Avowed: A Perfect Blend of FPS and Classic RPG

• Avowed is a first-person RPG from Obsidian, following Pillars of Eternity.
• The demo at GamesCom emphasized roleplay, conversation, and decision-making.
• Players use wheels for actions, enhancing familiarity and ease of use.
• The game features vast, detailed caverns and stunning lighting.
• Release date for Avowed is February 2025.

Impressions: Obsidian's Blockbuster Avowed Feels Like the Perfect Combination of First-Person and Classic RPG

The follow-up to Pillars of Eternity finally shows us its RPG muscles. Avowed just feels right.

Usually, sitting down with a new roleplaying game, there's a period of adjustment. But with Avowed, I just started playing.

I picked a rogueish character armed with twin pistols and a bow for longer range and immediately set about exploring some caves beneath Dawnshore like I'd lived there my whole life.

A lot of what's been shown of Avowed up until now has been very much focused on action and exploration. The demo I played at GamesCom was much more focused on an aspect I imagine longtime Obsidian fans might have been missing until now: the roleplay.

While I took part in multiple battles and did my fair share of exploration, the emphasis here was on conversation, deliberation, and branching decision-making.

Being first-person certainly helps with that feeling of familiarity. It removes a lot of what can feel alienating about more traditional remotely-viewed RPGs and means you're not learning a new UI of 800 buttons.

Instead, all your actions here are dealt with via wheels that pop up when holding down the left bumper. I started out playing mouse-keyboard but then found it more comfortably played on a controller.

It also helped that so much of the conversation in this 45-minute section of the game felt familiar for someone who's already spent a fair few dozen hours in Eora, the world in which Pillars of Eternity was set.

Here I was tasked with finding a missing expedition team who themselves had been hunting down a holy relic related to the god Eothas. I know Eothas. Or indeed don't, given the events of the 2015 RPG and its 2018 sequel Deadfire.

The rather proud Sargamis stands in front of his homemade statue. Of course, developers Obsidian aren't daft, and all of this is color for those who've been along for the ride while an aside for those who are new.

To maintain a balance between the two, Avowed continues the RPG series tradition of including footnotes for absolutely everything of note.

Sargamis is a godlike like your own character, a unique race of beings thought to be blessed by the gods with special skills, and he's clearly up to no good.

He's got some ridiculous plan to revive Eothas via a statue and he's stringing us along with some nonsense about never having seen the exploration party. Sargamis is clearly too chicken to go get the relic he needs, so inevitably suggests that we go get it ourselves.

So begins the quest of leaping between platforms over a massive chasm, climbing and exploring to find chests, and discovering the route to reach this magical MacGuffin.

As I played, I couldn't help but collect every item, harvest every plant, and seek out every chest even though I knew I wasn't going to be using any of it given the brevity of my time with the game.

The enormous caverns of Avowed took me aback aside from how natural this all felt was the scale. This section is all set in caves and could easily have been tunnels and small rocky rooms.

Instead, it was a series of vast, beautiful caverns extraordinarily detailed across vast areas I couldn't hope to reach. This is bolstered by some stunning lighting.

The one thing I didn't have time to get to grips with properly was combat. I managed fine, although I felt slight shame at how many health potions I was glugging.

At range, I felt like a master. The bow and arrow is fantastic to use and rather generous with its aiming. Thankfully, Kai was also helping out, his own AI taking care of his fighting.

The same sequence from the game was being used for hands-off demos elsewhere in the German conference, so you can see an alternative playthrough of what I saw, albeit with a wizard instead of a rogue and making different conversation choices.

I've seen a lot of gaming sites comparing Avowed to Skyrim, which I find the most peculiar idea. The games are both RPGs and both first-person, but after that, I struggle to find a connection.

Avowed feels much more coherent, more focused, like the natural evolution of games like Arkane's wonderful 2006 RPG Dark Messiah of Might and Magic.

In the mad frenzy of a week of nonstop appointments, I entirely forgot the release date for Avowed and got it into my head it was arriving before this Christmas.

With the demo completed, Sargamis dealt with, and a ridiculous hankering to carry on playing, I turned back to the Obsidian guy and said, "What's the release date for this again?"

"February 2025," he replied, and in a moment of complete unprofessionalism, I responded, "WHAT? NO!"

I think that's likely the most useful bit of information to take away from all this. I exclaimed like an affronted nine-year-old when I realized how long I have to wait to be able to play any more.