Saving a Small, Small World

This blog didn’t begin with the grandest of ambitions. The premise was pretty simple: I would play video games, and write about my thoughts about those video games. Then, after setting it all up, I played a video game, and this whole intricate system broke down.

I bounced off my first attempt at Avowed, the newest action RPG from Obsidian Entertainment, and the first in that genre fully developed after the studio’s purchase by Microsoft in 2018. The game drops you down on Tutorial Island, which at this point feels like the gaming equivalent of a backlot set, and offers a compelling enough push forward: You’re the emperor’s envoy and Very Special Person, sent to uncover and stop a disease called the Dreamscourge that’s causing people to forget their skincare routines and go mad and start killing everyone. Before you can reach the capital, your ship sinks and you’re forced to clamber through a deserted island fortress of the king’s own men, witnessing the effects of the sickness firsthand, before securing a boat to get you to town.

The story wasn’t the problem; the combat was. Or, to be more accurate, I was. Avowed is a real-time, first-person engine—to put it crudely, The Outer Worlds with swords and boards. You have all the standard verbs, stabbing and blocking and dodging and, of course, parrying, but as I brute-forced my way through the tutorial boss, chugging healing potions and getting slapped in the forehead with a hammer, I couldn’t seem to click with it. There’s a difference between bad controls and controls you simply don’t get, and in this case it was the latter. It felt bad because I felt bad. Using a controller, I didn’t feel like I had enough buttons for all the hotkeys I wanted to use, and on a keyboard, I did, but kept hitting the wrong one. I put it down for a few months and played other stuff.

There are better games than Avowed out there. Obsidian has made a few of them themselves. And yet I came back to it, in large part because it wasn’t better. I was busy. I was tired. I didn’t feel like internalizing the intricate and demanding combat systems of Baldur’s Gate 3 or Divinity: Original Sin 2. I was too lazy to read all that text in Disco Elysium, not in spite of how good it is, but because of how good it is. I installed Blue Prince, rushed through a couple runs, and felt absolutely no sense of progression or empowerment. I needed some macaroni and cheese, a game that I already knew how to play, one that would ask little of me. I fired Avowed back up, restarted with a glass-cannon mage build, and got up to speed fairly well. And then 50 hours passed without note.

The main criticism of the game, across the reviews, is exactly what brought me back to it: It’s a straight putt. The mechanical structure is barely hidden. Except for the tutorial zone and final, oversized dungeon, it contains four separate overworlds, each of them larger than any of the planets in Outer Worlds. (That game, too, is perhaps most notable for its restraint in design and reach, as a response to the endless open worlds that had come to dominate the genre in the past decade.) Each has a handful of small dungeons, five monster hunts, hundreds of chests tucked up on ledges and behind corners, and groups of enemies milling around everywhere, waiting to be surprised. The crafting system and loot tables are balanced properly to pull the player gently ahead right into the endgame, and the skill trees are carefully designed to avoid dominant strategies and overpowering, while offering new skills and powers that are interesting enough to make each new level’s point a choice worth considering. 

There’s always exactly three things to do, and the richly detailed world somehow seems both wide without being overly long, thanks to an infinite sprint stamina and a fluid, visually satisfying parkour system that makes bounding over rocks and up ledges fairly graceful. Again, nothing revolutionary, nothing offputting. It was a rarity to get stuck in the geometry, and the game only crashed on me once, an irony given Obsidian’s famous lineage. Microsoft gave the team extra time for once, and it showed. One of the best compliments I can pay the game is how rarely it gives you a reason to stop playing. 

The story is well-written and well-told, with a main narrative that holds up the Single Hero in the World motif required of so many of these types of games. Not only are you born different from everyone else, with a layer of fungus growing out of your head denoting you as a “godlike,” but you soon form a telepathic bond with a mysterious and cryptic deity clearly linked to all this fungal disaster that’s going on. You’re provided with four compatriots who have their own little storylines, complete with emotional payoff; while they’re not as deep and rich as, say, Viconia from Baldur’s Gate 2, they’re sufficient for justifying their companionship and for the traditional final night around the campfire. 

For all the game’s limitations of scope, it does a fine job of preventing the world from feeling too static. The creatures you kill stay dead, making the random exploration feel like you’re actually restoring peace to the fields rather than just grinding. In the vein of Edgwater’s power supply in The Outer Worlds, Avowed doubles down on passing the main story through major decision points, most of which are narrative but some changing the game itself. Entire cities can become inaccessible, story-important NPCs can be killed, and factions can be supported or undermined. In true Obsidian fashion, these choices are often murky, to the point where it can be hard to tell exactly what the payoff will be. They’re certainly more memorable, especially when dealing with an angry (but always loyal) companion—at some points, you’re going to piss off someone, because they’re different people who want different things.

