Obsidian Entertainment's next first-person RPG Avowed is coming in hot - and following up the brilliant Pillars of Eternity CRPGs from a different perspective - next February. And its developers are saying all the right things about the game's approach to exploration as "almost every" quest has multiple ways to start it.
Speaking to GamesRadar for our Avowed Big Preview, environment region designer Berto Ritger explained how the game handles player choice when it comes to quests. Avowed isn't a properly open-world game, but its wide and explorable areas mean that you'll sometimes find key items out of order or stumble upon a quest in an unusual way, and Obsidian is supporting all of those possibilities.
"I think almost every, if not every, quest in the game has it more than one way to start it," Ritger explained. "You can do things out of order and pick up items and give them to people that want them, or kill a character or whatever, like, you can play things out of order. You can come at a dungeon or vice versa, from a different direction than you normally would. And we want you to be able to do that just based on however you naturally progress through the world."
- Avowed is an RPG that's both the culmination of everything Obsidian has done before, and also an evolution of it: "There's really not a whole lot of our regions that's off limits to the players"
- Some of Avowed's most memorable smaller instances are reminding me of the magic of Red Dead Redemption 2's random encounters
That's in line with Ritger's previous comments about how the "core of RPGs that makes them special is missable content" since it makes the experience "feel so much more personal to how you play the game." Both the missable content and the fact that you can start quests in unexpected ways is the game trusting you to be - or maybe even helping you feel like you're - smart. Like someone who's discovered something uncharted.
"We want to just constantly foster that sense of exploration, wanderlust and just getting lost pleasantly," Ritger continued. I'm just excited to try and kill literally every single NPC in the game before loading up another save file and playing Avowed like the true saint I am when it comes to PC, Xbox Series X|S, and Game Pass on February 18.
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