Eternity Avowed - Obsidian's first person action-RPG in the Pillars of Eternity setting

[Heroic Liberator]

13k peak CCU on Steam. Yeah even worse bomba than Pillars of Eternity 2 which had 22k peak ccc.

For those who don't know peak CCU on steam roughly translates into 1:10 ratio on pc sales and so far it is one of better statistic on sales in industry to the point where publishers are pushing valve to remove ccc numbers much like they did with sales.

So ~130k copies sold on pc.

*game will be released into gamepass later

Avowed has already made over $10m in the bank during EA
Add the Gamepass payday
Add release sales
They're doing fine actually, bet they're stoked

Where did you get this information?

It came to him in a dream.

 

[Inec0rn]

13k peak CCU on Steam. Yeah even worse bomba than Pillars of Eternity 2 which had 22k peak ccc.

For those who don't know peak CCU on steam roughly translates into 1:10 ratio on pc sales and so far it is one of better statistic on sales in industry to the point where publishers are pushing valve to remove ccc numbers much like they did with sales.

So ~130k copies sold on pc.

*game will be released into gamepass later

Is people who are paying the highest value possible(US$90). With gamepass, my guess is that it will have much more players. My guess is that almost everyone who played Skyrim and owns gamepass will try this game.

This is why I don't like gamepass business model. Allow this types of games to become more successful...

Sure, Bethesda have been saying Starfield is super successful based on player hours played due to gamepass lol.

Ultimately idc, I don't have sloppass and there's nothing on there I would want to play anyway. If they want to double down on expensive casual, dull, woke games they are welcome to.

Trouble with milking IP like the industry has the past 15 years is I just no longer care about it. Doom, star wars, Diablo, fallout, TES, total war, witcher etc. etc.

A new announcement and I couldn't give 2 shits. Pillars was never really that strong, PoE1 wasn't bad and everyone wanted a new BG game, 2 was meh for me, and this game was lol from the get go.

 

[Gandalf]

What's wrong with Awoved aside writing? Does it really have good exploration and platforming?

 

[Cryomancer]

What's wrong with Awoved aside writing? Does it really have good exploration and platforming?

Everything.

• No Cipher, No Druid, No Chanter or any interesting class
• Very dumbed down trees for the 3 remaining
• RAnger animal companion is just a summon on CD
• No Blunderbuss
• No spear, no halberd
• The UI is shit
• They force you to play as a fungus godlike
• (...)

 

[Tenebris]

What's wrong with Awoved aside writing? Does it really have good exploration and platforming?

A lot of complaints I've been seeing is that item progression is very boring. When you find a chest anywhere it's almost always going to be crafting materials. Scaling also seems to be based off items rather then level. Personally it looks like they leaned too heavily into the parkour stuff to me. Like from everything I've seen everything is designed in a way for you to jump and climb onto.

 

[Ibn Sina]

What's wrong with Awoved aside writing? Does it really have good exploration and platforming?

Everything.

• No Cipher, No Druid, No Chanter or any interesting class
• Very dumbed down trees for the 3 remaining
• RAnger animal companion is just a summon on CD
• No Blunderbuss
• No spear, no halberd
• The UI is shit
• They force you to play as a fungus godlike
• (...)

Spears exists.

 

[normie]

nice review of avowed (he hated it, and it's pretty funny)

LMAO THERE'S FUCKING BROCCOLI HAIR, THE MULATTO PERM NO CAP ON GOD
you can hide the face shit and still have it accord with everyone treating you like a godlike abomination

there's something really funny to me about it, makes me want to mod broccoli haircuts into every Black Isle developed and or published game

 

[countrydoctor]

What's wrong with Awoved aside writing? Does it really have good exploration and platforming?

1) Loot tiers. Both you and enemy have a loot rank. If you're below the enemy's loot tier, you deal significantly less damage and take way more. It makes encounters an insufferable bullet sponge fest. But if yours and enemy's gear are at the same level, even on POTD, the game is braindead. You don't need any optimization, you don't need any "builds", as long as you pass a gear check you WILL win in the most braindead fashion possible. It also screws with exploration, since 95% of time the chest or a backpack is just going to contain money or upgrade materials. Uniques are rare and there's no diversity among standard gear.

2) Cities are completely devoid of life or any internal logic in their design. It's video game levels, not living environments. Same issue as in Veilguard. NPCs don't even react if you steal anything, which was a feature in a motherfucking Pillars 1.

