Avowed, a TOW-like game from Obsidian

[Finarfin]

nah, not all characters are ugly.
Manage to make one that looks good, and there are presets people share that look fine.

[Acrux]

First Comment:

"Good but it's not enough"

-Hansen threatens with "wait until you see the 'default'".
-The default is pronouns turned on. (You have to check the box to turn them off.)
-Grummz claims victory.



Don't ever give this grifter a moment of peace.

[Roguey]

-The default is pronouns turned on. (You have to check the box to turn them off.)

I saw others saying the default was pronouns turned off, you have to opt into it.

[Acrux]

-The default is pronouns turned on. (You have to check the box to turn them off.)

I saw others saying the default was pronouns turned off, you have to opt into it.

That's not what the screenshot shows.

[Shillitron]

nah, not all characters are ugly.
Manage to make one that looks good, and there are presets people share that look fine.

> this looks good


It's over.

[Shillitron]

-Hansen threatens with "wait until you see the 'default'".
-The default is pronouns turned on. (You have to check the box to turn them off.)
-Grummz claims victory.



Don't ever give this grifter a moment of peace.

The replies to Grummz is more important than Grummz himself.

He's my thermometer check on normy sentiments - aka the current state of the culture war.

[UltraFan123]

I do agree that Grummz saying "victory" because pronouns are now a choice is indeed quite misleading, because I think he should've instead said that it's a small victory in the sense that players have a choice to ignore stuff like that, which goes against the entire agenda of modern Western devs which is to forcefully shove that stuff everywhere and not give the players any choice of ignoring it.

What I think would've been a real victory should be to just remove the pronoun stuff entirely, and no choice to turn it on at all. Not that it would help much with sales even with that, tho.

[1998]

I do agree that Grummz saying "victory" because pronouns are now a choice is indeed quite misleading, because I think he should've instead said that it's a small victory in the sense that players have a choice to ignore stuff like that, which goes against the entire agenda of modern Western devs which is to forcefully shove that stuff everywhere and not give the players any choice of ignoring it.

What I think would've been a real victory should be to just remove the pronoun stuff entirely, and no choice to turn it on at all. Not that it would help much with sales even with that, tho.

And Avowed was far to late into development for pronouns to be completely removed. If currently its indeed some sort of turning point, we will see in 4-5 years. For now, I very much doubt it though. That would need an entire crop of new devs.

[Breathe]

And Avowed was far to late into development for pronouns to be completely removed. If currently its indeed some sort of turning point, we will see in 4-5 years. For now, I very much doubt it though. That would need an entire crop of new devs.

Watching AAA liquidate their dev teams has been great, and it shall continue as more duds are released. I hope there is a renaissance of some sort after this dark age.

[Cheeseknife]

The pronouns thing is stupid on the face of it because the game still has you pick "Body Type" a the very beginning anyway, allowing you to tailor a female body with a man's voice. The dialogue surrounding the Envoy is also all tailored so as to never refer to the Envoy's actual sex. That and you cannot romance any companions. Making pronouns a "choice" is just as much a victory in this case as managing to get one of your shoes back from your dog after it has chewed its laces and thoroughly slobbered all over it.

Male and female. He and she. Him and her. Simple as.

[WaterMage]

Body type should be ectomorph, mesomorph and endomorp. Not gender.

[Rand]

Watching AAA liquidate their dev teams has been great, and it shall continue as more duds are released. I hope there is a renaissance of some sort after this dark age.

The right people, and by that I mean sexually normal white men, need to be in charge and get funded.
Also, corporations need to go. Too many MBA normie ******* pissing in the stew (NFTs, loot boxes, games-as-a-service (GaaS), open world for the sake of it, niggerfetish sportsball games, etc...)

[Cedric]

I'm not checking a thread for a game I don't care about but has anyone posted the Skyrim vs. Avowed or the Oblivion vs. Avowed videos yet? We can all agree those games were dumbed down mass market slop for pinheads but it's still astounding how even those games we hate have way more love and attention to detail than this horrific garbage.

