Avowed spent a few years lurking in the shadows since its 2020 reveal, leaving us wondering about when it'd bring the timeless joy of sword and sorcery spelunking. Patience gets rewarded, however. We've finally gotten out hands on Avowed's colorful fantasyland, magical combat, and the many crushable skeletons its Pillars of Eternity setting has to offer and yes, it's good.
Here's everything you'll want to know know about Avowed.
February 2025: Avowed is here! We've done an Avowed review and an Avowed performance analysis, along with a lot of other Avowed coverage for you to check out.
When is the Avowed release date?
Avowed will release on February 18, 2025 but also has an "advance access" period beginning on February 13 for players who preorder its premium edition.
Originally, Obsidian's RPG was slated for a fall 2024 launch, dropping the game into an already crowded holiday release window alongside games like Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Diablo IV: Vessel of Hatred, and Call of Duty: Black Ops 6.
According to Microsoft, Avowed moved into 2025 to "give players' backlogs some breathing room," so no need to catastrophize the delay into something other than aiming for a healthier sales window. When news of Avowed's date change broke, it was said to be in "good shape."
Avowed trailers
Here's the Avowed developer deep dive
A few months ahead of Avowed's launch, Xbox Game Studios did another developer deep dive, this time nearly a half hour long. In the video, we see a good amount of combat highlights, showing off potential weapon combinations like a paired sword and pistol, dual-wielded wands, or just a big battle-axe—useful for smashing enemies you've frozen with ice magic.
What other Avowed trailers are there?
We first met the game with the Avowed announcement trailer, revealed during the Xbox Games Showcase in 2020. What we saw was brief, but it revealed a few key details—most importantly that Avowed is a first-person RPG in a similar vein to The Outer Worlds and Skyrim. Clever players on the Avowed subreddit also deciphered the runes etched on the sword in the trailer, realizing that it's a language that already exists in Pillars of Eternity, to discover the sword's name is Oathbinder.
After that there was the first Avowed gameplay trailer from 2023 that was mostly big flyover shots showing Eora's colorful landscapes. It did show some very quick shots of magical, hand gesture combat and big plague monsters.
Avowed gameplay details
We've reviewed Avowed, and it's got that Obsidian flair
Our Avowed review grants it an 82% score in which Shaun Prescott calls it "an engrossing and gorgeous action-RPG set in one of the most engaging fantasy worlds going, though it lacks the complex systems of its most beloved contemporaries."
"Avowed leaves a great first impression," Shaun says. "Those first 10 hours I spent in the sprawling city of Paradis and the wider Dawnshore region, learning about the Dreamscourge and life under the Aedyr colonisers, exploring surprisingly deep dungeons, shooting the shit with Kai, and making enemies with the local strongmen, put me in mind of the feeling of playing New Vegas or Oblivion for the first time, but better."
What is Avowed's gameplay like?
Avowed isn't Obsidian's Skyrim—not exactly—but it will be familiar to those who've played The Elder Scrolls. It plays in either first or third person and focuses on close-up combat, exploration, questing, and looting. You can bash sword-and-board style. You can bash with dual-wielded axes, or a two-handed sword, or ranged weapons.
There's plenty of magic to throw around, too. You can keep two weapon loadouts at all times and dual wield a wand and grimoire or a pistol and spells, or turn yourself into a spellblade. Maybe you'll have a heavy two-handed weapon loadout for cleaving through crowds of weaker enemies, but you'll swap to your wand-and-shield combo when you need to take things more tactically with a little bit of distance.
What you shouldn't expect in Avowed are deep systemic elements. There's not a theft and justice system, no killing NPCs, and no daily schedules for inhabitants. There is a bit of stealth, but it's not a reliable way to solve all your combat problems. Obsidian focused on picking up quests while exploring and getting your companions heavily involved in the story.
Avowed has guns
I don't want to just say that Avowed is like Skyrim with guns, but, well—there it is. Sharing a setting with Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity games, Avowed is in a fantasy world where society has discovered the powerful magic of shooting bullets at guys. The Avowed gameplay reveal shows the player character firing dual-wielded flintlock pistols, but we'll have to see whether other flintlock fantasy options are available. I've got my heart set on an enchanted blunderbuss, personally.
