I’m having a lovely time in Avowed, a game about bonking little lizard men on the head, skipping through classic, florid fantasy countryside, and walking up to NPCs to receive vast dumps of expository dialogue. It’s a game that’s less interested in doing something radical with the structure – this is a pretty straight-ahead, sword-n-spells, skill-and-dialogue-tree action adventure – than it is the sheer vividity of its delivery.
Avowed is vibrant and alive, a game made with a kind of committed, full-hearted dedication to a simple, clear idea, and to then . As evidenced by all the small, playful or just downright sensible twists on the basics – from a function that lets you pause mid-conversation to look up who or what exactly the latest proper noun is, to just a well worded explanation of shader compilation before the game itself starts. In fact the only thing that’s been nicer than playing a bit of Avowed, over the past week, was hearing what its developers at Obsidian had to say about making more games like it.
Get a load of this: the studio just wants to make games on the assumption they will be a “mild success”; it wants to do that at a pace of releases that is “not rushed, but often”; it wants to maintain its team’s institutional knowledge by having “the lowest turnover rate in the industry”; and it is “not trying to grow aggressively, expand our team size, or make super profitable games”.
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This is all from a somewhat scantly reported PC Gamer article, based on Obsidian bosses Marcus Morgan and Justin Britch’s talk at the DICE Summit last week, which Eurogamer didn’t attend – so fair warning we are missing some wider context here. Morgan might’ve said all that and then immediately taken it back, after, say, locking eyes with a lurking Satya Nadella. Who could, for all we know, have been standing at the back of the room miming a big “snip, snip” motion with a pair of comedy-sized scissors.