Avowed preview: Classic Obsidian fantasy on a AAA budget

It looks like 2025 is going to be an excellent year for action role-playing games. We’ve already started things off with a big Dragon Age: Veilguard bang, but next year will also bring Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, Fable and the subject of today’s dissection, Avowed. Each title offers something distinct for single-player RPG fans, and Avowed is poised to provide top-tier dialogue trees and rich worldbuilding, courtesy of Fallout: New Vegas, The Outer Worlds and Pentiment studio Obsidian Entertainment. This is the studio's first tentpole title under the Xbox Game Studios banner and its first AAA fantasy game ever.

While I couldn’t determine its full scope in the preview I played this week, I’m pleased to report that so far, Avowed’s world is as gorgeous as its writing.

The preview included the game’s first two hours or so, from character creation through the initial main missions. Avowed is a spin-off of the Pillars of Eternity series and it’s set in the Living Lands, an area unexplored in the existing games, giving Obsidian a blank canvas for an epic original story. A blight called Dreamscourge is spreading across the region, infecting plants, animals and people with a prismatic fungus that induces madness, rage and death. You play as the envoy of the emperor of the Aedyr Empire, which has a deep history of invading and colonizing the surrounding lands.

Of course your protagonist is special, even by the standards of this magical world. Players are a godlike, meaning they’ve been touched by the divine and marked by facial growths of rainbow fungus. Generally, your godlike status and relationship with Aedyr automatically instills respect and suspicion in the people you meet. As you learn more about the Dreamscourge, it becomes impossible to ignore its similarities to the godlike marks you carry, and this existential terror builds beautifully in the game’s first few hours.

Are nature’s mutations madness or divinity? It’s a thin distinction with a long and dark history, and Avowed wallows in this gray area. Its first few hours introduce multiple narrative themes that can be mined throughout the game — the violence of colonization, palace intrigue, spiritual visions, insanity and religious fervor form the most prominent talking points. These arcs play out in conversations with supporting characters and in interactive pieces of lore scattered around the environments, each concept unspooling in a natural and intriguing fashion. There are plenty of opportunities in the dialogue trees to investigate these ideas and learn more about the world or your companions, with specialized responses that unlock if you have the right stats. In general, dialogue in the Avowed preview is nice and quippy, and each new character comes with a distinct, believable personality. Already, I’m curious to know more about the people of the Living Lands.

There are no strict classes in Avowed. Instead, players freely level up their abilities across fighter, ranger, and wizard using acquired skill points. There’s also a godlike tree, a page to upgrade your companions’ skillsets, and a character sheet with classic RPG attributes that you can place points into. I focused on building up my magic, health and damage, and it took a minute to find my preferred combat style. There are two weapons loadouts you can swap between on the fly, a pop-up radial with extra abilities, and four programmable spots on the D-pad. It’s a lot to manage in the frenzy of battle, but new weapons and tools are added to your inventory at a steady pace and it’s easy to experiment with different builds. In terms of weapons, I stumbled across a knife, spear, bow, shield, grimoire, wand, pistol and giant hammer, but I suspect there were even more tools hidden in the world. The bow and pistol have unlimited ammo, but reloading the pistol is a lengthy process, and the hammer is incredibly powerful, but its swing takes a moment to connect, leaving you vulnerable between hits. Combat is chaotic — especially when fighting hordes of giant spiders — but the game responds well to rapid-fire inputs and generally, each encounter feels like a real skills test.

For me, everything felt right once I found the wand. I closed out the preview with the bow in one loadout, and the grimoire and wand in the other, and I was starting to feel like a real badass. The wand is a quick midrange weapon, and combined with the rechargeable spells in the grimoire and the long range of the bow, it worked really well for my preferred fighting style. One annoyance I noted was the fact that I couldn’t draw my bow while taking sustained toxic damage, as each small hit made my character lose focus — this was a tough lesson to learn while trying to fight off a gang of rat-toothed reptilian creatures, but I definitely absorbed it.

In any RPG, I have a hard time leaving an area without smashing every vase, breaking every box and exploring every path. Avowed rewards this behavior with bits of worldbuilding, potions, strange animals, coins and tools hidden in the corners and crannies of the Living Lands. Or, sometimes, there’s just a breathtaking view. Either way, it makes me excited to see what secrets the full game is hiding.

