, and it’s surprisingly well-optimized. Even on max settings, players can get good visual fidelity without sacrificing frame rate and resolution that much. The textures in the game’s environments, meanwhile, can look incredibly detailed at times.

A screenshot of Avowed isn’t going to fool anyone into thinking it’s a real-life photograph, and yet the impressive art direction more than makes up for the game’s lack of realism. The colors used in the environments, from caves filled with glowing mushrooms to volcanic fields overflowing with lava, really showcase the ecological diversity of the game most effectively. Hopefully, Obsidian will let players take screenshots of these stunning biomes by adding a Photo Mode to Avowed in a post-launch update.

Source link