Games That Respect Your Time: The Definitive Review
My Vow to Avowed, and How. Wow.
In a week when discourse watchers are focused on nothing other than Assassins Creed: Shadows, I am still very much wandering the Living Lands as I continue my leisurely meander through Avowed. I really enjoyed Bertie’s interview with Carrie Patel on Eurogamer, wherein Avowed’s director explains a fair bit about the game’s history and a touch about its pleasing disposition. The way Avowed swayed through various embryonic forms before coalescing into an expanded, fantasy-themed Outer Worlds perhaps explains its wonderfully smooth veneer - a combo of iteration and experience certainly seems to have paid dividends. While the interview does dig nicely into some of the weeds, it misses Avowed’s most pleasing aspect - the way it respects the player’s time.
It was after some hard reboot or other that my beloved Series S’s auto resume for Avowed had flaked out, prompting a cold load. It was during this that I realised you can skip every single logo. Yah, even the Unreal one. Once they start flashing, you can jump to the main menu almost instantly. Then there’s the other ambient functionalities that set about making your life so much easier. For example, whenever you’re allowed to fast travel, you can zip directly to camp and get your upgradin’ and cookin’ and fraternisin’ on before gaining a full rest. This might seem fairly humdrum, but the neat part is that on leaving camp, you can return to your original location. That’s right, the point you fast-travelled from. It’s a lovely bit of Quality of Life consideration that’s easily missed and once again, illustrates the uncanny taste that seeps through every aspect of the game. This was a key virtue of Avowed that I couldn’t stop mentioning in my original review, and it remains my most admired aspect; the taste with which it entertains the agreeable player. The deeper I delved, the more Avowed offered up delight. Not long after writing that first piece I found a cave - that without a word of a lie - was the most beautiful cave I’d ever seen in a videogame. Boom! Right there, absolute joy, contact with the sublime. This kind of delight also came as I coalesced a reasonably workable combat style. Part archer, part dagger-rogue, a bit of point-spending let me build a thoroughly enjoyable fighting style that merged distance sniping with extremely intimate stabbing, only with magic on top. And it never gets old when you freeze an enemy in place and a companion whacks them into a million shattered shards for the kill. It feels accidental, but also by design. Most of all, it feels graceful. Elegant. Refined, even.
Avowed did flag ever so slightly in its second map. There was perhaps too deep a slog or two into the forests, or an unwelcome trudge through the fungi-infested farmlands to keep up the momentum that had propelled me through Dawnshore.1 The Emerald Stair is often just as lovely to traverse but the enemy count seems higher, encounters less avoidable perhaps, and these combat distractions serve to take the shine off the pure joys of wandering, although just a little. I’d also swerved back onto S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 for a weekend when Avowed was downloading a colossal update, and found myself seduced once again by its utterly unique atmosphere and grit. Yet after returning to finish a couple of those far-flung quests and visit the map’s narrative locus, Avowed won me back. It really is that pleasant a jaunt. However I do feel the pull of other games on the horizon. Atomfall still is booked in for a day-one session with me, whether it’s a triumph or a disaster. Likewise Assassin’s Creed Shadows might be worth a look, although I really should think about at least trying Star Wars Outlaws2 or, you know, something brilliant that I should have fucking finished a long fucking time ago, like poor old Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth. That Avowed has to compete with such pulls and pushes is a bit saddening, as despite its joyfulness, there’s a sense that its overall disposition makes it a fantastic candidate for life on the eternal backburner when glittery new things arrive. That sense it carries where nothing is too pressing, where you’re free to play in the manner (and pace) that you may choose might be its undoing. And hence, I need to vow to complete Avowed. It absolutely deserves the dedication. It deserves my time precisely because of how it respects it. I rarely feel frustrated at quest endings or explorative sojourns into the environment, because the game is so wonderfully built to make that shit fun and rewarding, and crucially it meters those rewards to serve as a carrot with just the right sweetness. There’s that deployment of taste again. The Emerald Stair also ended with a narrative beat that landed at perhaps just the right time; it presents an event horizon crossed, an enemy to righteously loathe. For those who don’t want spoilers, I’d say look away now, but for me it was a Nipton Moment, albeit framed with far less real-world dread at the horrors humans can inflict upon humans. That said, the readings one can undertake of the involved parties may match contemporary concerns and resonate with an unexpected profundity. It caught me by surprise partially because it was supposed to, but also because of that coincident homology to events in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 that carry a similar resonance. In Avowed it’s softer, less specific, but rage-fodder nonetheless and certainly determinant in providing a fresh kick to the overall journey’s momentum. In one fell narrative sweep, Avowed took on a moral dimension, a certain flavour of purpose, that much to my shame, I’d happily overlooked in the previous map. I guess I was played like a fiddle, by fiddlers with expertise in the matter.
As I saw Avowed slip away from the white-hot edge of the discourse, I saw a few clips of podcast discussions where gruff critics, hewn from a certain stone, were trying to place it in the grand hierarchy of open world RPGs. The comparisons were ultimately trite, that it would hardly warrant mentioning if it wasn’t for how stupendously wrong they were. Of course, the debate was where Avowed sits compared to Skyrim or The Witcher 3, with a couple of commenters trying to shoehorn in Kingdom Come: Deliverance II. I think a surface read is all it takes to think Avowed has to prove itself against any of those. It doesn’t. It dances to its own tune, which is undeniably Obsidian’s own. What surprised me was the lack of connecting Avowed with its most obvious sibling, The Outer Worlds, for surely anyone versed with both would immediately see the continuum and the progress that Avowed displays. Yet in playing deeper, I found myself recalling again the other games mentioned in my original review - the Far Cries and the Mass Effects, but also touching on more distant relatives. There is something of the Alpha Protocol in some of its complexities, in the sense of attempting something braver than the norm, in order to establish a possible path ahead. The connection between The Outer Worlds and Avowed not only illustrates the development of a template, but of something that feels sustainable. As I mentioned previously, Avowed has the vibe of fitting its world so much better than its predecessor, and this success cements my belief that what it really represents is the Obsidian Open World RPG as opposed to the Bethesda one. It’s the arrival of something more modular than behemothic, more artisan than workmanlike. Skyrim seems quite roughly hewn in so many ways that Avowed is elegant, and I sometimes get the mad idea that if you carried out some XOR-like logical operation with the two, the best possible game ever made would emerge. Oops, I’ve gone and compared it to Skyrim like a trite rage-baiter, only it’s not about dominance or tier listings, it’s about the good of the genre. It’s about that sage modesty which stops Avowed’s ambition from outstripping its ability, and how little it asks you to forgive, and how little you have to overlook. Again, that sense that this kind of Obsidian game, this complexity of systome, this intricacy of environment, this well-deployed narrative, is sustainable. And perhaps that makes it sustainable for the industry as a whole. We can only hope, right?
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That said, I did jump down a massive hole and had a fucking whale of a time in there.
Who am I kidding? They're both going to end up on Game Pass at some point and we all know it.