It’s interesting to me how divisive reactions seem to be on Avowed, some people loving the hell out of it and some being very lukewarm. It’s not even falling along the usual IGN reviewer love vs indie reviewer scepticism divide like Starfield or Veilguard. I wonder what’s driving the difference?
The difference is what people want from their games. If you want a living open world with NPCs who react to stuff. You’re going to have a bad time with Avowed. But if you don’t care about that stuff. Avowed is the game for you.
yeah that’s the problem, when people (myself included) see a game label itself as “RPG” we kind of expect the world to be living, a world that feels like you could go anywhere and find amazing treasures, friends, enemies, anything and everything on your journey! A world where talking to any character could send you on a quest you’ll never forget
in avowed NPCs are static, there’s like 2 non-hostile animals, if something doesn’t have a healthbar your attacks phase through them, every chest has the same 4 ingredients in it, you can’t interact with the enviornment unless it’s a box, an urn, or specific vines, you can’t tell your companions to fuck off ever, if an NPC has a quest for you they’ll have an exclamation mark above their heads - which completely takes away the reason to talk with anyone else but them and vendors, and just sigh it doesn’t feel like an RPG at all to me
after i got a plot breaking bug (plot dialogue wouldn’t progress) i uninstalled it and downloaded skyrim again, which though flawed, at least it’s an RPG
Perhaps expectations of it being like some other thing instead of being its own thing.
I thought Outer Worlds was a pretty mid but Avowed is not grabbing me at all so far.
I’d say mid too about Outer Worlds, but the first half is above average IMHO. It’s the second half which felt half baked and lowered my appreciation.
I’d prefer some developers set their mind on a good/great 20h experience if they don’t have the budget for more, instead of trying to align themselves with the big players.
I didn’t get that far to be honest, the first world felt so by the numbers that I just kinda never picked it back up and looked up the rest of the story online.
I can’t say I missed much and my expectations for the next one are about as low as they can get at this point.
Unfortunate. Love obsidian but their first person games have been a bit meh
You can technically play Avowed in third person view, but I understand your point.
You may as well compare mechanics in Armored Core 6 against Dark Souls.
As someone who loves the freedom of games like TES:Morrowind, Fallout: New Vegas and the Outer Worlds this was a great way to make me lose interest in Avowed. That friendly NPCs doesn’t react at all when you steal in front of them or when you shoot them in the face sucks big time.
There is something that feels off about avowed. I only played it for a few hours, and it’s like eating generic brand chocolate.
I can’t quite put my finger on what it is about the game. Now that I think about it, the land seems kind of empty. In Skyrim, there is always something around. Even if it’s just a goat.
This game has little patches of enemies here and there. It also feels a bit linear so far. I’m probably not going to play anymore as everyone I play this, it just makes me want to play Skyrim again.
Maybe I can find a mod that gives me an avowed style want weapon. I really like how the want looks and works.
There are very different goals between these games. This is an action RPG where your whole character sheet is focused on combat, not unlike Dark Souls even in level design. The systems of Bethesda’s games have sounded good to me on paper in the past, but in execution, they’ve always felt like they aspired to be what Larian is doing now and had very few actual benefits. They let you steal anything you want in this game because it was more relevant to this game’s loop.
