Avowed Game Overview | Xbox Direct 2024 

I hope they can make the combat feel more weighty. There was this old game, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, that really nailed fantasy first person combat.

The game looks way better than last time, but the combat doesn't look as satisfying as I'd hope. It needs more "impact".

Anyone concerned by the lack of hit feedback? No blood, no stumble or stagger animations, no wobble on enemies when hit. I'm looking forward to this game but that aspect doesn't look finished at all.

Every hit needs more impact and wounds and blood decals are completely missing

Im worried that their focus on "choice" and fluid swapping of combat styles is going to mean that you cant get upgrades to specialize in a way that feels meaningful. And yeah, the combat looks completely weightless :( Hopefully they can fix that!

combat animations, impact, weight, and enemy AI all look pretty horrible although the weapon variety (wands & guns!) and load outs makes me very interested. I also think the NPC mouth movement/faces when they speak looks better than many other games. I’m about 60% sold on it

So swapping weapons is considered a feature now...?

Can't say I'm all that excited, and the corpo buzz-speak made the entire presentation seem like an informercial, but I'm at least willing to give it the benefit of the doubt until its release and reliable reviews come out. Also, ironically enough, the two presenters literally sounded as though they were chiming out "Spacer's Choice" jingles.

Gameplay looks like eso and the presentation is so corporatized. It looks like actors reading from a script at gunpoint to say the right thing.

I agree with others, the attacks look like they don't have any weight or Impact But the rest looks good, looking forward to it!

Seeing that Tyranny poster in the background made me so happy. I hope we get a follow-up to that someday.

Aw man the combat reminds me of eso's combat. Looks like you're slapping everything with a wet tissue..

Every American studio sounds the exact same describing anything... Corporate is killing everything. Just constant buzzwords and market tested design, cookie cutter presentation. The soul and creativity behind the the majority of American owned AAA is dead. Give me an awkward but passionate dev talking about this stuff instead of these soulless and clueless marketing people. I have these same marketing people in an entirely different line of business and they all sound the same regardless of the industry. I hate corporate america

The combat makes it look like a VR game

I know that Outer Worlds was bad when it came to story choices, but if this game has even HALF of the level of writing that they put into Pillars of Eternity, it will be really engaging

Please tell me the combat isn’t finished hahaha

Why is this so corporate?

im still not sure how i feel about the art direction of this game.. the first teaser was so dark...

whats up w/the weird camera angle during the interview sections

"you can use parries" *FOOTAGE MISSING*

"Spiritual Plague" Sounds like good ol' Eothas breaking the wheel gave everyone Soulcovid. Of course there was a side effect to ending the cycle of reincarnation.

Was is just me or did anyone else get reminded of Starfield presentations before they released?

Still waiting for a reason to get excited for this game

The melee pauses on the hits like a street fighter game. It takes away the punch behind the attack.

Enemy AI seems lackluster just standing there waiting for the player to hit them...

Looks like an early Xbox One game. With combat from 2006. Might as well fight with feathers.

Is this VR....It feels like VR

“Here at Obsidian our teams overarching goal is to empower you with choice” this literally soulless buzz word marketing. You all sound like politicians. What is happening to the gaming world man.

The combat looks so unsatisfying. Did nobody at obsidian notice that or do they think something like this doesn't matter??

I really hope that wands aren't the only "bread and butter" attacks for magic (I don't know PoE that well so maybe that's how it is there), I really prefer when magic feels like magic and not using magic-flavoured guns so to speak. The usage of the world "abilities" (which implies a cooldown or some other restriction) worries me that that might be it.

Looks like the rescoping rumors were true. All they showed was basic Obsidian RPG fundamentals. Combat looks fun, but this isn't the Obsidian Skyrim that had sold me on it. Seems like it will be Fantasy Outer Worlds. I would love to be wrong.

I won’t lie the more I see of this game the less interested I am. The art style, the combat, the plastic nature of it makes me feel like it’s an Ark Survival Evolved modded server.

Why does the combat look so outdated?

Both the game and presentation look like they were made 20 years ago for the 360

Hope it gets pushed back a year because it clearly needs it. Enemies don't react to hits at all, its like every enemy is the terminator, no reactions to any hits at all and then they either go full ragdoll or just slump when they die. Most of what was shown looks good, combat looks terrible and needs a ton of work.