If this sounds like a complimentary review, that’s because it is. Avowed is the polished product of an experienced studio that’s learned from its past, and is near the top of its game. On paper there’s very little to complain about: monster variety is lacking, exacerbated by the fact that the game is probably a little too long. Side quests are limited, and for all the fleshing out of your four companions, few NPCs provide any emotional resonance of their own. This is made evident in the final chapter, when you return to the first city for the final battle, navigating through the wreckage of town, greeted by all the people you helped, and are now ready to help in return. It’s a struggle to remember most of them. But these are forgivable sins. Everything about Avowed is forgivable, really. It’s a hard game to hate, and a hard game to love.

Numerical ranking systems are stupid, as we all know. But there’s a funny sort of shorthand for many scores, when applied on a 10-point scale:

10/10: A game that is both extremely fun (sound in both mechanics and design) and extremely compelling. The classics.

9/10: A game that is classic-level quality narratively, but falls short mechanically, either due to bugs or design choices. Some of the most beloved games fall into this category, because they’re games that players want to forgive. Fallout: New Vegas and Planescape: Torment are good examples.

8/10: A game that feels great to play, but winds up feeling unmemorable. Avowed got a lot of eights. Shadow of Mordor is another title like this.

7/10: A game that is actively flawed, but so weird or so ambitious that it’s usually remembered more fondly than the eights. Legend of Mana goes here.

I was a little frustrated, completing Avowed, that I had so little to say about it. But the fact that it was so unmemorable was, in fact, what was so interesting. Nothing about the game’s aesthetic, or narrative, feels rote. It’s not phoned in or rushed. The settings don’t feel like facades, and even if the game starts spinning its wheels mechanically in the final 10 hours, your choices still feel like they have impact. So why didn’t I care? Why did I stop checking in with my companions in camp, stop needling them for details about their past? Why did I not bother to read the lore scattered around in the world’s books? (That one’s easy: I will never read the lore scattered around in the world’s books.) 

The answer to all this is primarily one issue: me. Just as I didn’t feel like I was connecting to the combat the first time I played through the tutorial, I never emotionally invested myself in the Living Lands. I skimmed through the dialogue. I didn’t really go out of my way to talk to unnecessary NPCs. Obsidian could have been lazy with their worldbuilding in a manner befitting the AA ambitions of the game design, and they weren’t. I played the game like they were anyway. 

This is how art works, unfortunately. The artist has to create a link to the audience, just like the designer has to create systemic incentives—i.e., “fun”—to keep the player playing. Unfortunately, the player can just drop the line. This is where games differ the most from other art forms: people who like movies generally just like movies, and books with books. A video game has to hit multiple buttons to get a player on board. No bullet-hell shooter or RTS or tower defense game is ever going to grab me even if it brought Tolstoy back from the dead to write it; this is also true of slasher films, but probably only slasher films. Few mediums outside a 50-hour game are going to be instant dealbreakers. This is why so many Triple-A movies, and games, feel compelled to play it safe. It’s so easy to lose someone, and in the modern industry, so vital that you never be interesting enough to take that chance.

I just don’t love saving the world. I don’t care for the scale, and I don’t care for the inane motivations behind the Kujas and Dung Eaters who want to tear everything down on top of themselves. This is a problem, because I like RPGs, and that’s generally what the genre demands, for whatever reason. But worlds rarely interest me, and I don’t get a thrill from worldbuilding. I prefer my games to be about people, and my companions, affable and clever as they are in their campfire badinage, never got to be that close. My decisions all made huge changes to the world, but they didn’t appear to make any changes to me, except to prove what kind of person I was to make them. Since my colleagues had to be written to stick with me no matter what kind of life I led, they could never get close. 

Ultimately, if Avowed has a flaw, it’s not that it’s too safe or too breezy or too polished. It’s that its breezy, polished gameplay didn’t align with its serious, thoughtful story. The world was the correct size for the way the game played, but it was too small, too empty, too high-level for the story it wanted to tell. And that made me fail it, by withholding myself from some connection in the telling. I shot everything up like a drunken cowboy.

If this weren’t Obsidian, this would be of little importance. These balances are hard to strike with so many people putting so much together in such little time. The irony is that Avowed came from the same people who created Fallout: New Vegas, this game’s polar opposite: an ugly, janky, messy, and magical game. This game is somehow everything except magical. The temptation is to draw a through-line, and draw conclusions of something being lost over time. I don’t think that’s true, and I think that Avowed probably deserves better than its reputation as an 8/10 game will eventually fall. They should invent an 8.3, or maybe just throw the numbers out. Fun games are valuable in themselves, especially when they’re happy to be fun. But I also find myself looking at that release date for The Outer Worlds 2 and wishing that it got an extra year, and a chance to shoot for the proverbial moon.