Immersion is a word that has slowly lost all meaning in the video game industry. Claims such as how a new release makes you “feel” like you’re a specific character feel hollow because immersion should be the bare minimum. Every game should make you feel as though you are part of a far-reaching narrative. Even in experiences where you are creating a character instead of playing as one, they should make you feel as though you are representing yourself in a world far beyond your imagination.
Role-playing games (RPGs) have always been great at capturing this feeling. Whether it’s a turn-based RPG where you are playing as a pre-existing character, or if it’s one where you are creating a character and establishing their arc with your own choices, immersion is what you come to expect. In the last few years, both styles have stood the test of time and have been established as some of gaming’s best, such as with Final Fantasy VII Rebirth or Baldur’s Gate 3. Then there’s Obsidian Entertainment.
The studio is responsible for making arguably some of the greatest RPGs of all time: Fallout New Vegas and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II. The studio has recently reinvented itself by making games similar games like The Outer Worlds. This leads us to its most recent game: Avowed. Going into this fantasy epic, I had several questions: How does it stand out compared to other entries in the genre? Further, why has no one talked about this game since it launched in February? After nineteen hours, I am saddened to say that my answers to these questions turned out to be very disappointing.
Worldbuilding Without Substance
In order for an RPG to succeed on a narrative level, it needs to walk the line between crafting a world filled with lore and mysteries, while creating characters that are engaging enough that they play off of the setting. If all the focus goes to worldbuilding instead of developing interesting characters, then the world feels flat, and vice versa.
One example that has always stuck out to me is New Vegas, where the Mojave Desert feels alive despite the wasteland setting. Yet, the characters are engaging enough that exploring the world never feels boring. Unfortunately, Avowed isn’t able to create a story that feels particularly meaningful.
The game begins with you creating a character: an Envoy sent by the emperor to find a cure for the devastating new plague known as the Dreamscourge. The Envoy is a Godlike, someone who has a physical affliction based on their patron god. At the start of the game, however, you don’t know which god has blessed you as the more plant-like nature of your design is unlike anything anyone has seen before.
While you journey across the Living Lands, you’ll learn more about the mysterious plague and uncover the truth about your past. You’ll also encounter four party members (Kai, Marius, Giatta, and Yatzli) and learn more about the political tensions that the Empire has caused throughout the world. The concept of exploring your status as a second-class citizen to the empire and a pariah for the other kingdoms is deeply compelling. That said, the game isn’t able to deliver on this potential consistently.
First, it’s worth stating that the character creation itself isn’t very good. Most of the characters you try to make look uncanny, and not in a good way. Their chins are misshapen, their eyes are crossed, and despite the numerous settings for adjustment, I never felt like they made any difference in creating a character that I felt proud of.
Further, even though the ability to choose your character’s background is compelling, I quickly found that it made no difference to the story or most characters’ interactions with the player character. The same applies to the allocation of stats like Might, Constitution, Dexterity, etc.
On the other hand, something I did like was Avowed’s unique approach to worldbuilding. A lot of times in dialogue, characters will throw out terms that will likely disarm you. These can vary from words in a different language, names of key figures, or titles of cities/regions throughout the Living Lands.
What’s great is that you can pause dialogue, not just to look back and reread some of the conversation, but also to consult a glossary for more context on these terms. It’s a great feature that makes digesting these terms far easier. Despite the clear attention to detail in regard to worldbuilding, the narrative within the world isn’t particularly compelling.
For one, the villains are extremely boring. You’ll frequently encounter a character by the name of Inquisitor Lodwyn, a zealot for a god devoted to vengeance by any means necessary. At the beginning of the game, her presence is menacing, yet as it continues, she feels like more of an afterthought rather than a rival. There are very few interactions with her and even fewer where you and the Inquisitor both get a chance to discuss each other’s goals and conflicts.
Another unengaging piece of Avowed’s narrative is the party members. Over the last few years, RPGs have excelled at creating characters that stay with you long after the credits roll, thanks to a brilliant vocal performance, a deep character arc, and fantastic dialogue. While the party members’ vocal performances are alright, their character arcs feel limited since they feel less like people and more like caricatures.
Take Marius and Kai, for instance, two characters established as having been friends for a long time. Marius feels like the typical “gruff exterior with a soft interior” archetype that has been done for years. He is abrasive and cynical, but sometimes he’ll say and do something really nice. Kai faces a similar problem: a former mercenary with a dark and troubled past isn’t exactly new territory, especially for the genre.
