Avowed’s developers at Obsidian discuss the impact of the recent Xbox studio closures on their appetite for creative risk and explain a bit more about the RPG.
When Avowed was first unveiled back at the Xbox summer showcase of 2021, a dark and moody CGI trailer of burning arrows and fantasy spell-and-sword dual wielding — all from the studio behind the likes of Pillars of Eternity and Fallout: New Vegas — positioned it as something of a first-party Skyrim for Xbox.
In the years since however, it’s become increasingly clear that’s simply not the game we should now expect from Avowed. It’s bright and colourful, it’s seemingly dialogue-heavy, and as we learned in further explanations of the game’s combat it is, if anything, only quite loosely an RPG. As Avowed’s director, Carrie Patel, put it to Eurogamer last year after a slightly unconvincing first demo of its combat, «the reference point we’ve been trying to point people to is The Outer Worlds.»
Since then, things have been a little quiet on the Avowed front, but over the weekend Xbox showed another trailer, this time with emphasis on the game’s overarching story — though again it was a little light on anything truly new. Thankfully, we also had a short roundtable interview with Carrie Patel again after the showcase ended, who spoke alongside the game’s art director Matt Hansen and was able to outline just a little more of what we can expect.
On the role-playing front, Patel explained that it would likely be felt most prominently in Avowed’s dialogue. «We have skill trees that take your traditional fighter flavour, ranger, and wizard, and you can mix and match freely between them,» she said. «And you can build a character that either follows one of those vibes very closely or takes the best of what you like from each — and if you decide you don’t like your choices, you can pay a small fee and wipe them and build something entirely different.»
From a «narrative and dialogue perspective,» Patel continued, it’ll be «a huge part of the game, and exploring and really defining your role in it is about the choices you make moment-to-moment. There are skills that also have an impact in dialogue that will unlock certain options for you, the player will get to choose a background at the very beginning of the game that kind of flavours, ‘Here’s who you were before this mission, here’s how you came to prominence.
