Avowed: Obsidian Entertainment Delivers Its Best RPG in Years

Platform	PC, Xbox Series X
Genre	RPG / Action
Publisher	Xbox Game Studios / Obsidian Entertainment
Release Date	February 18, 2025
Availability	Game Pass (Day One)
Lumnix Rating	8.5/10

A Heavy Legacy, a Promise Fulfilled

Obsidian Entertainment is no ordinary studio. Behind that name lies decades of RPG pedigree that shaped an entire generation — Fallout: New Vegas, still ranks among the greatest role-playing games ever made, Pillars of Eternity and its sequel that single-handedly saved the isometric RPG from extinction, The Outer Worlds more recently, flawed but earnest. Carrying that weight is both curse and blessing. Fans expect absolute greatness every time. Detractors wait for the first crack to appear. With Avowed, Obsidian isn't trying to please everyone — and that's exactly why the game works.

Set in the Pillars of Eternity universe — the Living Lands, this cursed archipelago off the coast of Aedyr — Avowed ditches the isometric perspective to immerse you in a first-person action RPG that owes as much to Skyrim as it does to Dishonored. That's no accident. The studio clearly studied what worked in both formulas and extracted the best of each, while stamping its own narrative signature on everything. The result is a game that doesn't try to be the biggest open world ever conceived, but obsesses over being a coherent RPG. In a genre drowning in empty promises and maps stuffed with pointless icons, that editorial choice borders on radical.

Let's be direct: Avowed is Obsidian's best RPG since New Vegas. That's not a casual statement.

Hands-On and Gameplay: Freedom as Philosophy

From the first hours, Avowed sends a clear signal. You're an emissary of the Aedyr Empire sent to the Living Lands to investigate a mysterious plague transforming its victims into hybrid creatures — part human, part vegetation. That's your starting point. But the real question Avowed poses quickly is: who are you really in this world? Your character carries a divine soul — you're a Godlike — and this distinction structures every interaction with local factions, NPCs, and the main plot.

The combat system is where Avowed surprises most. On the surface, it looks like a polished version of Skyrim. In practice, it's far richer. You can equip weapons in both hands simultaneously — sword and shield, dual daggers, grimoire and pistol, hammer and staff — and switch between two complete loadouts mid-fight with a single button press. In practical terms, you could open an encounter as a sniper from high ground, switch to melee to chain attacks on a weakened enemy, then draw a fire grimoire to control the area as reinforcements arrive. This fluid transition between styles transforms every fight into tactical micro-improvisation.

Magic deserves special mention. It goes well beyond The Outer Worlds' simplistic system or Skyrim's muddled approach. Grimoires offer directly-activated spells, but also persistent area effects that interact with the environment. Freeze the ground to slow a horde, then detonate the ice with a lightning spell. Summon a wind wall to knock archers off a narrow bridge before charging in. There are enough combinations that each player develops their own signature playstyle, yet everything remains readable enough never to devolve into unmanageable chaos. That's the difference between depth and pointless complexity — Obsidian knows the distinction.

The Living Lands: A World That Refuses to Be a Map

Avowed's open-world design is a bold choice in an era where every studio feels obligated to deliver hundreds of hours of diluted content across a sprawling map. The Living Lands are an archipelago split into distinct, dense zones, each with its own visual identity, climate, and politics. This isn't the endless map of Starfield — and that's excellent news.

Dawnshore opens with misty marshes and fishing villages under colonial influence. Shatterscarp drops you into volcanic plains where stone still radiates heat beneath your feet, inhabited by tribes whose beliefs directly clash with imperial policy. Galawain's Tusks, a spectral forest dedicated to the god of the hunt, might be the most visually accomplished zone — hundred-meter trees, elf ruins overrun by aggressive fauna, an almost Lovecraftian atmosphere that starkly contrasts the rest of the game. Each biome plays its own tune.

What sets Avowed apart from generic open-world RPGs is that exploration rewards you intelligently. No synchronization towers, no icons spawning by the dozen when you climb a rock. You find documents mentioning specific locations, NPCs drop hints in passing, or you simply notice strange light deep in a cave. Secrets stay secret. I discovered an entire dungeon — complete with its own narrative arc — simply because I chose to hug a cliff face instead of following the marked path. Those moments are priceless in an RPG.

Factions, finally, have genuinely contradictory interests. Helping Aedyr colonists maintain their grip on a region mechanically and narratively weakens the indigenous tribes. There's no solution that satisfies everyone, and the game doesn't pretend otherwise.

Art Direction and Technical: Attention to Detail

Visually, Avowed is a clean success. The studio chose stylized art direction over photorealistic rendering, and that bet pays off. Colors are saturated without being aggressive, architecture blends European colonial influences with custom-built indigenous aesthetics in rare cohesion. You'll sometimes think of Horizon Forbidden West in the environmental detail richness, sometimes Dragon Age: Inquisition in how zones tell their own stories without dialogue.

