That, I think, is the one thing about Avowed which might cause me to not like it, in videos that I've watched it all looks a bit....Willy Wonka land. I'm hoping thats just the areas they were in
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Obsidian New RPG Avowed
- Thread starter jimjam81
- Start date
I've played through the intro island area, a side quest afterwards, and the first major quest part (where you find a certain duo).
Initial impressions:
1. Combat is alright, nothing spectacular but decent enough from what I've experienced. There are some issues, enemy AI is all over the place and while it feels fluid at first it also ultimately feels quite shallow for an action game. That might change as you unlock more abilities, but so far I'm not overly enthusiastic and I'm leaning more toward it becoming stale.
2. The writing so far has been so-so at best outside of the setup intro movies, I honestly expected more from the same world Pillars of Eternity is set in, even when bad things are happening people comes across as oddly enthusiastic and happy, there's no real sense of despair or fear.
3. World exploration seems nice, traversing the areas I've seen so far has been enjoyable.
4. I'm really not keen on the art direction, again going back to the fact this is in the same universe as the (quite dark at times) Pillars of Eternity, everything is extremely bright and colourful to the point it borders on cartoonish, I had a similar problem with DA:V. That's obviously an objective issue on my end, others might really like the way the game looks. In attempt to be subjective I would say that the games visuals are decent, but far from stunning in the way you'd expect from a AAA game.
5. The music and voice work are alright, nothing stands out and is quite forgettable thus far imo.
6. It runs passably, the odd frame drop here and there once you enter the main game area after the intro, 5800X3D/32GB/4070 running at 3440x1440, mixed medium to high settings/DLSS quality, averaging around 80-100FPS.
I might give it another couple of hours and see if it keeps my interest, but so far it feels very middling to me.
Initial impressions:
1. Combat is alright, nothing spectacular but decent enough from what I've experienced. There are some issues, enemy AI is all over the place and while it feels fluid at first it also ultimately feels quite shallow for an action game. That might change as you unlock more abilities, but so far I'm not overly enthusiastic and I'm leaning more toward it becoming stale.
2. The writing so far has been so-so at best outside of the setup intro movies, I honestly expected more from the same world Pillars of Eternity is set in, even when bad things are happening people comes across as oddly enthusiastic and happy, there's no real sense of despair or fear.
3. World exploration seems nice, traversing the areas I've seen so far has been enjoyable.
4. I'm really not keen on the art direction, again going back to the fact this is in the same universe as the (quite dark at times) Pillars of Eternity, everything is extremely bright and colourful to the point it borders on cartoonish, I had a similar problem with DA:V. That's obviously an objective issue on my end, others might really like the way the game looks. In attempt to be subjective I would say that the games visuals are decent, but far from stunning in the way you'd expect from a AAA game.
5. The music and voice work are alright, nothing stands out and is quite forgettable thus far imo.
6. It runs passably, the odd frame drop here and there once you enter the main game area after the intro, 5800X3D/32GB/4070 running at 3440x1440, mixed medium to high settings/DLSS quality, averaging around 80-100FPS.
I might give it another couple of hours and see if it keeps my interest, but so far it feels very middling to me.
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How have the NPCs been so far? One thing that struck me in videos was all the NPCs in towns just seemed to stand there and not move , no day/night activity change etc, just stood around waiting for you to talk to them. All seemed very game like rather than believable lived in world like, which looked quite jarring after something like KCD2 where the NPCs go about their own lives and activities. Is that the case ingame and it was just bad luck with the videos I saw?
While I didn't spend much time around them, they seemed rather static. You can't attack any of them the way you can in something like an Elder Scrolls etc, some might care about that and others not. There's not much interaction to be had outside of one or two NPC's in terms of chatting/dialogue, you will come across the odd scene where there's a guy being asked to move along by a guard or a couple of soldiers chatting at a camp site. I didn't wait around too long beyond a few seconds after the dialogue finished, everyone just remained in place. The world feels very basic and static compared to what I would expect, I'd even argue it's worse than Outer Worlds in that regard being the last big Obsidian game. I'd also say it's weaker in general than Greedfall, which is a AA RPG with a lot of similarities from 2019.
For the budget and time in development Avowed has it's pretty poor imo, it was announced I think around 2020 with at least a year or two of work already done at a guess?
From what little I've experienced I'd say it's something I might be happy with from a AA dev that did 3-4 years of work on a moderate budget, but would still find forgettable.
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It does feel oddly like a budget game from a few years ago. I've gone the ranged route...but...just feels a little clunky.
Also, anyone finding the game to look fuzzy/grainy? This is on RTX3080 with DLSS quality and everything on High/Epic. It just doesn't look very crisp at all.
Also, anyone finding the game to look fuzzy/grainy? This is on RTX3080 with DLSS quality and everything on High/Epic. It just doesn't look very crisp at all.
Does anyone else have, whatever character I choose I end up with the blond girl regardless?, can't change it?
