Avowed was harshly criticized on release, but this was due to many factors at play in the previous year’s gaming and controversy landscape. Many people accused it of being political pandering, oftentimes screaming louder than the reasonable people who were just pointing out flaws in game design. Many often miss the point of games like this due to their lack of media literacy, however, we don’t really know if Avowed was a good or a bad game, its just divisive, and perhaps fairly boring. Currently, a new update has dropped that brings some changes in to entice players to come back to the game.
Avowed is still boring
I personally never found the charm in Avowed, there’s issues in how it handles things and overall it feels very corporate and safe. This is coming from developers who actually proved that they can make amazing games which is rather saddening. Sometimes skill leaves the team and they just end up making things for the sake of filling an empty space rather than giving their everything to do it. The current update attempts to fix some of the grievances with the original game, even trying to bring it closer to the lore of Pillars of Eternity.
This is the right choice to go aim for, but personally I’m more interested in the Pillars of Eternity series myself and I didn’t particularly enjoy Avowed’s pacing and writing. I wonder what could the game have been had Obsidian focused on bringing an elevated experience with something nice to tell us that didn’t feel like a ton of empty words, at least the free update makes up for the huge mistakes that this game dealt with even if it doesn’t fully fix the boring foundations. When controversy happens, the sea of opinions becomes stirred, and it becomes hard to know what is true and what isn’t.