I also played Avowed for about 45 minutes at Xbox’s Gamescom event in August, starting with a pre-built mage character in the middle of a search-and-rescue mission a few hours into the game. I had a good time flinging spells from my grimoire and chatting with characters in the caves I was exploring, but I sensed a slight disconnect that I attributed to the rushed and public nature of the demo. Now, I know what was missing: Character creation.

Rich character customization is a massive reason RPGs can feel so immersive and emotionally powerful, and it was a treat to play around with this system in Avowed’s latest preview. As a godlike, your character’s face is dotted with technicolor fungal growths, and tweaking the placement and appearance of these details was delightful, allowing my brain to build the foundations of my character’s story immediately. I chose a face with fuschia butterfly-wing paddles covering my eyes and forehead, and a crown of neon ridges draped over my skull. I then started molding my character’s backstory as a witchy scholar with a logical mind and a heart of gold, and swapped a dexterity attribute point for constitution. All of the expected customization mechanics were there, allowing me to tweak the size and shape of each facial feature, and change my hairstyle and color, skin tone, body type, voice, background, basic skills, pronouns and name. Put simply, the Monster Factory boys could have a lot of fun with this one.

That said, it’s hard to find anything ugly in Avowed. It’s shaping up to be a beautiful game, and the preview showcases expansive medieval vistas, shimmering psychedelic spores, rainbow-flecked animals and highly detailed NPCs. I was particularly impressed with the skin textures in the preview: Our main companion, Kai, has snakelike teal skin, and I very much enjoyed watching the light shine on his scales as we chatted by the fire of our party camp. Maybe I’m developing a reptile fetish, or maybe Avowed is just a really pretty game — at least when running on a PC with an RTX 4070 Super. I haven’t had the chance to try it out on an Xbox yet, and I’m curious to see how it will perform on both the Series X and Series S.

I have it on good information that Pillars of Eternity players will recognize the rainbow fungus and its infesting ways, but I don’t because I’ve never played those games. Avowed is my introduction to Obsidian’s dark fantasy universe, and I’m not alone in this position. Developers at Obsidian are keenly aware that Avowed will be the first Pillars game for many players, as art director Matt Hansen and production director Ryan Warden explained to me in August.

“We don't want players to feel like there's required reading,” Hansen said. “So everything that we do should be accessible and fun and enjoyable on its own. If you're just playing Avowed and that's the only game you play, you'll have a good time. And then on top of that, we're finding ways to weave in little winks and nods.” He specified that these take the form of documents, books and even a few familiar faces. He continued, “We just wanted to make sure that this is a game that's fun for everyone, and thankfully the world is rich enough that it's easy to inject someone in at any point. It's also part of the reason we picked the Living Lands. Its unexploded territory gives us a lot of freedom.”

Warden added, “Even on the quest front, we try to keep it enriched by lore, but you’re not completely lost when you're a new player.” He said that characters in Avowed offer more information on the history of any given situation if you’re interested in asking them for it, and there’s a lore tooltip feature that allows you to look up terms mid-conversation (which is also a thing in Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire, so it’s kind of like a meta wink).

Hansen and Warden also shared some thoughts about the scope and layout of the full game, something that can’t be conveyed in a two-hour preview.

“The game is structured similar to Outer Worlds, where there's open zones that are open-world in structure, but not one contiguous open world,” Warden said. “So it allows the critical path, the main story to be more focused and have key moments that happen at a cadence that doesn't feel weirdly paced, but it also allows a ton of freedom for player choice. You can go off and do side quests and the regions are just small enough to be manageable. You can do a lot, you can explore, but it’s not just checking off a bunch of icons. Everything is bespoke. It's hand-done. There's not much reuse of things.”

Hansen nodded and said, “Lots to explore, but you're not punished for not exploring it. I mean, frankly, I'm becoming an old man. I don't want to spend 120 hours on a game anymore. I like being able to play through our game relatively swiftly. Or, I've had playthroughs that were like six times as long as other playthroughs because I started to get into the nitty gritty. And that's a nice accommodation.”

“It can be as long as you want it to be,” Warden finished.

Avowed is due to hit Steam and Xbox Series X/S on February 18, 2025.