A giant beetle charged toward me, and as it stepped into a big puddle in the center of the room, I snagged it with a burst of magical vines that appeared beneath its feet. Then I blasted the creature with one of my dual flintlock pistols--this one charged with electricity--which sent arcs down through the water, shocking a few skeletons that were joining the fray behind it. As they looked to overwhelm me, I unloaded with both my pistols, zipped a little sideways with a dodge, and clambered away to unload on them before they could slice me up.
One of the highlights of my hands-on time with Avowed, Obsidian Entertainment's upcoming first-person RPG, is its breezy combat and combination of elements. The game has seen some comparison to The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and with a weapon in each hand, it feels on point. Mixing and matching different play styles, like blasting away with elemental pistols, sneaking around with a bow, or dipping into a pocket to pull out explosive jars to chuck into a melee, felt pretty good in my short look at the game. That brief time also highlighted that the options I tried only seem to scratch the surface of what Obsidian is going for.
Obsidian showed off an hour-long look at Avowed at an Xbox event in Los Angeles that mirrors what is available this week during Gamescom in Cologne, Germany. The preview build picks up early on in the proceedings as you search for a missing expedition from the Aedyran Empire that has entered the islands of the Living Lands, the game's bright and deadly setting. Their path took me--the Aedyran Empire's envoy--into a huge underground cave system, alongside a companion character named Kai.
As Avowed's trailers have shown, the Envoy's job is to find the cause of a mysterious illness plaguing the Living Lands called the Dream Scourge. Evidence of the sickness, which infects people and animals and can also be seen spreading across the land as a sort of fungus, keeps appearing even deep underground--but what exactly it is or does was a mystery in this early part of the game.
The first thing I thought of when I originally saw Avowed's cover art was Annihilation, both the book by author Jeff VanderMeer and the movie adaptation directed by Alex Garland. Venturing through the demo continues that impression; the demo takes place in a bright, beautiful underground cave, full of plants and flowing water, and interspersed with bioluminescent flora.
Art director Matt Hansen and production designer Ryan Warden lit up when I mentioned Annihilation during an interview after playing the demo. Hansen said that, of course, everyone working on the game has brought a ton of different inspirations to it, but Annihilation was a big one.
"It's a very vibrant world, and that was a very intentional decision on our part, because when you allow yourself access to that, you can explore the full range of color psychology, and, you know, vibrant colors tend to be dangerous. What does that mean if we really play into that?" Hansen said. "And with trying to sell [that] the Living Lands is arguably the most dangerous place in Eora, we went big on color, but that's also an interesting juxtaposition to a lot of really grim story that you're going to encounter over the life of the game."
In both the book and movie, a strange phenomenon has cordoned off a piece of land that comes to be known as Area X, and an expedition is sent in to study it, with strange and horrific results. To enter the area, the group has to pass through a strange, inexplicable barrier called the Shimmer in the movie.
"What I really like about that is going back to this concept of duality and light and dark," Warden said. "There's that hesitation right as the group is about to enter the Shimmer in Annihilation. There's that moment where they're all just sort of looking at each other, and you get the sense of, okay, it's almost like nervousness, but also excitement, at going into something that's brand new, but also, I don't know what's lurking behind there. And that's kind of what we've got with the danger of the Living Lands, or certainly something that we've tried to bring out. It's that sense of, if you get an embrace from a loved one, that's a very nice thing. If you get an embrace from a python, that is maybe not as good of a thing. And so, is it an embrace? Is it a stranglehold? And that sort of a little bit of salt with your sugar helps really sell the overall thing."
Avowed is part of the universe of Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity series, but it feels a lot more like the studio's other recent RPG, The Outer Worlds, in how it plays. That's not just because of the first-person perspective that defines both Avowed and The Outer Worlds, as compared to Pillars' isometric viewpoint. Avowed is also faster and more visceral in terms of how it plays. Moving through the cave requires a lot of jumping over gaps and climbing up ledges, and while the game doesn't have a full free-running, Assassin's Creed-like feel, this demo shows off how much verticality and traversal are part of the world design.
