How Obsidian is making Avowed more welcoming for everyone

When I first heard that Obsidian’s Avowed was set in the developer’s own Pillars of Eternity universe, I’ll confess that I was a bit afraid it would be difficult to get into. After all, I haven’t played those games, despite the good things I’ve heard about them, and so I feared that an otherwise promising fantasy action-RPG from a beloved developer might not actually be for me.

But after talking with several Obsidian developers and playing the game at a recent preview event, I’m a lot more reassured over how much thought and care the team has put into making Avowed an inviting experience in a variety of clever ways.

You absolutely don’t have to have played Pillars of Eternity

What helps Avowed work as a standalone title is the fact that it’s set in The Living Lands, an often-unseen part of Pillars of Eternity‘s world of Eora. Speaking to MobileSyrup in a group interview, Avowed creative director Carrie Patel says the team primarily decided to go this route because it provided an existing framework and lore to build upon, and that includes exploring new regions. “One of the great things about the world of Eora is there are obviously quite a few settings there, and we’ve only really set games in a couple of them. So for us, The Living Lands was an opportunity to bring players back to that world, but in a setting that would be fresh for us as developers and also fresh for our fans as well.”

Dawnshore, the first region in The Living Lands.

In Avowed, you play as an envoy for the Aedyr Empire, who’s sent to The Living Lands to investigate a mysterious plague called the Dream Scourge. You’re also a ‘Godlike,’ a race of people who are said to have been “touched” by the gods and carry unique physical attributes like horns or scales that are tied to one of these deities. With this setup, Pillars of Eternity fans will get the added benefit of learning more about returning elements like the Aedyr Empire and Godlike while new players still have a fresh start in this new region.

“You’ve got rules you’ve got to follow […] It is interesting, trying to figure out in the Living Lands, specifically, where some of the rules are different, just by the nature of the place. How are the gods represented there, and figuring out, how do we want to pull that stuff in. What is the level of metaphysical weirdness that we want to delve into with this game, versus the other Pillars games,” says Matt Hansen, art director. “And we decided that will be present; curious players can find some of that stuff in the world, but we’re not going to make it critically important to the story. This is an action RPG, and so we want to make sure that the pace is moving along for people, so that stuff’s there if you want to engage with it, but you’re not forced to.”

“It’s a far away place removed from a lot of the rest of the Eora that has its own history. It’s really the wild frontier, so there doesn’t have to be as much parity between the games, but you can see what they brought culturally to tame this new frontier. It’s really been this terrific sandbox to play in,” adds lead environment artist Dennis Presnell.

Seeing the world from a whole new perspective

In talking to the Obsidian developers, it’s clear that something they’re particularly proud of is Avowed‘s support for both first- and third-person modes. Originally, the team had only confirmed the former, although the latter was eventually revealed this past June. I’ll confess that I took for granted just how meaningful such an option could be for players until I heard more from Obsidian.

Third-person.

“The biggest impetus for us in including third-person is accessibility. We know that a lot of people experience real motion sickness playing in first-person, and offering a third-person option is the difference between them being able to enjoy your game and not,” explains Patel. “It is definitely a very challenging and expensive option to support. It’s definitely something that we were developing from the beginning, even when we weren’t showing it […] For us, we know that this is really core for a lot of players being able to play the game in the first place. And as a nice bonus, you spend your time picking your fabulous envoys, Godlike features and hair and outfits, and so it’s also nice to be able to see that in the world.”

Those sorts of struggles can even affect those working on Avowed. “When I first joined the project almost three years ago, I was doing a playtest with the other directors. And it was one of these things where we were swimming underwater, and it was right on the transition between underwater and above the surface, and I was having a hard time,” admits Ryan Warden, Avowed production director who is, as I was pleasantly surprised to discover, an Edmontonian expat. “I had to put my head down a little bit and just look at the ground for a while. And so, one of the things that [third-person] gives you if you’re someone like me who is somewhat prone to motion sickness is the ability to play the game.”

However, enabling third-person isn’t a simple flip of a switch; it’s actually quite challenging and had to be considered since the start of production.

“It is definitely a huge chunk of work,” says Ash Kumar, lead VFX artist. “We had to rethink everything from a design perspective, just so that the abilities, the weapons, they all work in first- and third-person. We step one level down, we’re talking about animation. The animations need to be different, because there are situations where the character is spinning around, you can’t spin the first-person camera because it’s going to make you more motion sick. So, thoughts about that. And then visual effects. So for instance, if you are running and you crouch really quickly, you go into a slide. When you slide in third-person, you see all of this dust flowing through the character. But in first-person, you cannot obscure the player’s camera with dust in front of it. So all of those things we have to be cognizant about.”

