Avowed

This is a really good game that many people are judging negatively unfairly, either because it's not Skyrim or because it's not Pillars of Eternity. And make no mistake, it is not either of those games, and if you go into Avowed expecting either of those two games you will be disappointed. The design approach is more like the Outer Worlds. Not a true open world, very low NPC reactivity, but carefully hand designed areas that reward thorough exploration. The story is good and ties into the lore of Eora well. Combat is a bit on the simplistic side, but you can tailor the experience to consisting of low effort (guns) to more involved play (blocking, parrying, stealth attacks, etc). The dialogue is imperfect. It's well written and well voiced, but the problem comes from the writers goofing up a bit with branching dialogue paths and keeping straight what info has to be passed to the player in earlier dialogue stages for later stages to be appropriate. Interestingly that problem is more pronounced towards the earlier part of the game and lessens in the later parts, suggested the problem stemmed from inexperience and the writers got better at it as the game was developed. It's occasionally annoying, but never rises above the level of irritating and into a real problem. My first playthrough took 107 hours, and I think I saw about 95% of what the game had to offer in that time. Contrast that to the people who blew through the game in under 30 hours and were unsatisfied. This is a game that rewards the time you put into it. Run through it as quickly as you can and you'll miss a lot. TLDR: good game provided you can accept it for what it is, and not be disappointed that it isn't something it didn't claim to be.

The living lands shall always be free

这么说吧 游戏还是得自己玩了才知道好不好， 有没有政治正确？有 但是恶不恶心你？我觉得一般 几乎就是擦个基佬边然后避免被魔怔人喷的程度 优点： 画面风景一等一的美， 音乐非常沉浸， 移动迅捷流畅， 战斗爽快过瘾， 剧情庞大量足（没有永恒之柱那么庞大） 优化基本上没问题（后期会掉帧） 开箱不拖沓，初始武器可以一路升级到通关 缺点： 个别桥段有点降智， 宝箱容易让人幻听 除去战斗，玩法不丰富 拍照系统不能做表情姿势 衣服多数都有点丑

Avowed is a 5/10 game by it's own merit. As an addition to the Pillars Universe it's a 3/10. I really don't think it's bad at all and I initially wanted an Avowed 2 but I've since soured on that idea. This game is not at all worth it's launch price or it's current price. It is at most a 30$ game. As a part of the POE universe it's especially disappointing, It's narratively and mechanically neutered. I know you can't translate the entirety of a CRPG into an ARPG but there's so much of the CRPGs play options that aren't in this. Worst still is that the Narrative quality is also dipped down pretty significantly and repeats a lot of story beats from the first two games. POE was never a too complex narrative, but that's just what makes it more noticeable. Godlikes, which you are forced to play as, have been made generalized and pretty generic. The various kinds of Godlike in previous games were interesting in their design and their nature and were filled to the brim with Nine "Sub-Races" that each had their own slight variations. The version you play as does have some neat appearance options but the customization is ultimately really limited, clips into most of the hair and doesn't really fit some heads. This is all made so much worse when you meet an old style Godlike and see how neat he looks compared to you. I think it says something that you have the option to just outright hide it entirely, though the narrative will still pretend it's there. The customization options also spoil the big reveal pretty easily once the concept of a Godlike is explained to you. Pillars of Eternity 1 featured 11 unique classes, Pillars 2 had the same but also featured Multi Classing. None of my personally favorite classes that I spent the prior 2 games on are in Avowed. Avowed features 3 classes, Fighter, Ranger, and Wizard. Fighter for the most part is straight forward but also possesses tiny pieces of Barbarian and Monk featured within it but as a result you just feel like you're playing a very broken version of the original classes. Ranger is similar, Ranger has been heavily neutered and is honestly more of a Rogue based class than anything else. It also features a functionally infinite Invisibility spell and in late game I was literally just walking past all the combat encounters. Wizard is there but it's drastically reduced from it's original form in the first two games and has largely been reduced into various colors of magic Missile spam. Enemy variety is comically limited, my biggest gripe would probably be the Bears, there are no Wolves or anything adjacent to Wolves so you'll be fighting packs of Bears and when human enemies have tamed animal allies they have, bears. The Rangers ultimate ability is summoning a Bear for 30 seconds. I don't think I've ever seen an RPG forget to implement a Wolf equivalent like this. Even the world doesn't feel alive, there's not really any Simulation to it at all. If something isn't meant to do combat it's actually just a static object that talks to you, as such you can freely ransack the city on a theft spree or toss one of your hundreds of grenades you will accumulate where-ever you wish. Even if somebody walks up to you and literally threatens your life if they didn't attack you, tough, just gotta wait for the ambush they literally promised to your face. Unlike previous games you also can't modify your companions. You can unlock 4 abilities each 4 them and level them up and if you pay, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ 25$, you can dress them up in 2 unique cosmetics skins for each of them. This also means that very early on your inventory will fill up with Legendary Unique's with a storied history that the game will encourage you to ♥♥♥♥♥♥ break apart because there's nothing else to do with them. Avowed really comes off as a shallow experience, It does nothing of note and what it does well was already done better by it's own prior games. If this particular genre didn't have so many entries this would be a standout but compared to so many contemporaries it's pretty underwhelming and just seems like it's doing things everybody else has done. I can't believe this is an Obsidian product. It feels like something a new company put out. Even your first companion is just a copy of Garrus from Mass Effect, voiced by the same guy with a personality that's so similar I kept having to do a double take when I looked at him and didn't see a Turian. To some slight credit, they did later come back and try to touch up the classes and add new abilities but some of them are so pointless there's no reason to use them. Obsidians biggest contribution since release was adding the Premium Pre-Order content, two pieces of armor and 8 companion skins, for 25$. An incredibly overt greedy attempt at squeezing money out of us one last time before they ran out the door. The reaction to this was so bad they had to adjust the price.

