„Around every corner there’s a little something that somebody hand placed for everyone.“
When I had the chance to talk to Avowed region director Berto Ritger recently, I had one thing on my mind: How every nook, cranny, dead end, rooftop, and pond in the game had something hidden in it that was worth my time. Even a bit of vendor trash or upgrade materials in the right place seemed to say, „Hey, we knew you’d look here, we see you.“
The towns and countryside of the Living Lands may not have had the simulationist „real place“ vibe of a Deus Ex or even an Elder Scrolls game, but the more videogamey joy of always being rewarded for exploration in Avowed tickled my brain in a different way.
Ritger characterized his role as overseeing area design, environment art, and narrative design for particular regions of Avowed’s world, ensuring that everything fit together and gelled with the zone’s identity, while occasionally pitching in with more direct design contributions.
Ritger specifically oversaw Dawnshore, Emerald Stair (for part of development), The Garden, and the ending sequence, while he had a more direct hand in designing the prologue island and the opening of the memorable quest, Dawntreader—that’s the one with the magic crystal mech and the weird golden priest.
Part of the reason Avowed is full of so many rewarding secrets, to hear Ritger tell it, was its parkour system, which was in Avowed’s earliest iterations and survived a development reboot in 2021. The robust clambering, climbing, and jumping demanded vertically-oriented levels to support it, but also made it easy for testers to break the game and reach places the designers didn’t expect.
Ritger said the team suppressed the impulse to combat that behavior with invisible walls or unclimbable surfaces. „People are going to figure out a way to get up on the roofs. Let’s just lean into that and commit to rewarding that exploration, because it is so fun to just clamber on all this stuff.
