2025 feels to be a special year for Xbox and Avowed is just the very exciting start.

I was sold when I saw this was coming from Obsidian. Chomping at the bit when I heard it was set in the Pillars of Eternity universe. And now that I’ve got hands on, I’m delighted to say that this is the spiritual successor to Skyrim we’ve waited close to fourteen years for. In a world where The Elder Scrolls VI was announced six years past with still no trace. Yes, it’s really been that long!

Over the years, when I’ve looked at articles that proclaim ‘Games You’d love if you enjoy Skyrim’, I don’t generally get the comparison. Starfield is probably the closest, most recent example and even The Elder Scrolls Online or Fallout 76. But can you really compare it to The Witcher 3? Dragon Age Veilguard? Baldur’s Gate 3? To a certain point, perhaps.

And trust me, even though they’re both RPGs, trying to compare Avowed to Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is going to leave you sorely disappointed. They couldn’t be more different. Even to Avowed’s detriment, at times.

For example, KC:D 2 penalises players for stealing items. If you wear stolen items in towns, you get stop-searched by guards. You can only sell stolen items in certain places and can even try to persuade the guards of your innocence otherwise you face the stocks. In Avowed, you can walk into someone’s house and just…take the food off their table.

I’m not going to lie, playing these games back to back took some getting used to. And perhaps even disappointed me a little bit. Avowed doesn’t much deal in repercussions. Even in its decision-making, I didn’t find my conversation choices mattered too much or the choices between objectives feel too impactful. Often it all seems to lead to a similar conclusion. It was a big tonal adjustment.

But that does not make Avowed any less compelling, far from it. In fact, I found myself much more enamoured and hooked by Avowed’s world-building, story and characters. Its free-roam, multi-choice combat was also a very welcome reprieve from more complex and divisive systems and the philosophical barbs  between characters really stuck with me. Particularly when having discussions around morality with your party members at camp.

It’s all part of Avowed’s charm, efficient, polished, accessible. And for the most part, its systems all feel very easy to understand and get to grips with. It’s clear what everything does, trajectory is clear and easy to follow, and there are clear lines of progression. Avowed is smooth and slick and while it may seem simplistic in its execution, is also in-depth enough to keep you invested.

Killing enemies and completing quests in your journal gives you points to spend on your character attributes and abilities across different classes as well as your race and companion counterparts. Class abilities are defined by levels and you can only unlock certain abilities by threshold from Level 1 through 22, broken down into passives and actives.

As a Fighter, you get abilities like you’d expect like Stunning Blows and Reflective strikes, as well as increased power and regenerating health. A Ranger is a bit more cunning, using entangling vines to snare enemies to the floor, and then increasing arrow strikes and speedier equip speed.

Then there’s the Wizard, an oh-so satisfying addition to Avowed that you’ll really want to explore to the full. Simple spells like Minor Missiles can be purchased but once you start unlocking Grimmoire ranks, you can conjure up a ring of fire, blizzards and even meteor showers and arcane sigils. Peppering enemies with projectiles from your wand then scolding them alive with fire at range helps Avowed really come to life.

And you’ll need all of that support as even on the lower difficulties, Avowed’s combat really takes a turn at the mid-way point, enemy scaling with a heightened intensity and missions structued by difficulty, really encouraging the player to take their time, pace themselves and even do some grinding to build up your durability.

Avowed feels like Avatar crossed with The Elder Scrolls. Eora is a rich world filled with luscious forests, sparkly night skies, vibrant vegetation and dark, decrepid dungeons filled with secrets. It’s stunning, intriguing and you’ll find yourself admiring sunsets, scenic overviews, and wanting to

There’s high fantasy sword play, shields, hammers and crossbows, of course, but Obsidian have blended it in with some stunning spellcraft and even thrown in guns for good measure. All of it blends together seamlessly and keeps giving the player options, allowing you secondary equipment and even dual-wielding weapons. It’s so wonderfully refreshing having so many possibilities at your fingertips and even being able to acquire unique weapons throughout your playthrough that have their own distinct attribute. The chances of your alternating between weapons across the course of your playthrough is incredibly high, and sorely recomended.

