In this article, I’m gonna be talking about my gameplay impressions with Avowed over the last couple of days or so. I got to play about 8 to 10 hours of this during that time. Xbox was kind enough to send me over a preview build of the game to check out, so big shout-out to them, thank you for doing that. But in this article, I wanna go over what exactly Avowed is. I’m gonna give you more information about the gameplay loop, things that we couldn’t really deduce from our 30-minute play session at Gamescom, simply because there wasn’t enough time, and also because we were seeing a very small segment of the game there. 

Here we’re gonna kinda go into the open world nature of it and other mechanics in the game, so if you’ve been wondering more about Avowed, then watch on for some helpful information. Before I get into the gameplay itself, though, a couple things I wanna mention first is that this is a preview build of the game, so some of this is subject to change between now and launch in February. I think most of this is likely to remain the same, I just can’t guarantee that what I played is exactly 100% what will be there at launch. And the other thing that I wanna mention is that I’m actually more excited for Avowed than I was after playing at Gamescom, getting to see the whole game as a whole, like how it fits together, what the gameplay loop is like, I think I have a more positive impression of the game than I came away with at Gamescom, just from being able to see it and experience it myself. However, there is one major caveat to that, which I’ll go into later in this article. 

AVOWED – Exploration and The World

So the first thing that you do in the beginning of the game is you create your character during character creation. I don’t have footage of this for you, unfortunately, the character creation section is embargoed, so I can’t show it to you. But you essentially start out as a godlike, you can’t select any other race like you could in Pillars of Eternity or Pillars of Eternity 2, so you’re locked to this race. Although you can change your appearance so you don’t look like a godlike if you don’t like that visual appearance, but you will still be treated one throughout the game. And the character creator, I think, in my opinion, is solid enough for what we’re trying to do here. You don’t really see your character that much anyway, you’re not really seeing yourself in dialogues or anything like that. I think I saw my character twice in the eight hours I played, so it’s not something that I think is really important to the game itself.

But you will get to pick backgrounds that not only influence your starting stats, which you can tweak if you want afterward anyway but will also impact dialogue options. They’ll provide you with different dialogue options throughout the game. I have used this significantly as I’ve been playing, so they will play a large role in what dialogue you can say. Once you complete character creation, you’ll go through a short 15 to 30-minute prologue, depending on how fast you are. Again, this is also embargoed, so I cannot show you this. But this section of the game basically just introduces you to the mechanics of the game. And the game really opens up when you land on the dock at the Dawnshore. And this is really where the game really begins. 

So the Dawnshore is the first real open-world area of Avowed, and you can basically do whatever you want from the moment you arrive here. You will have a main objective or a main quest, but you don’t have to do it right away. You’re free to explore. You can go explore the whole town. You can go explore the wilderness outside the town. You can pick up side quests and focus on those. You can just run off and explore in any general direction, which is kind of what I did. So there’s a lot of freedom once you reach this point, which is very, very quick to get to in the game. Based on what I can tell so far because I spent all my time in the Dawnshore during this preview period, Avowed has a main map, like a main overworld map with a bunch of smaller maps inside of it. Kind of reminds me of Pillars of Eternity in that way.

Since I’ve only been to the Dawnshore, I can only theorize about this, but the Dawnshore area takes you about six to ten hours to explore, depending on what difficulty you’re playing on and how thoroughly you explore. So this is a quite sizable area. Now I don’t know if every area is this size. We saw this in the Outer Worlds, like the very first world was jam-packed full of stuff and some of them after that weren’t as fleshed out or didn’t have as many things. So I don’t know if every area is going to be this large, but I think you can speculate that Avowed is going to have a bunch of open-world maps that you fast-travel to or travel between. 

So the game isn’t completely open world, but it’s open world within the areas that you can explore, which generally I think is a good mix of open world exploration and linear gameplay. If you’re following the main story from zone to zone to zone, it kind of feels like Pillars of Eternity in my regard. And I expect the different biomes and landscapes of each zone that you can go to to be different to kind of mix up the feeling that you get. So in this Dawnshore area, you’ll spend time exploring, fighting enemies, completing quests, and speaking with NPCs. But it feels like mostly what you’ll be doing in this area from what I’ve gathered is exploring and fighting. I don’t know if this is the only zone or not that’s like this, but it seems like there’s a shift in focus with Avowed towards less questing and dialogue and more exploration compared to maybe something like the Outer Worlds. At least that’s how the Dawnshore area feels. It could be that other zones have a lot more quests and a lot less exploration. That’s really too early to say for sure. But in this very first area, you’re spending the vast majority of your time exploring and fighting.

And as much as the game gives you this initial Skyrim and Aeora vibe, it doesn’t really feel like Skyrim when playing. Maybe there are moments where you go, oh, this is kind of like Skyrim. But instead it feels more like I would say something like Dying Light. I get that the settings are completely different, but the game’s focus is running, jumping, climbing structures, finding chests and secrets a lot while you’re exploring rather than just running around the landscape and going into dungeons and things like that. That’s why I make that comparison. There are hidden chests just about everywhere in the Dawnshore.