If these characters had good arcs and good dialogue, then these issues would be moot. However, they have neither. Their character arcs don’t have a meaningful conclusion, especially if you choose not to do the side quests. In fact, two of the party members don’t even have companion quests, and there are no romances or further connections you can build with NPCs.
More importantly, the dialogue just isn’t very good. A lot of times characters will say things that fit more into modern English slang rather than the world that Avowed has established. Characters will sometimes make “your mom” jokes, Kai will repeat the word “squad” over and over again, and Marius even has a “well, that just happened” line dialogue.
If this was a game like Borderlands, it wouldn’t feel as egregious. As this is a game with a deep fantasy setting with moments where you’re fighting people corrupted by a dark plague, though, it absolutely destroys any possible immersion.
By far and away the biggest problem with Avowed’s narrative is how it uses the concept of “player choice.” Most Western RPGs will implement player choice in different ways. Usually, they’ll have very binary choices that are affected by the character you have created, such as with Cyberpunk 2077. In other cases, they’ll have it where every single action you take has the potential to affect the world, like with Deus Ex and Dishonored.
These decisions usually create different endings, but sometimes they will also lead to different gameplay scenarios that make it so that no one playthrough in the same. In comparison, Avowed is shockingly linear. While there are a few endings, most of them only really play out through a final slideshow, revealing the consequences of your actions. These consequences are only made clear in the ending, as the game rarely responds to your choices throughout the main story.
In one case, there is a choice you are forced to make that can cost the lives of several dozens of people or destroy a sacred temple. If you choose the former, the leader of the region will curse you and tell you to get out of her sight. Yet, at a later point when you are confronting the leaders that you’ve met throughout the region, she acts like nothing ever happened.
There are no consequences for any decision you make. If you make a choice that a character disagrees with, they will bring it up in an argument but will go right back to being your friend just a few seconds later. Not only that but even the dialogue options that the player character has feel limited and lifeless.
At one point, not only did I manage to insult an NPC, but I also took their personal belongings right in front of them. Even still, the player character has no personality to showcase, nor does the NPC respond with anger at you stealing their items. With side quests, if you choose an option that negatively impacts the quest giver, they will admonish you but still give you a reward. It made the already boring quests, which were mostly relegated to fetch quests, even more pointless.
As a result of all of these elements combined, I never felt like I was immersed in the world and characters of Avowed. Instead, I felt as though I was a spectator in a story that wasn’t very interesting, with characters that weren’t very memorable. Any interest that I had in the game’s story within its first few hours quickly faded away when neither of these areas developed or improved.
So if Avowed‘s story falls flat, how does its gameplay hold up? After all, while most RPGs are known for their stories, the actual mechanics can usually help to counterbalance any of its shortcomings. While the gameplay definitely represents the best of Avowed, it still has flaws that further detract from the overall game.
A Broken Fantasy
Regardless of my reservations about Avowed‘s narrative, I have to admit that the gameplay was very satisfying and fun. While your choices in character customization have very little effect on which weapon your protagonist will use, that actually works to its benefit. I had the chance to customize my play style on the fly, adapting to whatever the situation called for.
The basic mechanics are simple. Players have access to a light attack with all of their weapons, and a heavy attack that can be used by holding down the button. There are various weapons that are exactly what you’d expect, such as a one-handed sword, a two-handed sword, an axe, a spear, a mace, and a dagger. Admittedly, these weapons are fairly boring and lack any unique capabilities that differentiate them from other fantasy titles.
What differentiates it is the more peculiar weapons, such as a musket and a wand. I did not expect to be able to use rifles and it is quite a fun novelty which creates a gameplay style unlike anything I’ve seen in most fantasy games. Though the rifles aren’t very fun to wield due to just how slow the reload is, this was one of the few moments where I really felt like I was a part of Avowed‘s world.
By far and away the best and most fun weapon in the game is the wand/grimoire. On its own, the wand is a simple projectile weapon that fires energy bolts. It does some damage, but not enough to stand up against some of the more difficult battles. That’s where the grimoire comes in, a spell book that allows you to utilize a wide variety of different elemental attacks.
There are several grimoire books you can purchase, all with a different selection of spells. Some highlight more defensive support skills while others are geared around a specific element. Experimenting with different spell books is extremely fun and made a lot of the earlier combat sections even more exciting. Even in the late game, in spite of the gameplay issues that would become clear, most encounters were usually very exhilarating.
