Avowed’s Companion Quests Are A Big Let Down

Before Avowed launched earlier this month, I wrote in defence of its decision to not have any romances, hoping it would allow Obsidian to give characters more depth and texture. If you’re not accounting for player romance, it’s easier to have companions fall out with you or be true to their own motivations rather than siding with yours. This means you can have conversations that head in less predictable directions than different shades of flirting, and which could allow them to have a life outside of you. Unfortunately, in Avowed, it doesn’t feel as though any of this happens.

When companions disagree with your decisions, they just grumble and go along with it anyway, swiftly forgetting any resentment towards you when prompted for a casual chat. And these chats do feel highly casual, dispensing lore but never really giving us a sense of who these characters are as individuals, rather than a pictorial representation of a racial or ideological group. Most disappointingly, there is nothing on the level of Parvati’s romantic side quest in The Outer Worlds, which is what I’d hoped Obsidian would be shooting for. In fact, there’s little in the way of side quests at all.

Avowed’s Companion Quests Don’t Feel Finished

You have four companions in Avowed, which feels like a meagre offering for RPGs even rolling the clock back a decade. However, if that (like the removal of romances) had been done by design to offer increased richness in each companion, it would have been worthwhile. As you may have guessed from my tone or experienced yourself, this is not the reality. In fact, of the four companions, only two have any quest to give you whatsoever, and both feel like they’re grasping at something that’s not quite there.

First up is Kai. We meet him first, so naturally, we do his quest first. This is Battle Scars, where we learn of Kai’s late commander, who died saving him after Kai made a misjudgement in the field, nearly costing more men their lives. We recover his commander’s tags, and Kai realises he needs to let go of his past and see himself as the warrior his mentor saw him as, not as a failure who got people killed.

It’s tender, but also trite. It feels like a pretty standard military tale, and that’s all it is, with no real difference in Kai after the quest is complete aside from some tweaks to conversations that are rarely very interesting, and little learned about what makes Kai special, or of Avowed’s world in general.

Second is Marius, who we meet second, suggesting time may have gotten away from the team wanting the next two companions to have full quests. This is Chorus of the Lost, where we head to the north of the final main map, Galawain’s Tusks, to see Marius’ old village. We discover it has been burned down and abandoned, with only Marius’ old friend Iancu staying behind. He drifts in and out of lucidity, having been infected by Dreamscourge after Razvan killed most of Marius’ clan in a cult ritual.

This has more potential. It’s less cliche than Kai’s tale and leads us to Razvan’s lair where we discover he has also succumbed to madness caused by Dreamscourge. We can leave him there to rot or kill him, but Marius oddly takes a backseat here and agrees with whatever we choose. There doesn’t feel like a great deal of stakes or resolution here, but it’s something. It’s more than Kai and, obviously, way more than Giatta or Yatzli get.

Avowed Doesn’t Even Give Every Companion A Quest

The third and fourth additions to our party don’t even get companion quests. While recruiting Giatta as part of the main story, we head into a nearby basement, discover her parents have died in a lab accident (and been transformed by Animancy experiments), then head back to her for a lot of exposition. This is the closest thing Giatta gets to a companion quest. Annoyingly this reveal might have been interesting – it’s certainly more specific to Avowed’s world than Kai’s tale of woe – but it’s delivered with so little build up in such a generic fashion, with Giatta not even present, that it’s as if the game feels it too unimportant to waste time with.

Then again, at least we can feasibly point to something that resembles a personal story for Giatta. What does Yatzli get to hold up to her squadmates? In the endgame trek through the Garden, you relive important moments from the lives of your companions – Kai sees his commander wounded on his deathbed, Marius sees Iancu in a facsimile of his village, and Giatta converses with visions of her parents. For Yatzli, she discusses her research and you briefly turn into her human lookalike. As I went through this final quest, I thought I had missed Yatzli’s, but as I got to this encounter I realised there was nothing to miss.

This is Avowed’s biggest downfall, and I’m curious how it will age in a generation of highly replayable RPGs where the fandom is kept alive by its love of the characters themselves. There doesn’t feel like enough substance to any of these, and the stories they tell either fail to give them that substance, or flat out fail to exist. For all Avowed’s other qualities, it’s odd that there are so few companions and none of them seem to matter outside of some combat assistance.

OpenCritic

Top Critic Rating:
81/100

Released

February 18, 2025