Last week, we finally got a proper look at Obsidian’s new role-playing game Avowed. It was one of the handful of exclusive Xbox games at the Developer Direct, so the spotlight was searingly on it. But while there were things I was encouraged by – I really liked the otherworldly, colourful setting – there were other things I was less convinced about, and a bit confused about. Because for all it was billed as a deep dive, this showing, I didn’t come away with a solid sense of what we’ll do in the game besides fight, so when Obsidian offered me a chance to talk to Avowed game director Carrie Patel and gameplay director Gabe Paramo afterwards, to clear a few things up, I took it.
Avowed is the first-person RPG set in the same world as Obsidian’s Pillars of Eternity series, Eora, but which plays very differently. The Pillars series is a real-time-with-pause, traditional CRPG, played from an isometric viewpoint. Avowed, on the other hand, pulls you right into the character’s body to see through their eyes, meaning you’ll both see and experience Eora in a completely new way.
However, something worth stressing is that while the of Eora is the same for the Pillars series and the Avowed games, their settings within that world don’t overlap at all. As game director Carrie Patel explains to me – she who has worked all through the Pillars series of games, by the way, so knows them very well – Avowed takes place on an island continent called the Living Lands, which is far, far away from the Eastern Reach and its nearby archipelago where the Pillars games take place. There’s a huge amount of ocean in between.
“The game of Avowed takes place entirely in the Living Lands so you won’t be visiting other locations in the world,” Patel says. “Players who are familiar with past games will certainly recognise some concepts and even a few characters – certain events that they either saw or heard about in those old games do occasionally come up in references in Avowed – but we wanted to make sure that this was an experience that players having their first adventure in the world of Eora could jump right into. So those references are there for people who are going to get them and appreciate them, but players who aren’t familiar with them will skate right on through them.”
Related to that is the question of “when does Avowed take place?” because you’ll know, if you’ve played Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire, that events of biblical proportions – wink wink nudge nudge – take place at the end. They can’t help but affect the entire world and everything living in it. However, while Avowed will, apparently, take place shortly after the events of Deadfire, Patel says it won’t narratively be connected to it. “The two storylines are very separate,” she adds – as separate as the continents they take place on. “The process that Eothas sets in motion at the end of Deadfire is not an instantaneous state-change in the world,” she explains. “It’s something that is going to take place and slowly change the world over generations, not overnight, so that gives us a bit of breathing room to give the player some other adventures in the interim.”