This is when the problems begin to once again show themselves, unfortunately. The gameplay is great, yes, but the way in which most encounters play out starts to feel more and more monotonous as the game progresses. There are a few key reasons for this.
The first is within something that seems so innocuous but sticks out like a sore thumb: the HUD. There’s a lot going on in the HUD and it can become especially distracting in combat encounters. On the bottom left, there are your skills, health, magic, and the health of the party members. In the top left, there are your objectives and minimap.
All around the screen, there are markers that direct you toward your objectives and to enemies that are approaching you. When exploring the Living Lands, the HUD seems natural, but when combat encounters start, it becomes outright obnoxious. That feeling extends to another major issue, specifically with the enemies themselves.
Enemies will often feel like damage sponges, particularly as you progress through the story. They will take so much punishment and their attacks will track you, even if you try and evade them. If they’ve already started their attack animation and you move out of the way, that animation will still follow you. In some cases, it will even track you from one corner of a room to another.
A lot of dungeons feel as though the game is desperately asking you to grind in order to become strong enough, which I never felt motivated to do due to the aforementioned poor side quests. In my case, I tried to spread my skills out in order to make a well-rounded character who was prepared for anything. Even then, I still found myself floundering in combat, being downed by enemies who were impossible to beat without grinding.
The way in which you upgrade your character doesn’t help to mitigate the difficult encounters. Most of the upgrades don’t do much to make your character feel stronger, and the way you attain upgraded weapons is very frustrating. Improved weapons fall into the old RPG cliche of being exactly the same but slightly more powerful. For instance, there’s a common sword, a “fine sword”, an “exceptional sword,” and a “superb sword.”
Sadly, there are also some performance issues and glitches that further hinder the gameplay. Aside from the aforementioned tracking oddities from enemies, I also found a few moments where enemies were stuck in a wall and near impossible to attack. Sometimes loot that was required to complete a side quest was unavailable, soft-locking the mission until a patch was released.
Finally, when Avowed starts throwing more enemies at you in a single encounter, the frame rate can stutter substantially, making the visuals even harder to process. I will say that the visuals themselves are largely impressive. A lot of the scenery looks beautiful, especially with some of the castles and hubs you’ll encounter throughout the world of The Living Lands.
That said, the visuals can often feel a bit boring since a lot of the biomes feel derivative of what you’d expect from other games. There’s a desert area, a lava area, a jungle area, and so on. The visuals also fall victim to the aforementioned technical issues. A lot of the NPCs will have textures that are poorly rendered, creating a nauseating effect. There are also several cases of pop-in where trees merely a few feet in will materialize very abruptly.
Overall, despite a great foundation, the gameplay of Avowed is filled with a lot of major issues that make the middle and final areas of the game feel unpleasant to play through. While the technical problems and glitches can be fixed, the larger problems with the gameplay structure, approach to upgrading, and lack of weapon diversity further contribute to Avowed‘s biggest problem: its lack of immersion.
A Representation of the Genre’s Worst Features
Regardless of how many people have gotten tired of hearing the word, immersion is still a very important part of modern gaming. Whether it’s expressed through the way a controller rumbles when you fire a shot or if it’s the way a story will respond to your choices through dialogue and worldbuilding, these qualities can separate a good game from a bad one. Alas, Avowed falters because of how it fails to immerse the player.
Avowed‘s story and characters lack any real substance. The narrative feels disjointed and the choices that you make throughout the game aren’t reflected by the world. Even if you choose to make bad choices, characters will still treat you with respect until you reach the end. Plus, the NPCs feel limited due to the lack of a meaningful arc, engaging dialogue, and interesting companion quests.
The gameplay, regardless of a few great weapons and encounters, is undercut by poor design choices. Enemies will absorb damage and you’re forced to grind in order to make combat manageable. Weapons lack any significant upgrades; instead, you have to purchase the same weapon with a different label and better stats to make dungeons less difficult. The visuals are great, certainly, but the numerous issues with pop-in and texturing make any high points moot.
In the modern climate of RPGs that continue to reach the mainstream and push the industry forward, Avowed sticks out like a sore thumb. It embodies many of the worst qualities of the genre, and while you may find enjoyment within the game, any fun you could have will be fleeting. After all, it’s only nineteen hours, there’s no post-game, and there isn’t a new game plus.
If you’re a fan of role-playing games of all shapes and sizes, Avowed will not be the experience you are looking for. As much as it pains me to say it, if you’re looking for a game that has great characters, story, and gameplay, you may be better off looking at Obsidian’s previous titles such as Fallout: New Vegas.
