Avowed

There’s a specific kind of disappointment reserved for games that get judged against the game people assumed they were making. Avowed has been living inside that gap since its first trailer.

Obsidian Entertainment — the studio behind Fallout: New Vegas, The Outer Worlds, and the CRPG duology this game is built on — has made a single-player first-person fantasy action RPG set in Eora, the same world as Pillars of Eternity. You play an envoy of the Aedyran Empire, born godlike, dispatched to the Living Lands to investigate a spreading fungal plague called the Dreamscourge. The investigation curdles into a conspiracy about your own divine parentage, which is exactly the kind of plot Obsidian writes well: a bureaucratic errand that keeps peeling back into something theological.

Market positioning is where it gets complicated. First-person, fantasy, swords and spells, Xbox Game Studios money behind it — the shorthand wrote itself, and the shorthand was Skyrim. Avowed is not that. It’s a zone-based RPG with four handcrafted regions, closer in architecture to Dishonored or The Outer Worlds than to Bethesda’s seamless continent. Nobody at Obsidian ever promised otherwise. It didn’t matter. A meaningful share of the negative sentiment around the game amounts to complaints that this is a different genre than the one the buyer wanted.

Strip that away and what’s left is a focused, confident, occasionally thin action RPG with the best hand-to-hand-to-spellcasting system in its class. Obsidian bet everything on the moment-to-moment. That bet paid. What it didn’t buy was scale, and scale is what everyone showed up asking about.

• Independent Hand Loadouts: Every hand holds whatever you want. Sword and wand. Pistol and shield. Two-handed staff. Grimoire and blade. This isn’t a preset class fantasy — it’s a combinatorial system, and it’s the reason to play.
• Grimoire Spellcasting: Equipping a grimoire grants elemental spells you can chain directly into weapon attacks, letting you freeze a target and shatter it with the same input rhythm. Magic isn’t a separate mode. It’s a combo extender.
• Consequence-Free Respec: Rebuild between fighter, ranger, and wizard builds at will. Experimentation carries zero tax — a design choice that quietly rescues the whole progression system.
• Four Companions With Teeth: Kai, Marius, Giatta, and Yatzli bring their own abilities, quest lines, and pointed reactions to your decisions. The writing here is the game’s second-best asset.
• Vertical, Hand-Built Regions: Four dense zones with real verticality, hidden caches, and traversal that rewards looking up.
• Party Camp: A hub for crafting, gear upgrades, and companion conversation. New Game Plus and Photo Mode ship in the box.

The Combat Loop Is the Thesis

Most first-person RPGs treat weapon and spell as separate states. You’re a swordsman, then you’re a caster, then you’re a swordsman again, and the transition costs you a beat. Avowed refuses that. Because each hand is independently assignable, the fantasy you build is genuinely yours — and more importantly, it’s mechanically legible in real time. A pistol in the off-hand isn’t flavor. It’s a stagger tool you fire mid-combo to interrupt a charging enemy, then close with the blade in your right.

The chaining is where it clicks. Freeze with the grimoire, follow with a heavy swing, watch the damage multiplier land. Ignite, then shield-bash into the burn. The inputs are designed to be tactile and the feedback loud — hit-stop, screen shake, audio with weight. This is a studio that historically shipped great systems inside merely functional combat finally building the combat right. Avowed’s fighting is the most convincing argument for the game’s existence.

The respec system deserves specific credit. Build anxiety is one of the oldest forms of onboarding friction in RPGs — the fear of sinking dozens of hours into a character you’ve quietly ruined. Obsidian deleted it. Rebuild whenever you want, for essentially nothing. The result is a toolset players can actually use instead of hoard, which is exactly what a system this expressive needs.

Where the Structure Buckles

Now the honest part. Avowed’s enemy roster is thin, and the combat system deserved better opposition. When your build vocabulary is this rich, fighting the fourth variation of the same bear-analog for the twentieth time exposes the shallowness of the encounter design rather than your own creativity. By the back half of a region, the design stops asking you to solve problems and starts asking you to execute a routine.

Loot compounds it. Gear upgrades along predictable tiers, and the thrill of an unexpected drop — the thing that keeps a loop like this spinning — mostly isn’t there. You upgrade what you have. You rarely find something that rewrites your plan.

The zone structure is the most-cited complaint and the most misunderstood. Four handcrafted regions with genuine verticality is a defensible design choice, and the density is real — these spaces are packed with hidden caches, environmental storytelling, and routes you only find by climbing. The problem isn’t that the world is gated. It’s that the gating is visible: loading transitions and hard boundaries constantly remind you the map has edges, right when the art direction has convinced you it doesn’t.

Writing, Choice, and the Romance-Shaped Hole

The companions are excellent. Kai, Marius, Giatta, and Yatzli have distinct voices, real quest lines, and opinions about what you do — the party-camp conversations are the game at its most Obsidian. Series fans get more: the Pillars of Eternity lore is deep, specific, and rewarding if you’ve done the reading, and the background-based dialogue options give character creation actual consequence beyond cosmetics.

Two caveats, and they’re real ones. There are no romance options — a defensible stance, but one that lands strangely in a game this invested in companion intimacy. And player choice sometimes matters less than the presentation implies. The game stages decisions with weight, then routes them toward similar outcomes. In an Obsidian game, that stings more than it would anywhere else. This studio built its reputation on choices that bite back.

The art direction is the game’s quiet triumph. The Living Lands read as a place with a history — fungal blooms creeping across architecture, layered environmental detail that pays off close inspection, a color palette that avoids the muddy-brown default of the genre. Photo Mode isn’t a throwaway feature here; the game is built to be photographed.

Character presentation is a different story. Facial animation is stiff, and NPC performance during dialogue sits somewhere between dated and distracting. When the environments are this expressive, a talking head that doesn’t quite emote breaks the spell — and dialogue is where a lot of this game lives.

On the technical side, a 3D first-person game of this density is demanding on mid-range hardware, and the engine’s traversal-heavy structure is the kind of setup where stutter and hitching are common risks. Anyone with slower storage or limited VRAM should check the settings menu carefully before committing.

On Steam, mouse and keyboard is the correct way to play, and it isn’t close. The independent-hand system maps naturally to left and right mouse buttons, which makes the core loop feel less like a menu and more like an instrument. Aiming the pistol and placing spell reticles both benefit from the precision. Controller support is competent, and the UI clearly received console-first attention in its density — but the modifier-key layer for hotbar abilities is smoother with a keyboard.

Avowed is good and not genre-defining, and it’s worth being precise about which of those is the story. The combat is a real achievement — Obsidian solved a problem the genre has been fumbling for a decade, and the hand-loadout system deserves to be copied widely. The writing does what this studio’s writing does. The Living Lands are gorgeous.

What’s missing is ambition at the edges. The encounter design doesn’t rise to meet the combat. The loot doesn’t reward the exploration. The choices don’t bite the way an Obsidian game’s choices should. Each of those is a place where the game settles for competent when it had earned the right to reach further — and together they add up to a game we can’t recommend to most people, even as we recommend its combat to almost anyone.

Buy it for the fighting. Stay for the companions. Don’t come looking for a continent.