Avowed Preview | The Nexus

I’ve got to preface this impressions piece by highlighting several technical issues in the Avowed preview build, coupled with the brief access period, limited my playtime to the prologue region. However, after playing through Avowed’s prologue twice, with two different character builds, Obsidian seems to be sticking to what they know best – and what the industry desperately needs – dense, diverse, and replayable games, not sprawling and repetitive ones that’ll burn you out long before the end.

Although Avowed, a first-person action-RPG, is set in the same universe as the Pillars of Eternity classic isometric RPGs, Obsidian has wisely developed it as standalone spin-off that requires no prior knowledge. The opening scenes are dense with exposition and lore, and they’ll fill you in on the nature of Eora, the hands-on nature of the realms’ many gods, and the concept of “The Wheel” – an endless cycle that sees souls reborn again and again.

Your character is an Aedyrian envoy, sailing north to investigate a plague spreading through a diverse and wild frontier region known as The Living Lands. A few major settlements belong to competing colonial powers, while the diverse locals are evasive about their origins. What is certain is that a plague of some sort appears to be corrupting local flora and fauna into dangerous variants and affecting the minds of sentient species. The premise gave me strong Greedfall vibes, which I always consider a good thing.

Your character is an Aedyrian envoy, sailing north to investigate a plague spreading through a diverse and wild frontier region known as The Living Lands.

In classic video game fashion, the ship is attacked, runs aground, and your adventure begins short on supplies, allies, and no idea of who your enemies are. It’s the perfect setup to ensure new players don’t feel they’re missing out on any essential lore but, in classic Obsidian-style, there’s no shortage of lengthy dialogue trees to explore and plenty of journal entries for those looking to dig deeper into the lore.

Based on the opening hour, Avowed’s gameplay loop will be comfortingly familiar to fans of The Outer Worlds or, if you go even further back, Fallout: New Vegas. Most significantly, this isn’t another RPG where your role-playing amounts to choosing between a warrior, rogue, or mage to define your combat style, with in-game dialogue choices simply reduced to a succession of binary player choices.

Given the player’s predefined status as an Aedyrian envoy, Avowed offers a creative range of cosmetic options before you define your character background and starting attributes. It’s a limited but significant start, as while your character can grow into any class or multi-class role, the game appears to be chock-full of background and attribute checks. It’s not that all conversations can lead to wildly different outcomes, but every response feels significant and shifts the conversation forward on different trajectories. You’re not just exhausting exposition options before selecting the only option that’ll progress the story.

Given the player’s predefined status as an Aedyrian envoy, Avowed offers a creative range of cosmetic options before you define your character background and starting attributes.

As an example, your early predicament leaves you in the company of one skittish survivor and a seemingly hostile fort full of potential enemies. As a dextrous scout, more comfortable in the wilds than a city, the conversation centred on whether the fort was taken and how hostile forces may have infiltrated it. As an intelligent royal archivist, the conversation instead focused on coming up with a plan to survive and get in contact with the local embassy. In both situations, by demonstrating a plan of action and passing a skill check, the surviving crew member agreed to accompany me. Similar outcome but a satisfyingly different context.

At that point, traversing the world, looting chests for gear and potions, and engaging in combat followed a familiar rhythm. As a more railroaded prologue sequence, it was hard to assess the true scope of environments, but even this early sequence demonstrated several routes into the fort – one direct, one stealthy – and several optional areas. One of my favourite things about this genre is that there’s no shortage of environmental storytelling, hidden stashes, and optional notes tucked away in corners for those who enjoy thorough exploration.

The early combat felt fine, albeit limited by my low level and barren inventory, but it followed a very traditional structure of trading blows, combat experience slowly raising your level, and tiered equipment providing attack and defence bonusses. The release version promises a range of swords, shields, spells, bows, and guns, with the option for more tactical choices through a simple stealth system and the ability to lay traps.

At that point, traversing the world, looting chests for gear and potions, and engaging in combat followed a familiar rhythm.

Of course, Obsidian games have always often had excellent companions with their own backstories, quests, player interactions, and combat abilities to make your life easier. Sadly, my furry blue companion had little to say during the prologue nor did much beyond drawing aggro, so it remains to be seen how they compare to the high bar set by The Outer Worlds.

As preview builds are normally a few updates behind, the February 2025 release date seems plausible as Avowed was scalable and looked good even on my ageing gaming laptop (i7-11370H/RTX3070/16GB RAM).

The prologue region suggests a world that’s strikingly vibrant and often almost alien in design, while enabling ray-traced lighting refines the visuals but also doesn’t feel like a mandatory requirement for a good experience. Enabling DLSS quality mode, tweaking settings, and plugging in a gamepad, 1080/30fps with ray-tracing and higher settings was stable, while 1080/60 without ray-tracing and lower settings felt better and still looked good. It bodes well for the Xbox Series X and S versions.

After several years packed with massive AAA games that, irrespective of their other qualities consume far more time than their mechanics and worlds facilitate, I can’t wait for Avowed. If it’s anything like The Outer Worlds, it’ll offer a dense but epic action-RPG that encourages, rewards, and sometimes punishes your role-playing choices, all the while providing a fun combat system and dense, detailed world to explore.

Avowed launches on 13 February 2025 for Xbox Series X/S and PC. It also launches day one on Xbox Game Pass.

*Avowed Preview code provided by Xbox and Obsidian Entertainment