Boring and looks and feels like something a 5 year old would create. Ok fighting mechanics though.

I am going to admit i am a fool for falling for the griefers of this game when it was first released. I hate woke ♥♥♥♥, I hate pronoun based human anything in gaming. I hate all the women rule the world and men are are crap being shoved down our throats on all media these days. I am 65 years old. I am a PC tech since 1980s, crazy gamer. I juggle about 4 - 5 games at a time with over 800GB in my Steam, Epic, Blizzard store accounts every day. Currently playing "Space Craft", "StarMiner", "Nuclear Epoch", "Windrose", "Enshrouded" .. on a rotating - "how I feel today to what i am going to play" endless cycle. I got an itch to play another "Skyrim, ESO, Fallout type RPG open world game again', .. and was bumbling about checking out heaps of streamers until i again bumped into "Avowed" once more - that I wrote off as woke stupid crap after all the reviews and game play I saw when it was released. I will be very honest here and admit since i got my internet upgraded to fibre last week to 550Mbps that I just cruised the naughty places to get a "funny" copy of the game - to test if I liked it it enough to buy - but gave up after all the links were scams. I then looked at Steam keys to see if I could buy it cheaper than Steam ( $70 AUS ) but soon noticed it wa sold out everywhere. I became intrigued of how popular it had become in the last 6 months and gave up my hunt and bought it on steam eventuallly. My wonderful new internet downloaded it in under 20 mins, the shader compilation took longer than the game download LOL ! In any case the meat of this post is " I LOVE THIS GAME ! " It looks great, it runs great, the depth of battle options , class styles , mixing them to suit is wonderful. I totally ignored all the woke crap, ignored all the ♥♥♥♥ stuff people whinged about, and frankly its all good . The world is fantasic, the fast travel is balanced, the companion system is fine - I am loving the lore, the game play the voice acting etc. YES it does not have the depth of Skyrim's details to seeing fish underwater, being able to put buckets on NCP heads and there is no NCP daily routines etc, ... but I don't care. I thought i would but I don't. The game has so much depth, looks great and so much to do that who cares what it hasn't got compared to other games, what it has got, is fantastic! - it's just so much fun to play! I am so sorry I folllowed the 'nay sayers' that turned me off the game when it was first released. Maybe the earlier first release like "No mans sky" was crap , I dont know. The latest 2.1 release maybe has a lot of things fixed that I never suffered. I see a lot of players hated the enemies respawning cleared areas, which they now have added a toggle in settings to permanantly clear areas if that offended you etc. In any case, I just wanted to apologise to Obsidian games that i followed the "pile on to hate woke ♥♥♥♥ in games" in this particular instance. Avowed is a very nice rpg open world wonderful game that deserves a lot more love and attention in 2026 than it gets. If you were like me, pondering on the fence to have a go or not, ... I absolutely reckon you give it another chance , you will love it. Avowed is worth your time and money and I suggest you watch a few streamers playing the game within the last 12 months to see how it looks and feels - i assure you, you will get the itch like i did and dive right on in : )

Not the best RPG from Obsidian, but still worth it.