If all that wasn’t enough, you can upgrade all equipment across various stages of quality, from Common to Legendary. Meaning any item you encounter, providing you pick up the right materials and craft any specalist pieces, can be upgraded to maximum potency. That’s a pretty awesome prospect, meaning despite what I said above, you could carry the exact same weapon from the moment you pick it up to the end of the game. As long as you scale its difficulty.

That’s what I feel Avowed and Obsidian truly understand about players. We do have that one weapon we love and stick to in RPGS and often feel a twinge of sadness when playing games like Diablo where it feels like you churn through a hundred different weapons before the end. You can absolutely do that in Avowed if you want to, or do the total opposite. The choice is yours and that’s absolutely wonderful.

You can even take it a step further still and upgrade Enchantments on weapons,  adding an additional feat that cannot be undone. The game has so many possibilities and that in itself offers up opportunities for replayability and means combat is where Avowed really shines brightest.

In addition, there’s a totem system at camp that offers additional benefits and perks depending on what you pick up and find, should you choose to. It’s all part of the game’s optional quests, which also include treasure hunts and bounties. Find scraps of map or purchase them from vendors and let them lead you to massive chests brimming with all sorts of goodies, such as rare items and unique equipment.

And naturally, you have companion quests so you can build bonds and loyalty with allies, learning more about them and their own quirks and interesting traits. And it’s interesting because you don’t have any sort of companion affiliation bar but the missions have been purely designed for story and narrative purposes, so they’re designed for you to just get to know the people fighting alongside you and help shape their destinies.

That’s perhaps where Avowed slips up somewhat compared to others in the genre. I said at the top I didn’t want to compare, but when you do look at Baldur’s Gate 3, for instance, characters react to your actions and your connection to them changes based on what you do. You certainly see that in the dialogue between you and your companions and there is clear impact on their stories. But there’s no tangible thing to connect to and see how that relationship is developing.

This is probably because there’s no risk of companions leaving you or opportunities for romance, so those systems may not necessarily be needed. Narrative is clearly very important to Avowed and it shows, there’s so much to read, many topics of conversation to broach and a tale full of some intriguing twists and turns. But you can’t help feeling, at times, that the scope and scale of the game may have been cut back and reduced through development and you wonder how this already great game could have been even better if you’d been able to explore these relationships further and what impact additional systems could have had on the game.

Fortunately, there’s a lot to unpack and discover. World traversal is a confident hybrid of a healthy sandbox and contained areas with a sizeable Living Lands map to get through and chunky areas within to explore. There’s lots of hidden quests to find and items to pick up, giving you plenty of chances to level and be a completionist. If that sounds like your bag, you’ll have hours and hours of story and content to discover.

That’s why I’m citing this as close to Skyrim as most any game that’s launched since, only it’s a more scaled back version. Avowed may lack things like a wanted system, horseback riding and even romance and marriage, but the moment to moment gameplay of moving around, collecting, taking on quests, stumbling onto the next, openly exploring the world, going high and low, fighting some challenging bosses and unique characters while having those lengthy conversations where you’re hanging on every word sees you lose hours and hours.

When it’s all combined with a really beautiful, vivid world with fantastic rendering, wonderful voice acting and beautifully written dialogue, all with a truly varied, engaging combat system that empowers your allies as well as gives you agency and choice. You just find yourself succumbing to Avowed’s charms and losing hours to its world before you’ve even realised its got its hooks in.

The difficulty spike midway can be a bit hard-hitting and you can’t help wishing the scope of the game was a bit broader, but this is a fantastic addition to the Game Pass library and a game I hadn’t realised I was desperate to play. I truly hope we see more and more Avowed in the future, this franchise has unlimited potential.

Verdict

Avowed is a wonderful RPG that feels like Skyrim’s true successor, at least until TES VI arrives, despite the scale and scope making it feel a tad barren in the genre’s current landscape. Combat is the game’s truly shining star with its variety and wealth of options and the writing is as compelling and engaging as you would hope and expect from this world and developer. Between that and the healthy amount of content you can find and the beautiful environments to explore, you’ll find yourself going deep under Avowed’s spell. We absolutely need more from this world and franchise as Obsidian continue to be one of the crown jewels in Xbox’s developer crown.

 

Pros

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Avowed is available from today on PC and Xbox Game Pass via Advanced Access. The Full Launch is February 18, 2025

Played on Xbox Series X

Code Kindly Provided by Microsoft for review purposes