Avowed doesn't tie you to character classes
As we learned in a January 2024 interview with Avowed's game and gameplay directors, Carrie Patel and Gabe Paramo, Avowed is setting aside the character classes of its Pillars of Eternity predecessors. Instead, it'll have a more free-form character progression, with ability trees similar to Skyrim's perk constellations. "It is a classless game," Paramo said. "The player will be able to kind of pick and choose their abilities as they level up and progress, and you will be able to respec."
The game will have character backgrounds that you'll choose from during character creation, Patel told us, but that's more for establishing a foundation for your idea of your character. It won't restrict any character build choices.
Avowed doesn't have a sprawling open world
Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart told us that, while Avowed's original pitch was a sprawling open world like Skyrim, the studio shifted to a more focused scope to emphasize Obsidian's strengths. Instead, Avowed will have a similar scale to Obsidian's scifi RPG, The Outer Worlds. "We could go off and create an 8km x 8km open world and then deal with all the consequences of that—because that makes it a different style game," Urquhart said. "But we want to tell more confined stories that the player can experience with their companions, and then move from part of the world to part of the world."
In the January 2024 developer deep dive, we got a look at Shatterscarp, a rocky area that was described as "the third region" you'll explore in the game, making it sound like the game will have a fairly linear sequence of areas.
Avowed will emphasize companion characters
Echoing Urquhart's statement above, Avowed director Carrie Patel underlined the game's focus on companion characters. "One thing we wanted to do with Avowed was make sure the companions felt really integral to the story," Patel said. "In some games they're optionally recruitable, but in Avowed they're deeply tied to the story, tied to your party… we really wanted to create this sense that you're in this big wild frontier, you're going on this adventure of discovery, and you have this small but tight knit crew with you."
In Avowed, Patel told us, you'll be bringing along two companions at a time, each with their own combat specialties. From the sounds of it, Avowed is a couple degrees closer to CRPG-style party emphasis than the Elder Scrolls comparisons would otherwise imply.
We've broken down what you'll want to know about each of your individual Avowed companions.
For the more general design highlights, our January 2024 interview with Patel and gameplay director Gabe Paramo remains a good place to start:
- You adventure alongside two companions at a time. Your other companions, which you'll gather throughout the story, will wait at a party camp.
- In "a few cases," you'll need a specific companion character's specific knowledge or skills to resolve a situation, but otherwise you're free to run with whoever you want.
- There's no "approval system" where companions could potentially leave if you make a decision that upsets them, but you will be able to make choices that influence the outcomes of their individual stories.
- Every companion will be relevant in every playthrough; unlike Baldur's Gate 3, you can't skip recruiting someone.
- Companions will have abilities that are useful both in and out of combat. You can issue basic orders, but you won't micromanage your party like a tactics game. Think Mass Effect.
Avowed story and setting details
Avowed is set in Eora, the Pillars of Eternity setting
Sharing a setting with Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity CRPGs, Avowed takes place in the fantasy world of Eora. Eora's slightly more modern than your usual medieval fantasy fare: there's a lot more gunpowder and tall ships hanging around. It's closer to our Age of Sail than it is to the Middle Ages. Still plenty of magic being meddled with, though.
More specifically, Avowed is set in the Living Lands, a remote island that, until now, has been distant enough to avoid direct attention from Eora's colonial powers. Foremost among these is the Aedyr Empire, an intercontinental imperial state.
What do we know about Avowed's story?
You play as an envoy to the far off Living Lands, sent by the Aedyr Empire to investigate rumors of a plague. Given the "Empire" bit, the inhabitants of the Living Lands aren't exactly ecstatic to have you around. In fantasy as in life, things tend to take a downward turn once agents of colonial powers start arriving.
According to Carrie Patel, Avowed's creative director, you'll have a say in just how much of an imperial nightmare you end up being. The "personality, appearance, and philosophy and vibe you bring to that role is up to you as a player to decide," Patel said.