"Working on The Outer Worlds, we started to realize, 'Hey, we can go a lot more vertical with the game,'" art director Matt Hansen told me in an interview. "We can do a lot more with traversal. And that's new for us as a studio; we've not really done that before. And so getting to experiment with that and also encounter pitfalls and figure out, 'Okay, that didn't quite work, what could we do to really make it sing?' And I mean, I didn't really like traversal in The Outer Worlds, I'm gonna be totally honest. It's fine, there's nothing wrong with it, but I didn't feel momentum in the way that I do in Avowed, and that was one of the things that we really want to make sure that we improved upon."
Momentum is one of the surprising elements of how Avowed feels moment-to-moment, in fact, and it feels like Obsidian has put a premium on movement as part of combat and exploration. There are the running, jumping, and platforming aspects, but you also have a short-range dodge move you can use in combat to avoid taking a hit or to sidestep an enemy. And like a lot of games, Avowed lets you slide from a sprint. Hansen noted that the slide was something that's not strictly necessary as part of combat or movement, but it's fun, so Obsidian put it in--and people playing the game have been excited to discover the ability to slide as they play.
"When you're an isometric, top-down game, it's pretty slow by comparison, especially when it's real-time with pause, like Pillars was, and so having our gameplay team really dig in hard to what makes those moments fun was an interesting challenge for us," Hansen said. "It's a lot of new territory--like we've had first-person combat in games before, but we really wanted to dig into, 'What do games outside of genre do that work so well, and which of those things can we reasonably pull in?'"
Delving deeper into the cave, our demo had us spending a lot of time with companion Kai--notably voiced by Brendan Keener, who played Garrus in the Mass Effect games. Kai comments pretty liberally on the proceedings, fleshing out his character and drawing attention to the evidence we find as we make our way deeper into the cave. He notes that there are a lot of signs of life here, and not just those left behind by the expedition. This place is also dangerous, in part because of the xaurips--hostile humanoid lizard people we keep finding along the way. It's also outfitted with traps, several of which caught curious or incautious expeditioners.
We eventually stumble across a survivor of those traps and hostile creatures, a kid named Caedmon, who, alongside Kai's commentary, gives a sense of Avowed's tone. Bleeding and maybe dying of his injuries, the first thing Caedmon does is lament that he's going to die a virgin. Obsidian fans will be instantly familiar with what's on offer here, with multiple dialogue options for how you deal with Caedmon, including several that depend on your character, like the stats you've focused on or the backstory you've chosen in character creation.
You can help Caedmon out, and he gives you information about what happened to the expedition if you do. On the other hand, you can tell him to suck it up and get over his life-threatening injuries, and as was demonstrated by another journalist during our session, Caedmon will actually (and somewhat hilariously) just... die.
Caedmon directed us to Sargamis, an oracle and worshiper of the god Eothas and, apparently, the guy responsible for the underground temple and the traps. Sargamis has little in the way of information about the expedition, but he sends you on a side quest that dovetails with your search, asking you to retrieve something called the Splinter of Eothas from deeper in the cave. That artifact is possibly what the expedition members were after as they proceeded, and if you bring it back to Sargamis, he'll use it to try to summon and trap Eothas in a big statue. There's a bunch of lore surrounding this whole quest, and one notable element of Avowed is how tooltips will let you pull up short glossary entries alongside dialogue for a quick explanation of what key terms mean, to help you follow along.
The highlight of the quest with Sargamis is that, if you bring back the splinter and give it to him, he tries to use a series of magical and scientific devices to summon his god and seemingly fails. Then he has a suggestion: You should sacrifice your soul to the statue to draw Eothas into it. The dialogue options give you the chance to do that, if you really want to, but it sounds like a terrible idea. Naturally, as this is an Obsidian game, you can convince Sargamis to use his own soul on the statue instead. While you can warn Sargamis that you don't think this is going to work, he does it anyway, and it goes exactly as expected. So if you make the right choices, that's both characters you meet dying soon after talking to you.
The interactions with Caedmon and Sargamis have their funny moments, but as Hansen and Warden told me, Avowed isn't really a comedic game in the same sense as the satirical The Outer Worlds is. The tone is more in line with Pillars of Eternity--funny at times, and pretty dark at others.
"[The Pillars of Eternity game] are very much games for adults, but adults also like to have a laugh, right? And so we try to punctuate the serious tone of a lot of things with levity, both in terms of the writing, but also the visual storytelling," Hansen said. "It's definitely not a comedy game, but I think just like in real life, when faced with incredible tragedy and incredible adversity and really challenging situations, people turn to comedy a lot as a defense mechanism, as a release of all of that stress, and we know that that's a powerful component of human psychology. ... It's a game of contrasts, and things feel bigger when they're contrasted against their opposite. Black is blacker if you've just been hit with a bright light. And that's true of narrative tone as well."