3) The writing is a typical self-absorbed Pillars drivel. NPCs routinely info dump entire wikipedia articles on your head, even unprompted. If a character has a particular trait, it WILL be exaggerated and obnoxiously overused over his dialogue tree. Kai is a decent party member because he's literally Eder with a voice of Garrus, but even he suffers from the fits of millennial "well, THAT happened" humor. The game is at its best when it SHUTS THE FUCK UP.

4) UI is a cluttered, ugly piece of shit. Usability and quality of life is nonexistent in general: you routinely come across locked chests without any lockpicks in your pocket, yet there's no way to somehow mark them on your map, forcing me to screenshot their location. Skill wheel doesn't allow me to pick grimoire spells. In general, keyboard controls have this weird feature where your movement gets disabled after you use a skill wheel, forcing you to re-enter inputs before you can dodge again, which feels clunky as fuck.

5) Visuals and art style are a weird mix of photorealism and stylized environments that makes everything look like plastic toys. And by the gods, now i realize why the setting is so racist towards orlans. They are fucking hideous up close.

In general, i would say the game is not as bad as i thought it would be. But it would be way better if they removed 90% of NPCs and turned it into a straight-up dungeon crawler with minimal amount of story faggotry and purple prose this series loves so much for some reason. Ditch tiered loot system on top of it, and it could've been a decent dungeon crawler. But thus far it's 6/10 (which is still more than i would give the godawful Outer Worlds).

 

[Nifft Batuff]

You can't point to a single element of Skyrim and demonstrate that it's good

It has day/night cycles.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

Why is this so oddly fitting, should be the new official EE portrait.

 

[flushfire]

All hair options except the balding line are gay. Not even kidding, they're either obviously made for women or soyboy cuts.

 

[Yosharian]

I mean this is fascinating but what does it have to do with POE lol

 

[markec]

I mean this is fascinating but what does it have to do with POE lol

Posted it in a wrong tab.

 

[Roguey]

Avowed, a game with a massive budget made by a studio with a pedigree for great RPGs, has less than twice the highest player count of a game about digging a hole in your back yard made by two sedans worth of Germans.

https://steamdb.info/app/2457220/charts/
https://steamdb.info/app/3244220/charts/

It hasn't been released yet to the wide audience, so perhaps we can wait a day or two with this assessment?

Yeah, whether Avowed is successful or not depends on if MS decides to lay people off several months after release. If they get the Veilguard Special (everyone except the TOW 2 team gets laid off) we can safely call it a failure. If not, it was a success.

PoE2 was only bought by hardcore Obsidiots. No one sane buys a direct sequel to a game they never finished, and only someone insane would finish the snoozefest that was PoE.

Deadfire only failed because of marketing and that guy was fired because of it as Avellone revealed.

Unsuccessful games don't get their project directors nice watches.

1) Loot tiers. Both you and enemy have a loot rank. If you're below the enemy's loot tier, you deal significantly less damage and take way more. It makes encounters an insufferable bullet sponge fest. But if yours and enemy's gear are at the same level, even on POTD, the game is braindead. You don't need any optimization, you don't need any "builds", as long as you pass a gear check you WILL win in the most braindead fashion possible. It also screws with exploration, since 95% of time the chest or a backpack is just going to contain money or upgrade materials. Uniques are rare and there's no diversity among standard gear.

Did Carrie decide to take the wrong lessons from Swen's success or what?

 

[Tenebris]

Didn't Obsidian talk about eventually remastering the first Pillars during that campaign? I wonder if they'll ever actually do that. If Avowed ends up selling well, there's a healthy amount of new comers probably wanting more of the world. Whether or not they'd be too braindead for a cRPG is another story though.

 

[Brickfrog]

Whether or not they'd be too braindead for a cRPG is another story though

I'm hopeful that bg3s success will make publishers more amenable to investing in these projects.