Every NPC is static, as if they were in a MMORPG ; there is no "lived in" hustle & bustle of characters going about their daily routines. Several reviews have raised this point and mentioned that Avowed was originally designed to be a "live service" or MMO - the static NPCs appears to a remnant of its initial design before it transitioned to being a single player RPG.
Man of Honour
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Can’t decide to play this or KCD2 first?
KCD2 is the better game, if you can get past the combat.
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Looks reasonably interesting. I shall await it being £7 with bated breath.
If you have games pass give Avowed a shot, but thus far I'd recommend against it at current prices. It's deep sale material at best imo.
I'm about 6 hours in and the game is fantastic. They've created an absolutely gorgeous world that's full of secrets and treasures, normally I'm not one to search every corner of a map but in Avowed it feels like there's always a reason to as 99% of the time you'll be rewarded with something. It also has the best first person spell-casting I've ever experienced, it's so well done. The melee is also solid, I don't know how anyone could call it "clunky". It's just a very fun game with so many smart choices, UX isn't mentioned often but it's top tier, everything is just so intuitive. I've had no issues with the story, characters or voice acting so far, which I've seen some people complain about, maybe it gets worse later on but so far I'm happy with it.
Performance wise it's great, fully maxed out I get 100fps+ without FG, and cap out my 165Hz display with it, which is how I'm playing it. The towns barely have any impact on performance, although you will see tiny dips, and I mean tiny. But otherwise I have a 100% flat line on my frame time graph, the game runs like silk. I've read weaker CPUs can struggle in towns but it's not an issue on modern hardware from my experience. The only technical problem I'm seeing is farm animals and very occasionally NPCs seem to animate at a lower frame rate, they jitter walk, which is very jarring.
Overall this is the most I've enjoyed a game in a long time, and as I have Gamepass running ATM for Indiana Jones and Ninja Gaiden 2 so it may as well of cost me nothing. But I will say if the game continues to be this good I would have happily paid £60 for it. I feel it's getting some weird hate on Reddit and other social media, mostly because a couple of streamers didn't like it, so obviously the sheep follow without even playing it, but it's reviewing very well, sitting at 82% on Open Critic, 80% on Metacritic and 81% on Steam, and that tracks with my opinion ATM, it's an easy 8--9/10 IMO.
Performance wise it's great, fully maxed out I get 100fps+ without FG, and cap out my 165Hz display with it, which is how I'm playing it. The towns barely have any impact on performance, although you will see tiny dips, and I mean tiny. But otherwise I have a 100% flat line on my frame time graph, the game runs like silk. I've read weaker CPUs can struggle in towns but it's not an issue on modern hardware from my experience. The only technical problem I'm seeing is farm animals and very occasionally NPCs seem to animate at a lower frame rate, they jitter walk, which is very jarring.
Overall this is the most I've enjoyed a game in a long time, and as I have Gamepass running ATM for Indiana Jones and Ninja Gaiden 2 so it may as well of cost me nothing. But I will say if the game continues to be this good I would have happily paid £60 for it. I feel it's getting some weird hate on Reddit and other social media, mostly because a couple of streamers didn't like it, so obviously the sheep follow without even playing it, but it's reviewing very well, sitting at 82% on Open Critic, 80% on Metacritic and 81% on Steam, and that tracks with my opinion ATM, it's an easy 8--9/10 IMO.
If your like me and your into more action then Avowed is a better option, KCD2 is a a boring experience for me personally.
However im having major crashing issues with Avowed, actually crashing the whole PC
Since im playing on game pass pc i might download for box.
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I think I’ll use the $1 for 14 days of Game Pass this weekend and see what this is like.
Is the Game Pass download speed still crap does anyone know? Last time I subbed to it, I felt like I could learn to code and then write the whole game in the time it was taking.
Is the Game Pass download speed still crap does anyone know? Last time I subbed to it, I felt like I could learn to code and then write the whole game in the time it was taking.
I suspect a lot of the "marmite" of the reviews comes down to what the player expects/qualifies an RPG to be. From what I've seen and read (on here and elsewhere) it sounds like Avowed is a good game but a poor "RPG", so I suppose its understandable that opinions on the game will differ depending on what "RPG" is defined as for each person.
I guess the crux of what I am saying is that Avowed seems like a game that you need to be absolutely sure what it is you are looking for in an "RPG", otherwise you may end up disappointed.
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Soldato
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Speeds have been very good for me for a while. Well, barring the odd time it has an existential crisis and decides to spend its run cycles questioning the meaning of its existence instead.*
This doesn't happen that often, but maybe one download in six or so, it will fallback to dial-up speeds for some reason. I've found that quitting the app and continuing the download in the MS Store for some reason reliably fixes whatever was going on and kicks it back up to normal speeds.
That occassional bug notwithstanding, it's just as fast as Steam for me.
(*This may not be the actual cause of the intermittent slow downloads. I am not a software engineer.)