The Queue: Avowed

I find myself wondering if I’ll love this game the way I did DA:The Veilgard, and I honestly don’t know yet. Avowed feels very different to other games I’ve played in the same basic wheelhouse — it lacks the zany satirical feel of The Outer Worlds, the breathless chaos of Fallout: New Vegas, and while you can certainly understand that this game is inspired by games like the various Elder Scrolls games, it doesn’t really feel like one of those.

Mechanically it looks and feels like a modern first/third person perspective RPG — maybe made unique by it’s complete resistance to what I call the Dark Soulsing of modern games, without the somewhat overwrought dialogue and stilted, borderline incomprehensible delivery.

There feels like an enormous amount of story below the surface of the game, stuff I’m discovering as I go. As of the current state of my character — level 10, 20 or so hours into the game — it feels like there’s going to be more going on than I initially expected, and I’m pretty familiar with the lore of the world of Eora.

I like it, but I’m not in love with it yet. We’ll see if I fall in love as I play it.

I would not care, which is why I’m a scourge to HoA’s everywhere. Paint your house pink, cover it in Zhevra hooves, I really do not feel any sort of need to control what you do with your house. Not that I know if you’ll even be able to do much of anything like this since the feature is not yet live. Remember, everything can be changed in development.

I don’t care, I’m still gonna say Ashkandi.

My partner is going to have her own house, so I won’t be putting things up to please them, but if we did share our player housing I’d likely let her have some kind of menagerie for all her Hunter pets much as I have in real life allowed her to festoon our home with serpents.

I’d really love to be able to put an Armory in the house with various armors on display like a fantasy Tony Stark. Specifically Warrior Tier 2, Tier 6, Tier 10 and whatever the Legion tiers were.

Nobody can replace Bioware in terms of games that made me love gaming. From the original Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate 2 to the underrated Jade Empire, my beloved Knights of the Old Republic and of course the Mass Effect and Dragon Age series. That being said, with Mass Effect basically being all that’s left and there being a sense that if it doesn’t blow up the entire world it’ll be deemed a failure, I do not believe that Bioware will ever reclaim the heights it once reached.

I’m currently waiting for CD Projekt Red to bring us Cyberpunk 2077‘s successor, currently code named Orion. I honestly love and am still replaying Cyberpunk 2077, and I am hopeful that the successor will have more flexibility in terms of what happens and what your choices mean while preserving the extraordinary gameplay and side quests we saw in the first game.

Obsidian seems to be flexing its muscles this year, with Avowed combining their Eora setting from the Pillars of Eternity games while also saying to the world Hey, we’re aware we do what Bethesda did, but better and the coming of The Outer Worlds 2 bringing their anti-capitalist Fallout meets Gilded Age greed satire to a new level. I very much loved The Outer Worlds, so I feel Obsidian could leave this year in a very good position as a maker of games I love.

Ubisoft squandered the amazing momentum it had with Assassin’s Creed Origins and the superior Odyssey on the bloated (playable, but flawed) Valhalla, the really uninteresting throwback Mirage and while I haven’t played Shadows yet I’m not feeling the vibe anymore, especially after Ubisoft has made several games with really amazing open world gameplay (Avatar Frontiers of Pandora, Star Wars Outlaws) but less than stellar reception. So while Odyssey is one of my ten favorite games of all time, not likely for there to be a successor to that game from these folks.

Otherwise, the usual suspects — Larian, Owlcat, and the as yet unreleased Exodus from Archetype Entertainment, which has a serious pedigree of ex-Bioware developers like Drew Karpyshyn and James Ohlen. I have high hopes for all three of them, based on the work the people involved have already done like everything Bioware ever did, the amazing Pathfinder CRPG’s like Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous and of course Divinity Original Sin 2 and Baldir’s Gate 3. 

When I roll out of bed while asleep in the world I actually live in, I usually wake up before I hit the ground. So yes, at such lower gravity, I’d probably wake up well before that. The disorientation I feel once I’m falling, especially at such a low gravity, would likely wake me up.

Fun fact: I was on a plane that nose dived to the point where it felt as if I was weightless. I did not enjoy the sensation.

Remember that thing you did when you were seven? That’s why.

Yes, very much so, although I know it will torture me forever until I complete it.

I talked on the podcast about how schizoid I think Overwatch 2 is currently in terms of its design goals, as if there were two teams actively working on different goals. Different, and often contrary, goals.

Okay, that’s the Queue for this week. See y’all next week, and I hope you’re all doing as well as you possibly can.