Avowed

Let me start by being up front: I have a strong positive bias in favor of this game as an avid fan of the developers (Obsidian), someone who loved their previous entry in the series (PoE 2), and as someone with a passionate desire to see microtransaction-free single player games continue to be commercially viable. I also just genuinely had a delightful time playing through Avowed. With all that being said, I don’t think this game is for everyone. You need to have played at least one of the Pillars of Eternity games to make sense of the stakes in Avowed (or brushed up on a bunch of lore videos at minimum; “Mortismal Gaming” has some good ones), and it's noticeably shallower than most of Obsidian's work. Here are my pros & cons: [h3]Pros[/h3] • The environment being modified by effects (shock to activate devices, ice to form path-able surfaces on water, etc.) can be satisfying and, while limited, still neat. • The lore is rather good (though I am, as I said, quite biased in favor of this setting) • The writing is mostly between fine and excellent • All of the VA performances are genuinely above average, sometimes outstanding. (Garrus, I missed you!) • The actual gameplay loop, at least for magic, feels fun to play. Though it gets somewhat repetitive, I kept enjoying it the whole way through. • I found the overall narrative & deeper themes rich and satisfying • I feel like I got my money’s worth, with ~100 hours by the time of completion. I totally understand others who don’t feel that way, however. (No disrespect intended!) [h3]Cons[/h3] • It is [b]very[/b] noticeably unfinished. Examples include: a) Normally Obsidian games are renowned for having many different paths to progress the story. This is seldom the case here. b) Noticeably limited polish, with some areas being vastly more populated, lively, & interesting than others. This is especially striking in the parts of the main city/hub. c) Far fewer characters to speak to than you would expect (e.g. characters greet you with unique patter & are staged as though they are significant, but have nothing to say) & those that you can interact with often have much more limited dialogue trees than you would normally get in an Obsidian game. d) Marius’s ability isn’t explained and appears to be completely broken and given up on? I think it’s supposed to reveal treasure with a ping but it highlights stuff that doesn’t exist or has been picked up all the time. • Combat can be cheesed/trivialized extremely easily. The second boss you fight (the infected bear) triggers before you even enter the fighting space, so you can stand in the cavern and easily plink away at it with zero risk. You can do a version of this with many fights by simply walking out of the encounter area, with zero downside. • No interior maps for most caves/dungeons/etc • Various critical bugs in the desert region, including the terrain failing to load if you move faster than the client can keep up with you (which is shockingly easy to do). • You can’t order your companions around (beyond choosing when to toggle their abilities) in a game that revolves around cooperating with your companions!? • Companion AI also frequently launches projectiles into obstacles/walls. Meanwhile, enemy AI is frequently able to fire through rails/trees/obstacles.

This game is incredibly, if not aggressively, mediocre: No single aspect of it is "Bad", but also no single aspect of it is "Good". The combat is stunted and slow, but not terrible. The art direction is generic fantasy. Unique, but not memorable. The exploration exists, but you never feel like you discovered something interesting. The writing carries the story, but is utterly forgettable. It is a game trying to mimic the aspects of better RPGs that came before it without trying to do anything new. In a few months I will have forgotten I had even played it.

I literally had to force myself to keep playing past the prologue and the first couple of quests, just so I can form an informed opinion on what makes me dislike this so much. There is literally nothing good going for this one. The only two decent parts of this are some of the narrative and the exploration, but even those are mid at best. The art style is just wacky. The companions are forced upon you, but are boring, uninspired and kind of overpowered, trivializing combat and exploration for you if you use them at all (There are some parts of the levels that require you to set stuff on fire in order to move through. The level designers have put a whole lot of effort into giving you in-world tools that would let you do that, but all that effort is nullified by the first companion having a no-cooldown, zero-cost ability that just sets stuff on fire on-command. The other companion just shows you all the secret loot spots around you, nullifying the excitement of exploration.) . The item progression is too grindy for what it's worth. The skill progression only has a couple of nuggets of interesting customization, with the other 99% of it just increasing base numbers. The party camp mechanic just lets you teleport back to your camp from anywhere in the open world and then return back to the same spot you came from, with your items upgraded and your resources fully restored at no cost. Food is plentiful, and while it is neat that the game lets you buffer the regenerating effects instead of letting the overheal go to waste, it just trivializes the combat even further, since you just need to take a few steps away and let your nearly-immortal companions tank some damage for you until the regen effect kicks in. The 'stealth' might as well have been missing completely. The animations for most weapons are wack, especially for the ranged weapons, and especially for third-person-anything. The sounds for most weapons sound like placeholders, and the soundscape as a whole feels dull and also broken at times. There are firearms in the game, I couldn't figure out why they are here, and why do they use stamina. I think I could go on and on here, and I've only just started the game. I haven't even passed the first tier of progression fully. There's no way in nine hells that this was made by the same Obsidian people who'd given us Fallout: New Vegas and Tyranny. This is isn't art. This is a waste of hard drive space.

