You look at Avowed, which has this incredibly vibrant art and production design, a big open world, myriad quests and branching narratives, and, of course, all the development pedigree of Obsidian, and naturally, you’d assume it’s an expensive game to build. From The Outer Worlds to Pillars of Eternity, Fallout New Vegas and beyond, Obsidian has always committed its efforts towards facilitating player agency and making worlds replete with possibility. But speaking to PCGamesN at this year’s Gamescom, the team reveals that, when it comes to Avowed, one of the toughest, priciest aspects of development comes from something that most players take for granted.
The Avowed release date is getting closer, and we’re increasingly curious to see what Obsidian, creator of the greatest Fallout game ever, has been building. A fantasy RPG set within Eora, the colorful yet calamitous world familiar to anyone who’s played Pillars of Eternity, it combines Obsidian’s trademark exploration, player expression, and organic, divergent storytelling with first-person sword-and-shield combat. There are clear influences from the studio’s earlier work – Obsidian previously explained to us that Avowed is meant to be more Fallout New Vegas than Skyrim. But director Carrie Patel offers a new, somewhat surprising insight into one of Avowed’s central mechanics.
“We’ve designed Avowed as a first-person experience first, but still with the third-person option,” Patel tells us, live at Gamescom 2024. “It means more people can enjoy the game. And if you spend time in character creation, deciding what they’re going to look like and how they’re going to present in the world, and you want to see that, third-person makes it easier.
“But it’s definitely a very expensive thing to design. It means additional sets of animations. The body players inhabit during first-person, you don’t have a torso there, so it’s a different model to the body you get in third-person. It’s a lot of behind-the-scenes work to support, but I think it’s been well worth it for us.”
It seems like nothing. You’re playing an open-world game, maybe Fallout 4 or Oblivion, and when you want to swap perspectives, you just tap a button. Simple. But that kind of fluidity takes serious design work. Likewise, when it comes to subtly but certainly guiding players in particular directions, Patel and the Avowed team have to pay close attention.
“One of the big challenges of designing in first person is thinking about the players’ spatial awareness and their sight lines,” Patel continues. “It can be very hard to predict where they’re going to be looking at a particular moment, but you can use certain layouts and certain audio and visual cues, and certain details in your design, to help draw attention. We want to make sure that we’re placing those details in ways that reward exploration and also encourage further exploration.
“When I joined the project in 2021, we wanted something that brought the Pillars of Eternity experience and that world to a new audience, with a style of gameplay that also felt very visceral. I think we enjoyed the combat and exploration experience that we were able to get from The Outer Worlds, and we looked at that and thought about how we could recreate it for Avowed, but in a way that also brings something fresh and new.”
It’s another of Obsidian’s specialities, this ability to surreptitiously direct the player in the right direction. When I think of New Vegas, though, still to my mind the studio’s best work, what I remember most fondly is my time spent with the companion characters, like Boone, Arcade Gannon, and ED-E. Patel says that the companions are one of her favorite things about Avowed.
“I always love hearing them interact with one another – that, for me, is some of the most entertaining dialogue to come across. It feels like you’re watching two friends get to know each other.”
While we wait for Avowed to arrive, check out some of the other best sandbox games, or maybe get the best games like Fallout, if you want something else to fill the New Vegas gap.
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Additional reporting from Gamescom 2024 by Sam Comrie.