With the recent news about obsidian shutting down work on Avowed 2 and being set to work on fallout, a lot of discussion about Avowed started up in the online community - primarily focused on how many people saw it as "A mid flop".
I have been a pretty solid Obsidian fan ever since i played Fallout: New Vegas (cliche, i know) over 5 years ago and have since played almost every single of their games including the Eora series which i would describe myself as a pretty mayor fan of. Since i recently got myself a new computer i decided to therefore check out Avowed to see what the fuss was all about.
# The Good:
The general artistic representation. The enviroments are very detailed and vivid, and i feel it says plenty about obsidians sucess in this regard when my favorite environment was a desert, a place otherwise dreadfully boring in most other games. The living lands have been hyped up as this totally wild and unihabitable place in the earlier games, and i would say without a doubt that Avowed manages to live up to these expectations.
The Music. The soundtrack is both ephemeral and moody and generally really good at easing you into the universe, I especially enjoyed the track that plays in Paradis, the first major city in the game.
The companions.
One thing i feel that avowed did very well was making the companions feel like real characters. Each of them have their own place in the world and they all feel rounded and complete in this regard. Due to all the companions also having at least one other character they already know on the team, the group did very quickly feel like a giant team working together alongside each other, something other modern games and movies fail at.
# The Mixed:
Combat.
The combat of avowed is pretty fluid and frantic, however it suffers from two pretty big flaws, those being the general tankiness of enemies and the lack of enemy variety. I played the game as a wand-wielding mage and from what i have read online this is the most "fun" way to play the game as your special skills can get really beefy. However, i still struggled with combat becoming unfun, especially in the later chapters where i more often than not would just run away from a fight rather than fighting the same xaurips i had been encountering since act 1.
The general game world.
While i would say the artistic direction is good, the general game world does have some serious flaws. To put it bluntly, it very often just feels kinda dead and deserted. In most cities and settlements there is very little to do other than just picking up quests and visiting the vendors one singular time, since after getting a few levels higher you will have outscaled whatever loot they could sell.
In many ways, the cities remind me of other isometric CRPG titles, where they are simmilarily static, but once you make the transition from top-down to POV, the staticness becomes a lot more pronounced.
The game world is otherwise littered with chests and backpacks giving you the same basic money and upgrading materials that you will need for all your tools. I actually don't fully dislike this, as it allows you to upgrade your older tools easily and that way get a rather solid "set" of tools and armour you can use throughout your entire game.
The writing.
The writing is propably \the\ most inconsistent part of this game, carrying both its highest highs and lowest lows. Some of the worse parts worth highlighting are the constant "marvel" tier quips that your companions come with in random conversations (which annoys me even more considering how much i like them outside of that!) or the very forced crypticness of the voice in your head that just makes it a total pain in the ass to even understand what they are trying to say for the good first third of the game (it does get better later on though)
The parts where the writing is good are however also \really\ good. Kai's entire questline about processing the grief of his old desceased friend is just amazing to play through, and some of the choices you get put through later in the game (like the big dilemma at the end of act 3) had me actually have to take a break from the computer to think about in real life.
This general inconsitency also extends to the main story, which abandons it's most interesting plot points in the last 3rd of the story. The base plot about the dreamscourge is not really that interesting, but the dynamic between the colonizing aedyrans (which you are a part of) and the other inhabitants of the Living Lands is really amazing and even forced myself to ask some questions about my own political convictions.
Spoliers ahead:
[spoiler]Specifically, when Fior mes Iverno was burnt down in the end of act 2.!!Until then I had proudly taken the actions that would benefit aedyran influence in the country, but also been good to distance myself from the steel garotte. I always play as "good" characters when i play these games, but ultimately your character in this game is also personally chosen by the aedyran king and thusly i felt it was my duty to further his goals, without violence of course.!!In act 2 there is a mission to find a spy in the local militia of Fior mes Iverno, and at the end of that quest it is revealed that the spy did murder more than two people, but did it all to support the aedyran side and prepare the city for our eventual takeover. I let her go, since i thought it was "only" normal influence and such, and while her ways were violent, she only did it to people who would have killed her otherwise for supporting us.!!When Fior mes Iverno then burned down i was forced to reconcile with the fact that this was entirely my own fault, and it was in this case i began thinking deeper, that because i was "just following orders" i allowed myself to blindly stumble into an entire disaster that could have easily been avoided had i just stuck by my morals instead of following some vague belonging an