Not far beyond the oracle and his statue, after another big combat encounter with some rather large beetles, you eventually do find the Splinter of Eothas sitting and waiting on an altar--although there's still no sign of expedition. Taking it causes an earthquake to shake the cave like something out of Indiana Jones, followed by a boss fight with a big, barbarian-like skeleton called the Godless Executioner.
The big guy hits hard with a two-handed sword, requiring you to dodge away to avoid taking a bunch of damage from his hits, but the tough element of this fight is actually in figuring out your priorities. Before long, the Godless Executioner is joined by a bunch of other skeletons, including archers, fighters carrying swords and shields, and a priest who will heal the boss continually during the fight. You can't make any progress until the priest goes down, but fighting the boss is tough while getting sniped by the archers, too. Luckily, Kai is here to help draw the boss's ire while you mop up all the little guys around the room.
I played this sequence twice with two different builds. The first time, I did it with the dual-pistol character, which Obsidian helpfully referred to as a "ranger" in the save file, who also sported a bow for stealthy snipes and a spell for going invisible to get out of danger. The second time, I was on the "barbarian" file, wielding a big, two-handed club and doing big damage to the boss with heavy melee attacks.
Though Obsidian put us into save files with classic RPG character types like ranger and barbarian, Warden said that one of the major elements of Avowed is that it doesn't have traditional character classes. These character builds were created for the sake of these demos to give a sense of the different approaches you can take in the game (there was also a magic-focused character I saw a bit in action but didn't get to play).
"One of the things that's also kind of novel about this game, certainly in comparison to the Pillars games, is the fact that it's a classless game," Warden explained. "You don't jump into character creation [and] press A on 'barbarian.' Here, it's up to you. You can roll around with a sword and board, you could do sword and pistol, you could do wand and pistol. You could do basically any combination that you can come up with."
Replayability and the ability for players to find different pathways through the game are also major focuses of what Obsidian is going for with Avowed, Warden said. He mentioned that despite playing through the preview build a huge number of times, he often was surprised by the different ways you could take through it. As an example, he mentioned another player who skipped one of the major combat encounters in the demo--the fight with the beetles--by using the invisibility spell to slip by them. Warden said he expected the player would have to deal with that combat encounter on their way back out of the cave. But it turns out, they never had to, because the earthquake triggered by grabbing the Splinter of Eothas floods that cavern, something he hadn't considered. You can even swim down and find all the drowned bugs, he said.
Watching other people run through the demo, it's clear that it is a bit shorter than I realized. You can clear the whole thing in a matter of minutes if you're quick about it and ignore diversions. But I spent an hour on the cavern quest, reading lore, checking corners, and finding side doors and secret locations opened by shooting hidden switches. The demo wasn't long, but it was dense with things to see and do.
I asked Hansen and Warden about Obsidian's approach to Avowed, which isn't quite a full open-world game such as Skyrim--the developers instead are calling it "open zone," with the map made up of several large but discrete areas to explore. Taking that not-quite huge open-world approach, they said, allowed Obsidian to up the density on the content within Avowed, much like in the demo's cave.
"You may have noticed the game is super dense with visual interest, with things to do, all of that," Hansen said. "The bigger the level is, the harder it is to actually have that density and have it run. And we wanted to make sure that we were focusing on the content and making the content as good as possible, and not have to worry as much about trimming back so much to accommodate a big open world."
"Our zones are still huge," Warden added. "There are some of them that are absurdly large."
The demo ended soon after I returned to Sargamis with the Splinter (in fact, the power to game stations went out just before he surrendered his soul to the statue). I still have no idea what happened to the expedition. But delving into notes and books, and talking to the demo's two characters, I got an intriguing look at the expansive depth of the Living Lands. Though my look at the game was brief, it was full of potential, with fun and funny moments and fascinating characters, a ton of deep lore, and a fast, dynamic combat system underpinning it all. Avowed seems to contain all the things that make Obsidian's RPGs deep, fascinating experiences, while taking a major step forward for the studio. Just how big a step it is will become clearer when the game releases in February 2025 on PC, Xbox Series X|S, and Xbox Game Pass.
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