Avowed might have lost me

I see it in my dreams everynight

In the many years it has been since the hey day of Bethesda and the release of Skyrim, it's been like sitting on a bed of needles waiting for the next aspirant to seize the throne of western action RPG king. Sure, we get all of those ceaseless faux-RPGs that stitch together a sad levelling chart and call that 'Role Playing Mechanics' (Looking at you; Assassin's Creed) but no one really has what it takes to match up with Bethesda, which I guess tracks given how simply huge Bethesda is. Of course, some of us remember the majesty of Fallout New Vegas, a game which took the engine Bethesda built for 3 and reshaped it into a compelling world with rich factions and fertile conflicts- and that's what put Obsidian at the top of our list for the next Bethesda competitor. The Outer Worlds felt like their warm-up to one day making a proper open world RPG and the reveal of Avowed sold the world on the fact that this was it- the blow-out Obsidian game we've all been waiting for!

And it isn't. A full blown open RPG, that is. Avowed is an adaptation of the Pillars of the Eternity world and systems to an RPG more in the vein of The Outer Worlds; and to be honest that kind of sucks the excitement I had built for this game right out of the window. And I know- it's my fault for getting so worked up, but what do you expect? The pedigree of Obsidian is well know, they've been getting more and more ambitious with their games, Avowed was announced with a grand sweeping cinematic of a trailer that purposefully employed sweeping land-covering shots as though to imply our play space would be grand and open... but it seems that was all a red herring. Avowed is constrained, act based, focused with choice and consequence- nothing bad at all, to be clear- just oddly safe for a company that seems keen on pushing itself in so many aspects.

That is to say, we know they can make games like this! The Outer Worlds is already out and we know The Outer Worlds 2 is in the pipeline; so what new facet of creation will Avowed push? We've seen Obsidian cover long dead RPG subgenres and bring them back into vogue, get experimental with smaller internal projects that both saw some commercial success and pushed one simplified CRPG which to this day I argue is criminally underrated. (Justice for 'Tyranny!') Avowed kind of reminds me of Bioware or Telltale games when they were entering their 'rut' phase. It's an instance of- "Oh, it's another *insert studio here* style game. I pretty much know exactly what experience I'm going to get here, so I'll base my expectations accordingly." And no, I'm not ever going to compare such a phase with whatever terminal malaise that Ubisoft is going through right now-  these studios still have some creative spirit left.

Out of everything we've heard since the gameplay trailer, none of it excites me or sells the idea that this is Obsidian's biggest project yet- if that's even an idea they want to sell to begin with. We know that the narrative isn't going to focus around a Watcher, but we're still going to be following some sort of soul-themed malady that has afflicted the living lands. Maybe it's my misgivings tainting my perception, but instinctually I hear that and roll my eyes. "Another soul-based plotline? Does anything not soul-themed ever threaten this damned world?" It's like how 'Bad Daedra' is the cause of most Elder Scrolls evils past Morrowind, or how the bad guy in every 'original' LOTR adaptation is always some incarnation of Sauron- it's taking a wide and open fictional world and limiting it down to the same few reoccurring plotthreads.

We will have companions on our journey but, curiously, they won't be optional members of our journey but mandatory appends to the adventure. In their defence Obsidian have claimed that this allows these characters to be central to the narrative, but lacking any comparative for companions so essential they can't be optional it's hard to know how to take these. Do they mean this is like Dragon Age: Inquisition wherein each companion was significantly tied to a major world faction? Or maybe like Mass Effect 2 in which the entire first act was dedicated to finding and recruiting specialists for some sort of job? Because neither of those two options preclude going solo whatsoever, although I will acknowledge that later Bioware games really did nail how to have companion interactions reinforce the idea of a familial unit. But then again, Tyranny wasn't so bad at that either and companions were still optional in that game. Strange news, I'm still processing.

But the most troubling news we've heard on the game so far comes down to the class system. Much ado was made about an action adventure based off the surprisingly in-depth character building of Pillars, but it seems that is going to serve as merely a base template for Avowed's 'flexible class' system. Yes, it's another one of those games where you build a class by picking as you go, slightly betraying the cohesion of the world space. Spell casters no longer require a lifetime of study, you can pull that off with a mild fancy to magical talent. I know several DnD adaptations over the years have played it fast and loose with classes and level building, but I really did kind of hope a property looked over by a single caretaker would have a stauncher backbone for keeping it's world sensible.

It's not that a flexible class system can't work, it's that the replay value of these fundamentally different styles of playing defined classes always feels more significant than deciding half-way through a game that you're sick of a wand and starting to beat people around the head instead. Typically this manifests as underbaked class architypes that aren't quite all-around satisfying to mainline, necessitating players to become a sort of 'jack of all trades' and for every 'build' to essentially end up roughly the same. Just like how every Fallout or Elder Scrolls character ends up with the same rough stats at some point. Cyberpunk did prove me wrong with it's more constrained approach to this ideal, but that game has some of the best action RPG combat ever made, I struggle to see a world where Avowed matches that.

I don't want to be pessimistic about Avowed, I really wanted to love this game: but it isn't what I was looking for out of a studio I expected the world from. Now to be fair, I thought the same thing about Starfield and have recently performed a full 180 on my feelings there- but I just don't think Avowed is as ambitious in the areas I wanted Obsidian to push in.  I suppose it's my own fault, expecting Obsidian to expand into becoming a AAA studio out of nowhere when at this point I'm starting to see that's not only not where they're at, that's not even what the studio wants. I expected them to pick up after an infirm Bethesda flounders or bloats itself too large, but Obsidian have their hearts elsewhere, which is probably why they're reticent to take on a Fallout project. Avowed will probably still be a solid game, just like The Outer Worlds was: I just hope it leaves more of an impact on me than that game did.