[wndrbr]

I feel it's not entirely correct to compare Avowed to TES games, since Avowed belongs to a different subgenre of RPGs. It's basically a Bioware game, with a camera hack that adds a first-person perspective - a typical storyfag adventure with none of the Ultima/UltimaUnderworld attributes that TES series still somewhat retains.

[Cedric]

While that's certainly fair it's still funny.

[gerey]

I feel it's not entirely correct to compare Avowed to TES games

The devs never dissuaded anyone from making comparison to Skyrim during the prerelease phase. Also, is it really unfair to compare Avowed to a game made 15 years ago?

The simple truth is that Avowed was made by people that couldn't care less about making a good game. All they want is to preach at people and "own the chuds".

I can't recall who in this thread says that the characters look like asset flips, but it's true, everything about this project looks like so generic and uninspired, likely because no one working on it had any actual passion and drive. The same thing was true for Outer Worlds as well, just by-the-numbers slop with a woke art direction that appeals to no one and is of no interest to anybody.

10 years from now people will still be remembering New Vegas fondly, while Avowed will have been forgotten.

[Cedric]

It looks like something slapped together with Kickstarter money on Unity or UE4/5.

[Roguey]

The devs never dissuaded anyone from making comparison to Skyrim during the prerelease phase.

bruh https://www.pcgamer.com/games/rpg/avowe ... es-anyway/

As far as I've seen, there's no actual preaching in the game. It's just written from a liberal perspective as most RPGs are. Patel's a neurotypical woman, so she engages with RPGs the way a neurotypical woman would, largely focusing on character interaction with combat and exploration as speedbumps to break conversations up, like how Gygax once described.

[Vlajdimir Ermenović]

Watching AAA liquidate their dev teams has been great, and it shall continue as more duds are released. I hope there is a renaissance of some sort after this dark age.

The right people, and by that I mean sexually normal white men, need to be in charge and get funded.
Also, corporations need to go. Too many MBA normie ******* pissing in the stew (NFTs, loot boxes, games-as-a-service (GaaS), open world for the sake of it, niggerfetish sportsball games, etc...)

That's the summa summarum right there.

[Rand]

Avowed is incompetent even compared to The Outer Worlds...

[1998]

Took them a bit to come to that conclusion

[Shillitron]

I do agree that Grummz saying "victory" because pronouns are now a choice is indeed quite misleading, because I think he should've instead said that it's a small victory in the sense that players have a choice to ignore stuff like that, which goes against the entire agenda of modern Western devs which is to forcefully shove that stuff everywhere and not give the players any choice of ignoring it.

The point of my post was that his followers are saying "No, we demand more". His grift is now considered milqtoast and his audience demands more. They even moved HIM off the position of "KCD2 is based guiz" to "**** it they are all lying charlatans"

I'm just watching the pendulum swing.

[Shillitron]

What I think would've been a real victory should be to just remove the pronoun stuff entirely, and no choice to turn it on at all. Not that it would help much with sales even with that, tho.

I feel like now the shoe is on the other foot.

We always said "stop appealing to SJW's they don't buy games" but the way Avowed looks and the team who is behind it.. their only target audience are leftoids and ******* like @Finarfin who have to pretend their boyfriend bought it for them.

The reality is, even if they made every NPC killable and put Donald Trump in the character creator as the default option - I still wouldn't buy this trash. I'm no longer the audience - they might as well double down. There are zero UI changes they can make that will make me wanna even pirate this garbage.

[Breathe]

This game is worse than mobile trash.

[Wretch]

What I think would've been a real victory should be to just remove the pronoun stuff entirely, and no choice to turn it on at all. Not that it would help much with sales even with that, tho.

I feel like now the shoe is on the other foot.