I estimate in my playtime that I found over a hundred of them, if not more. And you’ll spend a lot of your time seeking them out and looting them, whether it’s from climbing on top of buildings or going behind things or breaking crates open to find them. For the most part, I really like this. There is a lot of exploration and a lot of reward to it, but the sheer quantity of chests is a bit overwhelming, in my opinion. It can really distract from your immersion if you’re constantly seeing like a shiny chest because they kind of glow blue, purple, gold, etc. And you find yourself looking for them everywhere because you know how many there are after a while.

And I feel like if they had probably reduced this or they do reduce this by half and put slightly better rewards inside of them, I think the exploration would be better as a whole. But generally, I find myself enjoying exploration more than not. And in terms of atmosphere of the Dawnshore area, it’s both impressive and underwhelming at the same time. I’ll try to explain. The sheer size and layout of the Dawnshore is pretty darn good, in my opinion. There are many interesting areas to explore.

There are these dungeons that have their own maps. There are ancient ruins. There’s buildings that are overgrown or guarded by enemies. There are some interesting encounters to experience as you come across them. The general like layout of the Dawnshore area is actually pretty good, and I really enjoyed exploring that area. However, the art style of the game is not what I would have chosen for Avowed. And while it looks great in some areas, generally, I don’t really like it. I wish Obsidian had kind of gone in a different direction here. This is just personal preference. I’m sure for some people this will be fine and for others, not so much. It doesn’t ruin the exploration of the game, but it does detract from it a little bit to the point where maybe it makes me want to explore a little bit less than I would have if I had chosen a different art style. 

AVOWED – Combat and Skill Customization

So besides exploration, you’re obviously going to have combat as well. And there are some interesting things about combat. When I talked about combat in my first preview after playing, you know, I kind of went pretty hard on the combat of the game. And there are some things I didn’t really understand about combat. And I will say that my initial impression of combat is probably a lot more critical than my impression now. I generally enjoy combat a bit more now than I did then. But that’s because I had more time to mess around with it.

And what I learned is that Avowed’s combat system is extremely reliant on wizard spells. These basically carry combat in this game, and I’ll try and get into why exactly that is. So the main issue and the reason that this is the case is that both ranger and fighter skill trees only have four active skills. This means if you’re playing like a pure fighter or a pure ranger or a mix of ranger and fighter without any wizard skills or spells, you will only have a total of eight skills, active skills to use throughout the course of the game. 

From what I can deduce from the skill tree, obviously you might pick up skills somewhere else. I don’t know if that’s the case. But from what I’ve played so far, you basically have those active skills to choose from. I got up to level five during the time playing for about eight hours in. I got about level five, like six or six or so. So in that time, if I had played just a ranger, I would only have two active skills, which means your gameplay gets really repetitive, right? If you’re playing like a ranger, that means that one of your skills just entangles enemies so they can’t move. And it’s on a 20-second cooldown or so.

And the other skill turns you invisible. Neither of those are particularly great in terms of mixing up your combat. If I had picked up a fighter skill, it would make me charge into combat, which is not what I want to do as a ranger. So if you are only playing a fighter or a ranger or some mix of those, your combat is kind of dull. Like there’s really nothing to do besides left click, left click or right trigger, right trigger, R1, R1, etc. Attacking enemies over and over and over. That’s basically your gameplay. But once you start mixing in wizard spells or you pick up a grimoire and it’s like your backup weapon slot and you’re casting spells on top of doing either fighter attacks with melee weapons or ranged attacks as a ranger, that’s when things really start to get interesting. 

And there are a lot of spells that synergize with this sort of gameplay. But it almost seems impossible to me to make any sort of interesting character build, you know, that maybe doesn’t just abuse something that one-shots enemies, that doesn’t have some semblance of wizard inside of it.

That is to say, you’re going to have a hybrid fighter wizard or ranger wizard or fighter ranger wizard, wizard is always probably going to be a part of your repertoire if you want to have interesting combat in this game. And that’s a huge negative, but once you figure it out, the combat gets better. And something else I really want to note is that itemization really does affect combat in a way. This is something I theorized about based on what we saw from our previous gameplay impressions.

But for instance, I have an item that makes it so that when I critically hit an enemy, it poisons them. Well, the poison when it initially triggers does a lot of damage. And since I have all my points on my build into perception, which increases crit chance, I crit quite regularly. And because I’m using a wand, I’m attacking very quickly at range. So I get a lot of crits from a safe distance. And when these trigger, they do massive damage when the poison triggers at the same time. Now, you not only get the crit damage with the poison, and I was able to kill enemies that are way higher in difficulty than me just from that random trigger of poison over and over just from one item. I can really see how getting multiple items that make a build in this game are going to make you very, very strong. 