Facial animations during conversations clearly received attention. It's not Baldur's Gate 3 level — nothing currently is — but it's light-years ahead of the corpse-like stiffness that dragged down The Outer Worlds. Characters look, react, and emote. That's enough to sustain immersion through lengthy conversations.

Technically, the PC version runs flawlessly at high resolution on mid-range hardware, loading times are brief on SSD, and no major bugs surfaced after twenty-plus hours — rare enough to warrant mention. The Xbox Series X version holds up well, with a stable 60 fps performance mode that remains the recommended setting for combat.

The soundtrack is understated but effective, knowing when to fade and when to assert itself at pivotal moments. It won't linger in memory like New Vegas' score, but it handles its work seriously.

Writing: Where Obsidian Never Compromises

This is the reactor core, and this is where Avowed confirms the studio hasn't dulled its edge. Dialogue is written for real people with genuine contradictions, not archetypal templates. The colonial governor you meet early on is neither hero nor villain — he's a man convinced of his mission's legitimacy, capable of authentic compassion and systemic violence in the same day. That ambivalence runs through the entire cast.

Kai, your primary companion, is a disillusioned former soldier hauling his own moral debts. Your relationship builds on disagreements as much as trust — he'll tell you when he thinks you're wrong, and his opinion shifts based on your choices, not how many times you've chatted with him. That's the difference between a written character and an affinity-point system masquerading as human connection.

Moral choices refuse the typical good-guy/tyrant binary, sometimes hitting genuinely hard. I was asked at one point to decide an entire community's fate knowing every available option meant irreparable loss for someone. No magical third path, no miracle diplomacy unlocked by a hidden skill. Just a difficult choice and its consequences owned fully. That's narrative game design.

Content and Lifespan: Quality Over Quantity

Plan for 35 to 50 hours on a complete first playthrough depending on your exploration style. It's not Elden Ring, it's not The Witcher 3. It's exactly the right length for an RPG preferring density to filler. Every side quest you encounter has a reason to exist — it either provides faction context, completes a character arc, or unlocks a gameplay system. Generic fetch quests involving gathering ten plants from a forest are conspicuously absent.

Replayability is genuine, not artificial. A second run with an opposite character build — full magic versus full stealth, for example — actually changes how several major quests resolve and opens dialogues otherwise inaccessible. Certain factions permanently close their doors based on your early decisions. That's not window dressing.

Day-one Game Pass availability warrants mention. For subscribers, Avowed represents one of the service's best quality-to-accessibility ratios since Halo Infinite. For others, the full price tag is justified without reservation.

Strengths

• + The hybrid combat system — fluid and deep, with magic that far exceeds direct competition
• + Character writing — sharp and honest, without false moralizing
• + Zone density over empty breadth — every corner explores something meaningful
• + Real narrative consequences for player choices that resonate through to the ending
• + Cohesive art direction that gives the world genuine visual personality
• + Technical stability at launch — a rarity in the genre
• + Kai — a primary companion among the best-written in Western RPGs in years

Weaknesses

• − Enemy AI lacks ambition: opponents react but never truly surprise
• − The crafting system remains shallow compared to genre standards — you won't invest much
• − Character progression is functional but unremarkable, missing those skill-tree choices that truly define a playstyle
• − Certain secondary zones, especially late-game, show notable narrative density drops
• − The Pillars of Eternity universe as backdrop remains poorly accessible to newcomers — the game doesn't try hard enough to onboard players to its lore

Final Verdict: Obsidian Proves It Still Knows How to Write an RPG

Avowed doesn't try to be its generation's biggest, longest, or most spectacular RPG. It tries to be the most honest. Honest about what its world can offer, honest about character complexity, honest that your choices carry cost. In a genre where escalation has become default — infinite maps, hundreds of generated quests, layered systems hiding the void — that honesty borders on subversive.

Obsidian reconnects here with what made New Vegas great: the idea that an RPG should force you to think, not just optimize. That NPCs are people, not quest dispensers. That the world should react to what you do, not simply validate your decisions with a fanfare. The result is imperfect — progression systems lack punch, combat AI plateaus too quickly — but the essentials are present, solid and well-executed.

If you're hunting the next Baldur's Gate 3, move along: the ambitions operate on different scales. If you want a narratively demanding action RPG that's coherent in vision and generous with gameplay depth, Avowed might be the strongest case Game Pass has made for itself in a long time. And for a game bundled into subscription without extra cost, that conclusion carries real weight.

Lumnix Rating: 8.5/10 — A major RPG, designed for players who actually read the dialogue.