Bugs have always been part of video games. While occasionally game breaking, most of the time they’re a little bit of goofy fun. How we feel about them tends to depend on whether they actually impede progress, how funny they look, and whether they come from Bethesda or GSC, in which case all bets are off. But as Avowed shows, bugs have become a lot less fun.
That’s because gaming as a whole is a lot less fun now. I don’t mean the physical act of playing, which as ever goes up and down depending on the game in question. But the whole sphere of gaming has become increasingly toxic, so it now feels impossible to love as a shared space that even the bugs have become a cudgel to whip up more nastiness.
Avowed Looks A Little Buggy. Welcome To Pre-Release RPGs
This brings me to Avowed. Obsidian’s upcoming fantasy RPG had a round of previews recently, and was well-received in some much needed good news for Xbox. Our own George Foster, not always the biggest fantasy-head, liked what he saw of it, and it has wriggled up the rankings of games I will carve out some time for in the most crowded February since records began. However, some previewers did experience some visual bugs.
It’s a shame 2025 isn’t a leap year, as we could really do with
an extra February day
to fit all these games in.
I’ve always been a little torn on the hierarchy for excusing bugs. Other than ‘it has always been that way’, I’m not sure why some studios are considered the exception. At the same time, I understand that making video games is very, very difficult, and so if it’s just visual then that’s really only worthy of a light chuckle.
This is how I feel about Avowed’s bugs, which squish character faces into something that resembles a Snapchat Chad Face filter. Do people still use Snapchat filters? Am I just old? Anyway, you know what I’m getting at. The faces look a little funny, and worse yet, the bulging eyes face doing the round is a custom character designed to look silly on purpose. Everything is disinformation or ignorance.
But this is not funny, or so the angriest people on the internet would have you believe. Instead, these misshapen faces are a manifestorium of the developers’ twisted nature. The reason the most Skyrim game to not be Skyrim has some visual bugs three months out from launch, these people would have you believe, is because of wokeness. What’s woke about this game? One of the developers appears to personally dislike Mark Kern. That’s about it.
How Do You Enjoy Anything This Way?
It just feels a little pathetic. Maybe Avowed is woke, maybe it’s broken, maybe it’s bad. But we don’t know any of that yet, and likely no one will be able to define how woke it is until they see the sales figures and retroactively decide if it was a woke game that failed or a non-woke game that succeeded: see Space Marine 2 for more details. It was bad enough when people were deciding they loved games sight unseen and would defend them to the hilt. Now we’re having people reject games at an overlord’s say so and take up that position religiously.
Yes, the bugs in Avowed can look a little silly. Yes, if the game came out looking like that with any regularity it would deserve to review poorly. Xbox has been on a bad run of form one way or another, with even the reliable Microsoft Flight Sim coming out bugged and broken. In a small way, this could be serious – Xbox really needs both Indiana Jones and Avowed to do what Starfield, Redfall, and Hellblade 2 couldn’t.
But in a much larger way, it’s a silly face in a video game made to look silly on purpose. I don’t know, maybe lighten up a bit? This corner of gaming seems to take so much joy in the suffering of others that they have decided to take joy in the suffering of themselves. This cannot be enjoyable. If you reject a fantasy RPG because the face models look a little off three months before launch, you can kiss this entire genre goodbye.
It’s gotten so it feels like the enjoyment some people have comes from performatively not enjoying something. It’s the same mentality that declares Gladiator 2 woke – a movie with two female speaking parts, one of whom dies in her second scene, all about a masculine revenge fantasy, honouring your father, and seizing glory through strength. What are you even allowed to like if you think this way?
Where woke is, we shall not be. Where woke is not, we also won’t be because we decided it was woke too and now we have nothing to play.
Avowed has some funny face bugs, and that’s all this story is. Anyone who feels any differently about the issue is probably the one pushing agendas in gaming, despite claiming to be against that. When a game does something silly, it’s okay to laugh. You don’t need to be mad about everything all the time.
- Released
- February 18, 2025