i don't know wtf a "woke" is but if this game has it and it's this good then i like woke.

"My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined"

When Avowed was originally released in early 2025 to a very mixed reception, I was determined to wait for a deep sale, as none of what I saw in gameplay videos seemed to justify the 70 bucks price tag. I was sure, however, that most of the negative reception was probably down to the game not measuring up to that preposterous price point (in addition to the usual ideology-driven mudslinging from bad-faith reviewers). And when I finally got the game with its 2.0 update for 30 bucks, I was initially pretty confident that that assessment was correct. Sure, Avowed had some weak points, and it certainly was [b]more of a first-person action game, rather than an in-depth RPG like the [i]Pillars of Eternity[/i] games[/b]. But at 30 bucks, it felt fine. I was fully prepared to give Avowed a cautious 7/10 "wait for a sale" thumbs-up. That was after the first 10 hours, though. And as I kept playing, my personal impressions of the game just kept slowly getting worse, to the point where I now can't really justify giving it a thumbs-up at all. I still think that [b]Avowed isn't a terrible game. It's serviceable. In fact, its first-person combat and traversal feel exceptionally good[/b]. But it does have some glaring problems, such as the [b]incredibly static (and invincible) NPCs that stand around the same spots day and night, looking off into the middle distance[/b] like so much set-dressing. And as the game dragged on, things like this just started to dilute whatever positives I could come up with for this review. Thus, [b]I'm not giving Avowed a thumbs-down because it's terrible or anything like that. I'm giving it a thumbs-down because of how mediocre it is and how much of that mediocrity you need to get through to finish the game[/b]. I feel like I should enjoy Avowed much more than I did, as it almost seems like [b]the devs tried to steer the game more towards an immersive sim direction[/b] (which I love). For example, there's some basic environmental interactivity in the game, with water that can be frozen into platforms or walls that can be destroyed with explosives. But then you start realising that [b]any time you come upon such an environmental interaction opportunity, you can bet your bottom dollar there'll be a frost bomb or a grenade somewhere nearby[/b] which you can use to freeze the water or destroy that wall. Y'know, just to make sure you don't actually have to find these tools by yourself and save them for when you need them. Likewise, the game has a [b]nasty habit of providing helpful exposition right whenever you need it via books and scrolls lying about the environment[/b]. I know that sounds strange to complain about, but consider this example: One of the early side quests culminates in you figuring out that one of the townspeople has a twin soul; their soul has been split between two distinct persons upon birth. But of course, the developers felt the need to put a book explaining the twin soul phenomenon right in the mission area, so you'll likely read that before you even start your investigation. Imagine how satisfying it would've been if that information was available somewhere else in the world, so once you had to actually make the connection to the quest at hand, you'd have to figure out the whole "this townsperson has a twin soul" twist yourself, based on your knowledge of this world... Oh, [b]how satisfyingly player-driven that COULD'VE been[/b]. It's not all that bad, to be honest. [b]Some of the main and side quests can have interesting repercussions[/b], such as when a person you've previously helped puts in a good word for you with another NPC later during an entirely unrelated quest. But as the game goes on, all of these positives get more and more diluted by all the small inadequacies of the game. You start seeing patterns, like when you realise that [b]any group of two people standing around the game world is likely a quest giver or at least a dialogue partner because Avowed really loves to put you into dialogue with two people at once, so they can have quirky banter between them[/b]. The [b]environments are pretty big, but very few areas feel really remarkable[/b]. The game tries to have [b]a lot of verticality by adding scaffolds and rocky outcrops you can climb up and jump across, but all of those just come off as artificially videogame-y[/b]. Not to mention the fact that someone apparently travels across the Living Lands just to drop [b]the same 3 or 4 types of large wooden chests and backpacks into caves and even on top of houses[/b] all over the land. Naturally, these chests and backpacks contain mostly crafting components, so [b]you end up just mindlessly hoovering up their contents without looking at them twice[/b]. And why, exactly, does the game have an encumbrance limit if you can just teleport any item from your inventory to your infinite party stash whenever you want? Ultimately, I think if all you expect from this game is running and jumping around a pretty static world, fighting monsters and looting chests and backpacks, you'll probably have fun with Avowed. But [b]if you were hoping for an in-depth RPG (or even just a well-designed imsim, which the developers seem to have attempted to shift towards), then I think all of Avowed's clear weaknesses and the fact that they're stretched over such a long play time should give you pause[/b]. P.S.: It occurs to me that perhaps [b]the one single example that demonstrates most concisely why Avowed fails as a roleplaying game[/b] in a mechanically believable fictional world is how NPCs react to criminal behaviour. Because they just don't. You can break into their homes and steal the plates from their kitchen tables while they're having a meal, with no repercussions. What's worse, the developers apparently recognised this, so a few NPCs will go "y'know I can see you rifling through my things"... and then do nothing about it. Apparently, Obsidian [b]couldn't be bothered to program some basic mechanical consequences to player actions (which is what roleplaying games are all about)[/b] but they DID have the foresight to add self-aware quips to respond to them. Even Obsidian's own 2025 [i]The Outer Worlds 2[/i] had more mechanical depth than this.