 

[normie]

You can't point to a single element of Skyrim and demonstrate that it's good

It has day/night cycles.

it's in general a cozy place to explore and take in, all its biomes have a lot of charm and just enough graphic fidelity that it's not a visual assault, but also not lacking so much you have to imagine it
and the writing is heads above anything Obsidian post New Vegas has produced

All hair options except the balding line are gay. Not even kidding, they're either obviously made for women or soyboy cuts.

they look like hair mods do, excessively detailed and styled in a manner that clashes with people's sense of what people would look like were they not living in a rat utopia like the "beautiful ones" - they're an Elder Scrolls modding staple
Avowed looks like playing within some woman's The Sims game, or some lady's obsessively managed Second Life world, there's this sense of an unrestrained and unsubtle dollhouse logic to how things look and act, and the way the player "snarks" in dialog too is extremely feminine in the exact same manner for the exact same reasons
the game is just too damn girly

 

[Nifft Batuff]

Didn't Obsidian talk about eventually remastering the first Pillars during that campaign? I wonder if they'll ever actually do that. If Avowed ends up selling well, there's a healthy amount of new comers probably wanting more of the world. Whether or not they'd be too braindead for a cRPG is another story though.

Why remastering the first Pillars if their graphics is better than Avowed?

 

[sebas]

I've played it for about 3 hours now. The game is like a Netflix series and I am convinced it was designed with the same goal in mind, to maximize subscriber viewership.

It's competently made, runs like butter and looks good (I hate the mushroom aesthetic but that's just me). The characters are the most watered down, vaccinated, chicflix stuff you can imagine. To go from Durance, Kana, Grieving Mother or even bestbro Eder to Mr. Clippy and Kai is such decline.

The story itself is barely engaging, like a straight-to-tv Christmas movie: hey here's this really deadly island that's killing everything - how about we have the capital's mayor and Aedyr ambassador run around and get lost in it. Ta-daaaam, intrigue!

The combat is basically nu-Skyrim and very reminiscent of the many mods that tried to make it more engaging. Hosnestly, if they had managed to add some weight to it I think it would have been fantastic. Enderal with this gameplay would have a been such an amazing game! Still, it's good as is.

The exploration is really great. You can interact with the environment (nowhere near the level of Zelda of course) and it generally just pays to do parkour. It feel like this was the main focus for the game, or it's maybe just the part that ended up working best. Speaking of, judging by some of the items I've found parkouring the docks I think the itemization also has potential.

The RPG elements are there, including stats driven dialogue but so far it's been flavour only. The game promisses the Godlike abilities that will unlock will be tied to CnC so who knows, it might improve. (who am I kidding, it won't improve)

The woke shit is minimal but the DEI feminism is jarring to the point of complete disbelief. I just don't understand these modern "writers", how the fuck can you make the captain of the guard of the capital of the most dangerous island in the world, a fucking blonde goofy cheerleader...why, why the fuck would you do that?!

...

I still can't believe they made a fucking Eora game without a cypher, a nalpazca monk or a skaen priest - like, you know, the most flavourful and interesting shit they had in the whole fucking universe.


All in all, it scratches the Skyrim itch and, for what it's worth, is definitely a better game than OW.

 

[normie]

There are space buns in the game!

coincidence? no

 

[Gandalf]

I still can't believe they made a fucking Eora game without a cypher, a nalpazca monk or a skaen priest - like, you know, the most flavourful and interesting shit they had in the whole fucking universe.

Maybe those classes will be included in the DLCs?

 

[Mikeal]

If they didn't want to bother with fallout of player going full postal in the middle of the city they should've just disabled using your weapons and spells while in towns. It's not like you can attack every NPC in all RPG games out there. Most JRPGs simply don't account for that and neither do Pathfinder games, Cyberpunk disables firing whenever you point your gun at an actually important NPCs and people weren't bitching about that.

Stalker 2 also disabled shooting at important NPCs. I tried to shoot Strelok the other day just to see if the game allows it.

And? You couldn't kill important NPCs in previous stalkers either.

 

[sebas]

What's wrong with Awoved aside writing? Does it really have good exploration and platforming?

A lot of complaints I've been seeing is that item progression is very boring. When you find a chest anywhere it's almost always going to be crafting materials.

I found these right at the docks, so I'm cautiously optimistic about the itemization.

 

[Naraya]

What's wrong with Awoved aside writing? Does it really have good exploration and platforming?

A lot of complaints I've been seeing is that item progression is very boring. When you find a chest anywhere it's almost always going to be crafting materials.

I found these right at the docks, so I'm cautiously optimistic about the itemization.

Ah, the famous "+x% attribute", the peak of modern itemization (yes, I know it kind of started with The Witcher).

 

[cvv]

Ah, the famous "+x% attribute", the peak of modern itemization (yes, I know it kind of started with The Witcher).

No, it peaked with Witcher.