Avowed is Obsidian Entertainment’s chance to make big gains in the fantasy RPG market. With The Elder Scrolls 6 rumored to be at least five years away and with Obsidian having found recent success with its first-person sci-fi RPG The Outer Worlds, many fans of the genre are hoping that Avowed will be able to spiritually succeed The Elder Scrolls series to become the new first-person fantasy franchise on the block.
If Obsidian is going to create a first-person fantasy RPG that truly brings the genre into the next generation, however, the studio will need to make significant innovations in the way it handles its open-world storytelling. To do so, Avowed will need to solve one problem found back in Skyrim, but also more recently in The Outer Worlds.
RPGs, especially open-world RPGs, tend to market themselves on freedom. In The Elder Scrolls 5 the player has the choice to ignore Skyrim‘s main quest and head out in any direction they see fit. Few questlines and areas are blocked off by this decision, and many players choose to forego the main story entirely for a more customized roleplaying experience.
This philosophy of freedom extends beyond exploration to other classic RPG elements like dialogue trees. Conventional wisdom says that the more dialogue options and the greater their potential to affect events, the better. Skyrim certainly gives the player different dialogue options when dealing with some NPCs, and even presents the player with some big decisions during quests, such as choosing whether to become a vampire or not during the Dawnguard DLC.
However, outside of cities and other settlements, Skyrim’s promise of a choice-led roleplaying experience falls away to interactions that almost always devolve into immediate violence. While there are more roleplaying options in quests, Bethesda misses the opportunity for more dynamic storytelling in the world.
While Skyrim came out in 2011, a similar flaw can be found closer to home in The Outer Worlds, which released in 2019. Outside of towns in The Outer Worlds, most of the humanoid NPCs the player will run across are Marauders, humans who have lost their minds and become extremely violent due to overuse of the drug Adrena-Time. As a result they attack on sight. Though it’s given an explanation in the story, the madness of the Marauders ultimately feels like a cop-out that avoids the challenges of creating a more robust RPG system for interacting with NPCs outside of quests by coming up with a reason for most interactions to be instantly violent.
Even hostile interactions can present multiple non-combat roleplaying opportunities. A gang of bandits in Skyrim will instantly try to kill the player regardless of whether they’re dressed like a travelling merchant or are standing head-to-toe in Daedric armor and carrying a bow made of dragon bone. In Avowed, players should have multiple options when dealing with both hostile and non-hostile encounters. They should be able to attempt to bribe their would-be attackers, or make other last-ditch attempts like claiming they can lead the bandits to a hidden treasure if they’re good enough at persuasion, giving them an opportunity to make a get-away later.
Avowed will be set in the Living Lands, a harsh but ecologically diverse frontier to the north of Eora, the world first established in Obsidian’s Pillars of Eternity. The fact that the Living Lands are a harsh frontier does not mean that interactions with humanoid NPCs outside of quests should be violent by default. Avowed needs to give players enough options when interacting with non-quest NPCs that their interactions can generate small but dynamic storytelling opportunities.
If Obsidian’s Avowed is going to feel like a truly next-gen RPG, then walking into a hostile camp with several followers should inspire a different reaction from the average NPC than walking in alone. Default enemy NPCs should factor in things like the player’s weapons, armor, and even reputation among their faction if they’re a part of one. A lone player may be surrounded as the bandits attempt to intimidate or rob them. A group of arrivals may inspire a more hostile reaction.
In both Skyrim and The Outer Worlds, the lack of roleplaying opportunities in the open world itself undermines some of the other choices in the game. At the end of the main quest surrounding Edgewater at the start of The Outer Worlds, for example, the player is put in a moral conundrum and has to side with one of two factions. Any questions of mortality, however, feel hard to take seriously when the player is also gunning down swaths of people while carrying messages between the two faction leaders. It’s harder to invest in the lives of the characters in the story in an open-world where life is so cheap.
For fantasy fans who err towards evil, Avowed should also include multiple ways to introduce hostility to otherwise non-hostile default encounters. Players should be able to tell a traveler they meet on the road that they’re robbing them, for example, instead of just pick-pocketing in games like Skyrim and hoping they succeed. The NPC might then take several factors into account before deciding whether to give up their goods or put up a fight.
If Avowed doesn’t figure out ways to create more dynamic opportunities in its open world, then there risks being a separation between the storytelling and the world that story is. As it stands, the classic first-person RPG formula tells a story through its quests, and presents the player with an open-world to explore. Until exploring that open world begins to create dynamic stories in its own right, it’s unlikely any new entry to the genre will be considered a worthy next-gen successor to Skyrim.
Avowed is in development for release on PC and Xbox Series X.
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