Fun game with unique mechanics especially for gunplay, spells, etc, but the story is eh and the optimization is the biggest issue. I cannot recommend the game due to it's terrible optimization and how often UE5 crashes or driver timeouts occur. I play the game on medium settings with raytracing off and no AMD FSR (I have an AMD GPU), and this gives me the "best" performance and quality but no matter what it will inevitably freeze up and crash for me while playing. The optimization is so bad I do not think I will be able to complete the game, it is a shame and I do not think I will be buying many new games if they continue to be so badly optimized on PC. Also the Premium Edition is overpriced, and while the armors look awesome, the price is NOT worth 2 armors. Worse than Oblivion Horse Armor.

玩法过度简化，任务感叹号通马桶，不能偷窃不能杀人，道德选项少互动少代入感低。 探索的正反馈低，装备淘汰太快，我在第一章图舔了半天，不如第二章随便一个商店卖的装备， 敌人等级压制极其严重，高等级敌人对你低等级有高额减伤，想越级打？不好意思，不行。给我滚去通马桶，典型的教玩家玩游戏。 队友不能换装备，属性技能都是固定死的，长得还没一个像人的，15年前的老滚5原版大妈都比你这队友看起来顺眼，想到这我终于知道你为什么不让我杀人了，能杀人你这b奇形怪状的队友我早给你图图干净了。

I bought this on Sale and I still feel cheated. After playing a couple of hours, I ended up creating a build that reduced the game to a shooter. The story is so bland I skip most of it, most likely due to the absolute dogsh*t writing in the game. I'm used to Obsidian being one of the best in game narratives, but since OuterWorlds that just hasn't been the case. Long gone are the days of New Vegas and Kotor 2. Also performance is not great, need to use DLSS and reduce shadow quality to get it to run at at stable-ish 60fops...considering how this game looks and plays, that is just ridiculous. I will finish it, but after that obsidian will go going my ♥♥♥♥ list... right next to Bethesda

既没有灵魂（无聊的剧情和任务框架）也没有皮囊（美术辣眼），能打完还多亏战斗系统能说得过去。总体不如污痕圣杯，起码前者第一章还算有趣。