AVOWED – Companions And Relationships

And you do have companions in combat. I only had one companion in the area that I was in, which is Kai. I really like Kai. If you didn’t know, he’s the voice actor for Kai. He’s the guy that does Garrus in Mass Effect. So he’s absolutely brilliant. Witty, dry humor the whole way. His voice is soothing. Really glad to have him. But basically in combat, what your companions are going to do is they’re going to fight. And you can use their cooldown skills. As you progress the game, you’re going to get more and more abilities for them to use. These each have their own cooldown. You’ll use them in combat. Kind of made Kai tank for me because I was playing ranged. And they do have a health bar. Unlike the game that we shall not speak of, these companions can actually fall during combat. You can revive them, pick them up off the ground, etc. So that is a thing in this game. But you can’t really outfit them with gear. I cannot find a way to outfit them with any equipment. And it doesn’t seem like you can speak to them when you’re not in your camp. Kind of not the companions you’re used to in Pillars of Eternity. 

In Pillars of Eternity, you can basically talk to them whenever you want. You can outfit their gear and set up their AI. There’s very, very limited function when it comes to your companions in this game. And it has been very, we’ll call it streamlined for lack of a better word. And I’m not sure I really like that too much. It’s too simplified in my opinion. But it nonetheless, it’s better than the game we shall not name. And obviously, when you’re not fighting or exploring, you’re going to be talking to NPCs. And you’re going to be picking up quests and doing their quests. The quests themselves seem to be interesting so far. And they do seem to have lots and lots of dialogue options that have drastically different outcomes. 

One of the quests I did during this preview session was the same quest that I played during the Gamescom preview. And I even got a different outcome. I’ve seen that quest, like three different outcomes. I think this was the fourth one, which was completely different. I did something absolutely absurd that I don’t even know what the ramifications of it are going to be throughout the game, which is a good feeling. You know you did something that’s going to create an effect at some future point in time. It’s very clear, but you don’t know what it is. And I really like to see that so early on in this game. And there are absolutely a ton of dialogue options between the stats that you have, your background, things like that. So you’re going to have a lot of things you can do. And obviously, it shows you the things you don’t meet the requirements for that you can’t say. I like that.

Some of these are just different ways of saying things. But there’s a lot of circumstances where you can get a positive outcome if you meet the requirements, which I generally like. The voice acting of the game is top notch. The character models are kind of middle of the road. People will probably say they look stiff and stuff like that. I don’t mind it so much because the voice acting is pretty good. But one thing I will say is that it seems like so far I’ve talked to a lot less NPCs than I was expecting for an Obsidian RPG. It seems like they’re relying more on lore notes and exploration for their storytelling than maybe in previous titles that they’ve done. And I’m not sure how I feel about this as a whole. We’ll have to see how the game progresses because, again, it could just be this area is lighter on that sort of content. And then maybe if you get to a major, major city, then there are more NPCs to talk to, more dialogue and stuff. But the dialogue is really good. 

Voice acting is really good. It’s kind of on par with what you would expect from Obsidian. So overall, I’m enjoying the game a lot more than I thought I would based on my initial impression. It’s growing on me. The more I play, the more I want to play. I think that’s a good sign. There are ups and downs in it. Again, I don’t really like the art style of the game, but it is growing on me. I think that’s a really good sign. The more you understand the systems and mechanics and combat, the more enjoyable it becomes.

Final Thoughts

But the big caveat that I mentioned earlier that I want to go into is that the performance of this game is really, really bad. I played the entire demo period on a 3080 Ti with an i9-12900K processor with 64 gigabytes of RAM. And with everything on the highest settings at 1440p, I was hovering between 35 and 75 FPS, depending on where I was. Usually in town, it would go down into the mid-40s or maybe lower in some areas. And usually, when you’re out on the landscape exploring, it would go into the high 70s. But that is a pretty bad performance for the PC that I’m running. 

I realize this is not a top-of-the-line PC anymore, but this is still a PC that should get better performance than this, in my opinion, considering the graphics of this game. And I really worry about people that have lower-performance PCs and people playing on Xbox. As we know, Xbox is capped at 30 FPS. I feel like the performance of this game as a whole is generally going to be pretty poor for people. Now, when I played, even with the FPS fluctuating between 35 and 75, I didn’t really notice much. It didn’t affect my gameplay much. There were maybe a couple of big slowdowns in very specific places in town. But outside, even if it was at 50, I didn’t really notice the combat of the game exploration. Didn’t really matter that much to me. So that’s the good news. But the bad news is, you know, if you’re playing a mid-tier PC or you’re playing on console, I don’t know how your performance is going to be. And this was a consideration I had after my initial gameplay preview. And it is still a very serious consideration I have at this point. 

So that kind of wraps up what I know about Avowed so far. If you guys have other questions, there are probably things I forgot to say. You can leave them in the comments and I’ll try and answer them for you. I am actually more looking forward to this game than I was. I do have a good enough PC. This isn’t even my best PC that I can play this game on. So I know it’ll probably run fine for me. But I am concerned how it will play for other people. What do you guys make of this so far? What do you make of the mechanics of the game? Are you more excited hearing about the mechanics? Are you less excited hearing about the performance? Let me know in the comments below.