Avowed: Obsidian Builds Something Smaller on Purpose

Obsidian Entertainment has spent the past decade being pulled in two directions at once: the studio that made Pillars of Eternity, a deliberately old-fashioned isometric CRPG built for players who wanted Baldur’s Gate’s density back, and the studio that made The Outer Worlds, a more streamlined first-person action-RPG built for a wider audience. Avowed, released in February 2025 for Xbox Series consoles and PC, is the clearest sign yet that Obsidian isn’t choosing between those two audiences so much as running them as parallel tracks — this is a first-person RPG set in the Pillars world of Eora, and its most interesting decision is refusing to chase the sprawling open-world scale that’s become the default assumption for big fantasy RPGs since Skyrim redefined the genre’s ambitions.

The setting is the Living Lands, an island region of Eora afflicted by a magical plague called the Dream Scourge, which twists the minds of those it infects into waking hallucination and violence. The player character is an Envoy of the Aedyr Empire, sent to investigate the plague’s source and its connection to a mysterious figure at its centre, and the plot unfolds through a small, well-drawn cast of companions — Kai, an aumaua diplomat with his own agenda; Giatta, an engineer with a personal stake in the region; Marius, a mercenary; Yatzli, a demon-touched scholar whose perspective on the Scourge complicates the Envoy’s official mandate. It’s Obsidian’s usual strength on full display: companions with actual opinions about the plot, willing to argue with the player character and each other rather than simply react to whatever’s put in front of them.

Why the smaller scope works

Avowed does not build a continent-spanning open world, and it’s worth being direct about why that’s a strength rather than a compromise. The Living Lands is structured as a series of distinct, hand-built zones connected by loading transitions rather than one seamless landmass, and each zone is dense with hand-placed detail rather than procedurally scattered filler. That’s a trade Obsidian has made deliberately: rather than spreading its budget across a sprawling map thin enough to need icon-clutter and repetitive side-quest templates to fill it, the studio built fewer, richer spaces, and the resulting game rewards actually exploring a zone fully rather than beelining the main quest marker and letting the rest go unvisited. It’s a structural echo of how Dishonored 2’s clockwork mansion argued that a tightly authored space beats a big one — Avowed applies the same logic at a larger, RPG-appropriate scale rather than a single showcase level.

Combat is real-time and built around a genuinely flexible loadout system: each hand can independently wield melee weapons, ranged weapons, spellcasting foci, or shields, in any combination, without the multiclassing restrictions that governed Pillars’ more traditional class system. A player can go pure dual-wield melee, a sword-and-spell hybrid, dual pistols, or a shield-and-wand defensive build, and switch between prepared loadouts mid-fight rather than committing to one approach for an entire playthrough. It’s a more approachable system than Pillars’ deep, sometimes opaque class trees, and the trade-off is honest: less theorycrafting depth, more immediate legibility about what a given build actually does in a fight.

Magic in particular benefits from the freedom of the two-hand system. Rather than locking spellcasting behind a dedicated caster class with its own separate progression track, any build can slot a grimoire into one hand and a melee weapon or firearm into the other, meaning a player never has to fully commit to “the mage build” to experiment with elemental damage or crowd control. Grimoires themselves function almost like spellbooks with a limited number of prepared spells swappable between rests, giving the system a rhythm familiar to anyone who’s played a Vancian-style CRPG caster without demanding the same rules mastery Pillars asked of its wizards. It’s a meaningfully different design philosophy from the multiclass-heavy systems Obsidian built for its isometric games, but it’s not a simplification without a point — the goal is clearly to make experimentation cheap enough that switching a loadout mid-dungeon feels like a tactical option rather than a wasted investment.

Exploration within each zone leans on light traversal tools — climbing, gliding via a companion ability, environmental puzzles gating optional loot — that keep hand-built spaces from feeling static even on a second pass. Optional dungeons and hidden caches reward genuine attentiveness to environmental storytelling rather than a minimap prompt, continuing the “fewer, denser spaces” philosophy into the moment-to-moment traversal loop rather than confining it to the macro structure of the world map.

The dialogue and reactivity Obsidian is known for

What Avowed keeps fully intact from its CRPG lineage is the writing. Companion reactions to the Envoy’s choices carry real weight — siding with one faction in the Living Lands’ central conflict over the Dream Scourge visibly strains or strengthens specific companion relationships, and the game is willing to let a companion leave the party or turn openly hostile if pushed far enough, rather than softening every choice into a reversible inconvenience. Dialogue options let the Envoy express scepticism, empathy, or naked self-interest without the game moralising about which is correct, a hallmark of Obsidian’s writing since New Vegas that survives the jump to first-person perspective intact. The result reads less like a Bethesda-style open-world RPG wearing a first-person camera and more like a Pillars of Eternity script performed at a more intimate, moment-to-moment scale.