We always said "stop appealing to SJW's they don't buy games" but the way Avowed looks and the team who is behind it.. their only target audience are leftoids and ******* like @Finarfin who have to pretend their boyfriend bought it for them.

The reality is, even if they made every NPC killable and put Donald Trump in the character creator as the default option - I still wouldn't buy this trash. I'm no longer the audience - they might as well double down. There are zero UI changes they can make that will make me wanna even pirate this garbage.

Your posts have a lot more backbone than before. Nice to see.

[Finarfin]

What I think would've been a real victory should be to just remove the pronoun stuff entirely, and no choice to turn it on at all. Not that it would help much with sales even with that, tho.

I feel like now the shoe is on the other foot.

We always said "stop appealing to SJW's they don't buy games" but the way Avowed looks and the team who is behind it.. their only target audience are leftoids and ******* like @Finarfin who have to pretend their boyfriend bought it for them.

The reality is, even if they made every NPC killable and put Donald Trump in the character creator as the default option - I still wouldn't buy this trash. I'm no longer the audience - they might as well double down. There are zero UI changes they can make that will make me wanna even pirate this garbage.

*************. Seriously. Do the world a favor and *************. Not a single person would miss your ****** ***.

[rusty_shackleford]

"noooooo you can't le heckin compare it to skyrim it's not le heckin like skyrim!!!"

It's entirely fair to compare a game developed by a company to their own past work. FNV is Skyrim adjacent and considered by many to be the best game made using Bethesda"s engine. No, you shouldn't care what the developers say about not comparing it to their own work from 15 years ago, that's just to cover their own asses for being full of inept women.

The idea that it can't be compared to Skyrim because "it's not like Skyrim" is itself *********. It's not like Skyrim because it's lacking so many features, not because of deliberate design choices. Features were cut, and cut, and cut. The game has been in development for what, around 3x+ that of FNV?
"but le heckin bethesda engine makes those games so great innately!"
Let me introduce you to a game called Starfield.

[Xenich]

First Comment:

"Good but it's not enough"

-Hansen threatens with "wait until you see the 'default'".
-The default is pronouns turned on. (You have to check the box to turn them off.)
-Grummz claims victory.



Don't ever give this grifter a moment of peace.

I see a lot of these victories they proclaim as completely absurd.

"Oh yeah, we totally won everyone! They were going to gay rape us and since we persisted, we now forced them to wear a condom! We are winning everyone!!!!! Rejoice!"

[Xenich]

"noooooo you can't le heckin compare it to skyrim it's not le heckin like skyrim!!!"

It's entirely fair to compare a game developed by a company to their own past work. FNV is Skyrim adjacent and considered by many to be the best game made using Bethesda"s engine. No, you shouldn't care what the developers say about not comparing it to their own work from 15 years ago, that's just to cover their own asses for being full of inept women.

The idea that it can't be compared to Skyrim because "it's not like Skyrim" is itself *********. It's not like Skyrim because it's lacking so many features, not because of deliberate design choices. Features were cut, and cut, and cut. The game has been in development for what, around 3x+ that of FNV?
"but le heckin bethesda engine makes those games so great innately!"
Let me introduce you to a game called Starfield.

Is it too much to ask that if a company made a previous game in the same basic concept that the new game contain all of the features/advancements of the past game at its base, then be improved in various directions they choose?

I never understood how this isn't just a "matter of fact" progression in making games in general, but it should be a no brainer if a game is made within the same studio.

[Roguey]

"noooooo you can't le heckin compare it to skyrim it's not le heckin like skyrim!!!"

It's entirely fair to compare a game developed by a company to their own past work. FNV is Skyrim adjacent and considered by many to be the best game made using Bethesda"s engine. No, you shouldn't care what the developers say about not comparing it to their own work from 15 years ago, that's just to cover their own asses for being full of inept women.