Looks really rough, getting Outer Worlds flashbacks. Also missing the atmosphere of the pillars games.

It doesn’t look bad but not what I expected. It looks a little bit too happy if that makes sense

Cool environments… bland looking combat

My biggest issue is the combat looks like something from a VR game instead of a AAA console/PC game

Ima be honest, im not a fan of the colorful, disney look. The gameplay and the serious tone of the lore of this world does not mix well with the visual making the game seem like a fairy tale world in a childs story book. I imagine if new vegas had this look, it would not be the same game.

Yea im sure dragons dogma 2 will give me the rpg fix ive been craving

Best looking VR game yet.

They said The Coalition has helped Obsidian upgrade Avowed to Unreal Engine 5.3 since this trailer. And Avowed said they are working on the melee combat , so relax. We will see it in two weeks at Xbox showcase and finally get a launch date.

Looks like it needs a lot of work. I can see this delaying into 2025.

.... Yeah. I dont know about this one. Should've made Pillars of Eternity 3 instead of a Skyrim clone tbh. Especially now with BG3 making isometric party based RPGs popoular once again.

This looks nothing like the Avowed trailer we got before, lol. This looks like a VR medieval fantasy game.

its just sad how they i think were forced to make it a kids game instead of its original look

There is just no weight to any of the attacks, meaning that the melee combat end up looking very flat, I mean even the guns don’t seem to have any recoil

Hear us! Fix combat!

I was so excited for the Dark, grim looking trailer. I saw this and knew I'd pick it up 2 years after it released for like 10$ max.

3 minutes in and i had to check to make sure people were talking about the clunky combat and animations

Make no mistake, the game does look really good overall! The combat however, particularly the animations, yeesh!

Looks like a VR game

The game looks very beautiful. I love the art style, but nothing else that was presented makes me excited about this game. I have been waiting years to see what Avowed was going to be.

Combat's still looking a little flat. Hope they spice that up a little. Not sure what's missing but something is, at least visually.

luckily this is on gamepass, no way id pay any money for it. It looks like it should have come out ten years ago

Ehhh it looks like such a goodie little two shoes experience. Where is the player choice to be evil? Where is the impact in the combat. Where is the interesting enimies

I still wish this was Pillars 3

Why do the NPCs sound like they’re from Chicago?

Ranged combat looks fine but the melee combat looks off somehow, not sure what but definitely looks rough. Overall I'm still interested though, but hope they overhall melee combat before launch if there's time.

This kind of makes me sad because I loved PoE2 TB. And I feel like if they'd have known BG3 was going to be this big of a hit, PoE3 would have been the perfect follow up to the CRPG renaissance... I really don't know how I feel about Avowed from what I've seen.

I love Obsidian. I fear this being first person. No rpg elements were shown either.

Well i was interested in this.

Just a quick question, will there be "hit numbers" of any kind? Not a biggie but I just love em lol.

I am absolutely looking forward to this. Obsidian's narrative never miss.

This honestly looks incredible. The combat may not be stellar but is getting way more vitriol bombed than it needs be. There is clearly decent animation and audio-visual feedback at points like 1:54. Honestly the toxic overreaction is clearly due to this being by Obsidian, Bethesda's modern day adversary - who have come out swinging (pun intended) in teaching Broken Bethesda how to make games that just ,, _work._ Great stuff! 👍💯

The dialog sequences with the NPCs looking off to the side feels weird. In fact, any video that does the solo speaker talking off to the side as if they're talking to someone else is weird. We know there's just one person and they're speaking to the camera, so look at it.

Pillar of eternity 3!!!! PLEASE!

i loved the pillars of eternity games but this game just looks exactly like outer worlds to me, just a different setting. the stiff gameplay looks especially rough but if its at least challenging unlike outer worlds its not the end of the world i guess

Wish for a major come back for Obsidian both critically and financially. Eora is a great world and piece of IP. Look forward to this and the PoE3 cRPG (we can hope).

This looks significantly better than the last presentation.

This looks really underwhelming

here's hoping this works out better than The Outer Worlds.

Is there is a 3rd person view?

I like this preview. But maybe the impact / connection of weapons and spells is missing a bit. Other than that im looking forward to it.

