Avowed

Well I think this looks lovely on the art side Mr grump pants. Combat needs more weight though.

For me, Outer Worlds had some issues that included the art style, slightly lackluster combat and then small, uninspiring areas.

I’m slightly worried that Avowed has all three from what I’ve seen. I’m still excited for it but will be curious to see what the first previews are like.

It's a reskinned Outer Worlds with added magic. It will be janky as fuck, the reviews are not going to great, the ponies will be laughing and xbots will discount any form of criticism as jealousy and/or xbox tax.

And I expect I'll love it.

Never even heard of it until now. Quickly skimming through the gameplay footage, it looks a bit pared back - quite basic. Like Skyrim with a funny colour palette. But Skyrim came out about 10 years ago

I do like the beige and brown custom Xbox though (not really)

They made Outer Worlds, which it does look very similar to and was basically AA Fallout

In fairness I'm only making the Skyrim comparison from the few minutes of the video I watched. I guess it's kind of hard to make a first person fantasy RPG without being unfairly compared to it, especially given the studio's history.

It's Pillars of Eternity: The 3D Realtime Game innit?

That world was already pretty generic fantasy, but the two games between them absolutely OWNED my spare time for long stretches.

Very much a AA studio nowadays, but with expectations set appropriately I'm looking forward to it! I'm presently rocking Robocop, which is about as AA-Jank as they come, and it's fucking excellent. Fingers crossed for Avowed.

Every time I see this it looks so…basic, in every way. I know they’re talking up all the choices and combat choices/systems but it just doesn’t capture any of that in footage.

It’s not often I just don’t understand any of what someone sees in a game but this is that one.

It just looks a bit empty and lifeless. There's next to no (if any) environmental interaction or anything really going on. They should probably stop showing off alpha footage because it's not doing the game any favours

Obsidian have a good track record so I'm hoping this will be decent at the very least.

Superficially - open world fantasy RPG in first person where you equip melee/magic/shield in the left and right hands - there are pretty obvious Elder Scrolls parallels. Doesn't mean it's going to be that, but it's not a crazy association to make.

I haven't seen anything that makes me excited for this so far. I like Obsidian RPGs and I can easily look past an uninspired-looking setting and crummy combat and animations if the rest is good. We just haven't seen that yet, so it's wait-and-see rather than hyped.

It's funny, I'm now trying to think of first-person fantasy RPGs and drawing a blank (besides ancient dungeon crawlers and the like). They do seem to be mostly third person nowadays, with most first person RPGs being sci-fi, such as Cyberpunk. Still, I expect this game will have more in common with The Witcher or Dragon Age series than it will Elders Scroll, despite the player perspective.

Interestingly, I did just find an interview from PC Gamer with Obsidian from last year, where they did actually say the original pitch was to be their Skyrim, but they dialed it back and decided to focus on depth instead of breadth.

www.pcgamer.com/avowed-open-world-skyrim-rpg-size/

Regarding what we have seen, I haven't had a chance to watch the gameplay trailer, but from the skim through I had it seemed like it would at least be fine, but I agree nothing hugely excites me about it. It being an Obsidian game is definitely a positive. I played a little of PoE and enjoyed the world (I don't get on well with real time with pause combat, so couldn't really get into the actual game), so interesting they are staying in that universe.

I know. I should really give it a go at some point. I played maybe about 10 hours of the first and did really enjoy what I saw, besides the combat.

This really does look it's following the Bethesda template a little too closely, the combat looks particularly poor.

Will give it a fair crack when released of course.