Companion banter during exploration does similar work outside scripted dialogue trees, with party members commenting on locations, recent plot developments, and each other in ways that feel responsive rather than looped from a fixed pool repeated every few minutes. It’s a texture detail that costs a lot of writing and recording to get right, and its presence here is a sign of where Obsidian chose to spend its budget rather than on a bigger map.

Faction politics without a simple right answer

The Living Lands is nominally contested territory between three factions with competing claims on the region — the Aedyran colonial administration the Envoy officially represents, the Dawnfolk who’ve settled there independently, and the Rauataian trading concern with its own commercial interest in the Scourge’s cause. Avowed resists the temptation to code any one of them as the obviously correct choice; each has a legitimate grievance and a genuine blind spot, and the game’s central political arc is less about picking the righteous faction than about understanding what each one stands to lose or gain from how the Scourge investigation concludes. That’s harder writing to pull off than a straightforward good-faction/bad-faction structure, and it’s the clearest sign that Obsidian’s political instincts from New Vegas’s Mojave factions transferred intact to Eora’s very different fantasy politics.

The real ancestor

Avowed’s clearest lineage runs straight back through Obsidian’s own CRPG catalogue — the Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous tradition of maximalist companion writing and reactive plotting, condensed here into a smaller, first-person frame rather than an isometric one. Its willingness to let companions genuinely leave or turn on the player, rather than treating every relationship as recoverable, sits closer to the moral seriousness Disco Elysium brought to dialogue-driven consequence than to the more forgiving companion systems of its first-person action-RPG contemporaries. What Avowed borrows least from is the genre’s current open-world orthodoxy, and that’s the choice worth naming as deliberate rather than a budget limitation. It’s a rare case of a studio looking at where the genre’s centre of gravity has settled — bigger maps, more systems, more hours logged as the primary marketing metric — and deciding its own strengths are better served pulling in the opposite direction.

The verdict, argued

The game’s difficulty options extend to combat balance sliders more granular than a simple easy/normal/hard toggle, letting a player who wants the writing and world without a stiff combat challenge dial that friction down without switching off other systems like enemy scaling or resource scarcity. It’s a considerate accommodation for a studio whose core audience skews toward players there for narrative and choice consequence first, combat difficulty second, without treating that audience as an afterthought the way some RPGs bolt an easy mode on as a late patch.

Avowed’s case for itself is that scope and quality aren’t the same axis, and a smaller, denser Eora serves the writing and combat better than a bigger, thinner one would have. The flexible dual-wield loadout system gives combat immediate variety without demanding a theorycrafting investment Pillars fans might expect and newcomers would find intimidating, and the companion writing carries real stakes rather than cosmetic dialogue trees. Where it’s most exposed to criticism is exactly the scope question it’s built around — players arriving expecting a Skyrim-scale continent will find the Living Lands comparatively contained, and a handful of side quests lean on familiar fantasy-RPG fetch structures that the best companion writing can’t quite disguise. But the trade Obsidian made — depth of a few zones over breadth of a whole map — is the correct one for the kind of writing this studio does best, and Avowed proves it rather than just asserting it. What to play next: if the companion reactivity is what hooked you, Pillars of Eternity itself is the deeper, harder-edged version of the same writing philosophy; if it’s the flexible combat loadouts, look at how differently a fully open CRPG handles the same freedom in Baldur’s Gate 3’s more traditional turn-based frame.

Spoilers below

The Dream Scourge’s true source turns out to be tied directly to the Envoy’s own nature — the plague isn’t simply a natural affliction but a symptom of the same godlike interference that runs through the wider Pillars of Eternity mythology, and the Envoy’s growing connection to it over the course of the campaign raises the question of whether they’re meant to cure the Living Lands or become its next source of corruption. Yatzli’s demon-touched perspective proves to be the most reliable guide to what’s actually happening, and companions who dismiss her theories early tend to regret it by the campaign’s final act. The ending state depends heavily on which faction the Envoy has backed and which companions remain in the party by the finale, with at least one companion death or departure locked in for players who push the more self-interested dialogue options too far without managing the relationship carefully.