What a boring game. You can tell nobody involved had any desire to make it other than the visual artists, and even that's up for debate. It's a total replication of everything that was wrong with The Outer Worlds.
They've done it again. They've made TOW again. Boring itemisation, dull as hell setting (though to be fair, it's Josh's fault this time around), shitty "linear series of small maps" design, ugly Unreal Engine visuals, one-dimensional plot with very clear and unambiguous "bad guys" that leaves the player no room to draw their own conclusions... same exact game as TOW. Still hanging onto the remnants of the Bethesda formula they inherited from New Vegas, when they can't be arsed putting in the effort to have any consistent mechanics or world sim aspects in the way even Bethesda's worst games do.
The combat seems promising at first but it ends up in a Dragon Age 2 situation - the mechanics aren't inherently bad in themselves and are competent in an arcade action way, but the sheer amount of combat you end up doing, and the excessive number of enemies, means that you spend far longer with these systems than they can handle. I was bored as hell with the combat by the start of the second map, which isn't even halfway through the game, and the number of encounters only skyrockets from there.
The writing, despite being fairly minimal and in the background, still manages to be offensively poor. I thought PoE was horribly boring and, in fairness to Avowed, it's a faithful sequel in that sense. As mentioned, the problems from TOW return - annoying companions, bad attempts at humour mixed with skin-crawling attempts at sincerity, and a childlike good-vs-evil plot in which the antagonists are rendered so monstrous as to totally refuse the player the chance to sympathise with them or consider their view in any way. There is also a more mystical plot going on, for which Obsidian have picked only the most boring fucking tropes possible - you're a Chosen One with Mysterious Voice speaking to you in dreams!
The map design is so lazy, just big squares of land with a small handful of locations scattered about, all of which are just enemy mobs. The open world aspect is sabotaged anyway by the constant beef gates. If you lose a fight, it's typically not because you did anything wrong, it's because the game wants you to go off and do some boring sidequests and come back when you're strong enough to smash through it. Why even use this type of design? Morgoth said earlier in this thread that he liked the tutorial area and I agree - it wasn't great but it was a solid linear level with a few decent handplaced encounters. If the whole game had been linear, like a modern Dark Messiah, it could have made much better use of the systems. I suspect the reason it's open world is because a linear game would take too much effort; it's far easier to draw a big plot of land in Unreal Engine, slap some towers and houses around at random, place a bunch of enemy mobs, and take Microsoft for a ride by saying you need a multi-million dollar budget to do something that any dickhead could do in five minutes.
The only really positive thing you can say about this game is that, unlike TOW, it's a bit more prepared to accept itself for what it is, which is a straightforward combat-focused ARPG with almost no player influence over the plot. In that sense, it's less objectionable than TOW was, but that's a pyrrhic victory. TOW was a pathetic attempt to recapture New Vegas that set its sights high and failed on every possible level, while Avowed is an equally pathetic attempt to shrug off the weight of expectation by just making something deliberately basic and simple, an admission of total defeat. Is it better to aim high and fail, or set the bar on the ground and barely manage to clear it? Either way, the result is bad games.
The only people who come out of this production not looking like shit are some members of the voice cast, who put good effort in despite being given diabolical material to work with. The actor for the Inquisitor tries to add some gravitas despite the fact she's playing a cartoon villain who the writers have no desire to make into anything worthwhile, the guy playing the Ambassador you meet early on has a great snivelling tone to his voice, and Yatzli's voice actor injects so much fun and personality into her delivery that you almost stop noticing that the dialogue is absolutely fucking dreadful.
I wish Microsoft would do the right thing and shut this stupid studio down, I'm sick to fucking death of them at this point. The pricks made one good game in their whole career and even that was basically a mod for Fallout 3 meaning a better studio - yes, I think Bethesda are better - did the hard work for them. The only benefit to their continued existence is amusing yourself by conjuring up the mental image of a glum Josh Sawyer, sat alone in his run-down corner office, uninvolved in any projects, tweaking ini files in New Vegas to try and get his crap jsawyer mod perfect.