The graphics have improved a lot since the last trailer. It's starting to look like a 9th gen title. The world and creature design is pretty cool as well! Good job with a lot of things. But two things I have to complain about: 1. Combat: Enemies stand around too much, don't react enough to your attacks, don't seem aggressive enough. Everybody is pointing out the lack of hit feedback and I agree that it's the top priority to fix. But look deeper as well. Don't settle for kinda sorta industry standard NPCs that stand around a lot in the middle of combat. 2. Image quality: Even in heavily compressed video footage I can see NOISE and ALIASING any time the camera moves to reveal objects that were previously hidden behind something else ("disocclusion" in graphics terms). This implies that the TAA (or TSSAA?) is tasked with way too much heavy lifting by effects that depend on it. Please stop doing this. Please stop making every game noisy and then using blur to hide the noise. These image quality corners should no longer be cut in the 2020s. You don't have to pretend to render 4K on a PS4 Pro any more!

combat looks fine to me. if gameplay loop, main and side quests are good it is enough for me. i don't expect more from obsidian

The combat looks like it was made in a engine from 10 years ago. Oh wait its xbox continue as you were.

Things I absolutely liked in this Avowed gameplay video: Visuals : It looks simply amazing, handcrafted, artistic. Sounds : All music clips really feels magical. Not fully big open world : aren't you tired of playing big open world games ? This game has open zones with varied vegetations and environments and that's what makes it unique from other so called big open world games. Make the combat better and impactful and this game will be great and more fun.

This is the only game I was interested in seeing at the showcase. Looks OK.

Will always love obsidian and the works that they put on. On that note I hope they do give the combat some more impact.

Looks okay. All the npc looked terrible though

The combat and art design both seem very underwhelming and somewhat generic compared to other contemporaries like Elden Ring and Dragon's Dogma, and the dialogue and lore don't seem interesting or well crafted enough to enable the game to stand out on it's own.

Pretty much agree that combat definitely needs some work. The animations seem very jittery. Also, it looks like the blood is coming from the sword instead of the enemy, if that makes any sense.

The extremely monotone voice of the presenter really sells the excitement of this game for me.

I agree with the people saying that there's a lack of responsiveness feedback for combat. But I want to appreciate that I as the player will have a multitude of different game mechanics that meaningfully change combat that I can easily switch to in combat. Like I get that animation wise yeah the combat doesn't look great but the combat obviously has good core mechanics. Enemies have telegraphed attack patterns and clearly some sort of "parry" mechanic in their attack animations 1:42. The ability to quickly change and combo various fighting styles together is amazing for this genre of game and adds a lot of needed depth to combat.

Looks so cartoonish and weird for a fantasy artstyle. The reveal looked like an 80s dark fantasy and now it just looks like outer worlds with swords and magic and like no castles or highlands/swamplands type stuff. Absolutely no gore or feedback with your attacks and it kinda looks like we happy few with the way corpses lay. Npcs just sit there waiting for you yo attack them. Idk man it just does not seem like what they advertised or offered originally and it is no way in any shape or form an obsidian Skyrim like they said it’d be

I’m really digging this game. When they first showed it I know a lot of people were excited for the dark fantasy prototype they showed, but we’ve gotten so much of that already. These environments look interesting and fun. I’m excited to give it a shot, and hopefully they can pull off the combat as that is what will separate it from the rest of the crowd.

Im a bit concerned about the loadout system. Isnt this an RPG along the lines of pillars, isnt there classes and specialisation?

Skyrim in the pillars of eternity universe... cool!

will we have a voiced protagonist? on a rpg? did they not learn their lesson of this?

I'm so happy to have this take place in the POE world. I love poe 1

Idk... I want it to be awesome but it looks... Okay?

The combat could be more brutal with more blood and physics. This looks like skyrim physics...

American accents in fantasy games are just so jarring

This feels like an Elder Scrolls Online remake.

Saw an article on this game. Had a lot of hope until they said it wasn't open world.

The first person cam seems off. Where is the position of the cam? In the chest of the character? I also think the impact of the attacks isn't that believable and satisfying. I am looking forward to it, because of it's world, but the ego perspective isn't my cup of tea yet.

Really like the art direction!

Modern Obsidian has become eurojank without the charm. Just all around mundane looking.