Robin Hood Simulator.

“One of the things that I hadn’t considered a long time ago: in first-person, there’s no torso on the player character at all. It’s just arms and legs, and so when you’re switching between the first-person and third-person, clearly, you’ve got to render a full character model there,” adds Warden. “So you’ve got to add in a torso, and you’ve got to add in a head, and it takes more doing than you might expect.”

Something you might also not consider is how these changes to animations and VFX will also impact technical performance. As Kumar notes, “there’s a few abilities in the game which [have] different effects treatment” depending on first- versus third-person, including a magical shield bubble that only needs to be partially displayed in the former but must be reworked so as to not hinder visibility in the latter. The trade-off, he says, is the game can save performance in that regard. But even something like visual fidelity is affected.

“The biggest challenge, I think, between third-person and first-person effects is [that] anything in first person is a lot smaller and needs higher fidelity, whereas in third-person you can forego the fidelity, but you need volume. So switching between that is something that we found out while working the effects,” says Kumar.

The X-factor

Another element that’s notable about Avowed is that it’s the first Obsidian RPG that was built from the ground-up within the Xbox Game Studios family since it was acquired in 2018. While the developer has incubated a few games under the Xbox umbrella, including the survival co-op game Grounded and historical narrative adventure game Pentiment, 2019’s The Outer Worlds — Obsidian’s last RPG — had been in development well before the Xbox buyout.

The Outer Worlds, Obsidian’s last RPG, helped lay some of the groundwork for Avowed.

Therefore, that begs the question — how has Microsoft’s involvement since Avowed‘s inception benefited the project? For one, it gives Obsidian access to the company’s award-winning suite of accessibility features, which includes tools to adjust field of view, head bobbing, camera sway, UI text size, subtitle size and background and control setups. The developer will talk more about these sorts of features closer to launch.

But for now, Patel says the support from Xbox “has been great,” especially when it comes to the collaboration with sister studios in the company. “Obviously, there are a lot of other studios under that umbrella that have experience working in Unreal [Engine] that know a lot about performance optimization and that have been really helpful in just helping us solve some of those technical challenges,” she says.

“In addition, one of the most useful things to us has been Microsoft’s user research department. We’ve run a number of studies through them, gotten a lot of research and data back from them. And in particular, we’ve run a few different multi-person playthroughs of the first four hours of the game. And so what that really allows us to do is hone on things like clarity, difficulty, seeing what players are noticing, where they are dying a lot, what quests and content they are picking up… So that’s actually been extremely helpful in getting those fresh eyes [for] reactions,” explains Patel.

Pillars of Eternity.

“And we’ve done a lot of very focused tuning around the data that we’ve gotten from them. And so it’s been, especially in the last year, very useful to go to them with a series of questions and hypotheses and say, ‘Have your people play the first four hours of the game. Tell us how we’re doing on these things.’ We get the report back and we see, ‘Okay, people are missing this thing.’ I think that’s actually where we got some of the data on grimoires that led to some of the tuning that we ended up doing. ‘Players are having trouble with these weapons, this part isn’t tutorialized, Let’s work on this and send it back and see what we get.'”

Of course, Xbox’s all-in approach with Game Pass means that Avowed will be available on day one for all subscribers, which only further opens it up to more players. And as part of that Game Pass push, both Pillars of Eternity and Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire are now available in the service’s catalogue if you do decide you want to go back and check them out. With that in mind, what advice would Patel — who also worked on those games — give to people who do so?

“Definitely give them a try! I think they’re they’re wonderful games that hold up very well. It’s a very different style of game. So I’d say, for players who who were experienced with either tactical or turn-based RPGs, jump right on in, because I think you’ll love it,” she says. “If you’re someone who is there for the story and that style of gameplay is a bit unfamiliar to you, we always have ‘Story Time Mode’ in those older games, so the style and challenge of combat does not need to be a barrier of entry for anybody. But yeah, there’s a lot to love, a lot to find and a lot to discover in those games still.”

Glossary terms will be highlighted in dialogue so you can learn more about them.

And even if you don’t do that, Patel says something that carries over from Pillars, the ‘Dialogue & History’ feature, will help ease you in. It’s an in-game feature that lets you pull up a glossary to provide definitions and additional context on key creatures, locations and other bits of lore that are mentioned.

“I would expect that the majority of our players are never going to have played Pillars of Eternity or Deadfire, and so making sure that those players get onboarded and feel welcomed into the game is hugely important.”

Avowed will launch on Xbox Series X/S and PC (plus Game Pass) on February 18th, 2025.

Image credit: Xbox