The idea that it can't be compared to Skyrim because "it's not like Skyrim" is itself *********. It's not like Skyrim because it's lacking so many features, not because of deliberate design choices. Features were cut, and cut, and cut. The game has been in development for what, around 3x+ that of FNV?
"but le heckin bethesda engine makes those games so great innately!"
Let me introduce you to a game called Starfield.

They didn't make those systems or features that came included with the Fallout 3 engine.

A Schreier article dropped, detailing the history https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newslett ... wo-reboots

“I feel like I’ve learned so much over the past four years that I wish I’d known at the start of this process,” Patel said. “It’s definitely been a job where the highs are really high and the lows are really low.”

Development of Avowed began in 2018, as Obsidian executives were gearing up to sell the company after 15 years of independence. The studio had become beloved for complex role-playing games like Fallout: New Vegas and Pillars of Eternity, but staying solvent was always a challenge. Obsidian presented prospective buyers with a pitch for Avowed, which the company hoped would be its magnum opus: a cross between Destiny and Skyrim that allowed players to adventure together in a massive fantasy world.

Later that year, Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox purchased Obsidian. The new owners announced the game in the summer of 2020. But despite a glossy teaser trailer, Avowed was floundering. The development team had gone through two different vertical slices — chunks of the game designed to demonstrate how it would all function — and cut the multiplayer component. Even so, it was still failing to coalesce. By January, the studio had decided to replace the project’s leadership team and reboot the game.

This came as a shock to the Avowed team, which consisted of 80 people who were preparing to enter production. Now they would have to develop a third vertical slice and essentially start over from scratch.

“Normally if you’re stepping back and reevaluating your creative direction, putting together a new vertical slice and revised production plans, you would do that with a very small team,” Patel said. “We did not have a very small team at that point.”

In the weeks and months that followed, Patel had to simultaneously figure out a new vision for the game, refill key leadership positions and ensure that dozens of writers, designers, programmers and artists had work to do as Avowed found its footing. It was like “building the tracks while the train is moving forward,” Patel said.

“A lot of lessons we learned as we were building this game, ideally we would’ve learned on a small scale with a true preproduction,” she added.

Under Patel, the game made two major pivots. One was to double down on the story and lore from the Pillars of Eternity franchise, which Obsidian had been incubating for more than a decade. The other was to replace the open world with “open zones,” like the company’s 2019 hit The Outer Worlds, which would allow the development team to create distinct, dense spaces.

They’d have to sacrifice the ambitions of building a Skyrim-style map where players could walk for hours and still not see everything. But for both technological and logistical reasons, that was proving to be an impossible quest.

“With any game you think, ‘OK, we can’t climb every mountain — which ones are really worth the effort for us?’” Patel said. “We knew from The Outer Worlds that we could build a really great game with ‘open zones,’ and that also adds some advantages in terms of letting you really theme your areas more distinctly and intentionally, and provide a sense of progression as the player’s going from one environment to the next.”

The Avowed crew stayed quiet for the next few years as Patel worked to rebuild her leadership team, steer everyone in the same direction and learn how to direct a major project for the first time.

Because games are so complex, with countless variables ranging from big (how many companions there are) to small (the main character’s walking speed), even something as seemingly simple as clearly communicating decisions can prove to be a big obstacle — and a big lesson for Patel.

“As an individual contributor, you’re always saying, ‘Well if I were in charge, I’d be doing this, and obviously this would be the right call,’” she said. “Then you get there and you’re like: ‘This is harder than I thought it would be.’”

Faced with the pressure of delivering on one of Obsidian’s biggest bets, Patel spent a lot of time getting to know unfamiliar disciplines, like engineering, while making tough calls about what to prioritize.

Avowed was re-revealed in 2023 and initially set for a fall 2024 release before it slipped to Feb. 2025. It wasn’t until late in development that it all coalesced.

Should have gone with Cryengine instead of Unreal, but Parker is even dumber than Vavra.