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During the Xbox Developer Direct, Obsidian Entertainment revealed a bunch of new footage from their upcoming fantasy RPG Avowed. We learned more about the various biomes, combat, how quests work and got a confirmation that the game launches in Autumn 2024 on PC and Xbox Series X|S.
Given that the new reveal was quite extensive with a lot of different shots, it's highly likely that you missed some stuff that wasn't that easily spotted. We made a list of some of the interesting things we noticed in our trailer analysis so if you're excited to get to know a couple of more details about Avowed, read on below.
Improved models
Obviously, we're not playing Obsidian games for the graphics but it's still great to see how much better the game looks now when compared to the build from seven months ago.
Pretty much everything from the lighting to the level of detail looks much better but the thing that caught our eye is the model of the infected bear, which received quite the visual makeover. Check out his next-gen fur in the comparison image below:
Combat footage was probably "dev mode"
The one thing that players didn't really like in the Avowed developer direct was how the combat looked "off". We have to agree that this was not the best showcase of Avowed combat due to the lack of animations, hit detection and what appears to be very low FOV.
If you look closely at the combat and enemies, it does look like these were just randomly spawned by the developers using their dev tools, and not something that you'll encounter in the game. Most of the enemies simply did not react to the player character, serving more like a "punching bag" rather than an actual challenge.
You can dive underwater (and swim obviously)!
In one of the shots in the Developer Direct video, we can see Obsidian developers playing Avowed in the background while their colleague talks about the game's combat.
Interestingly, it seems that the devs are exploring underwater in one of the many lakes and oases in the Living Lands. If you look closely enough, you can clearly see blue, underwater-like environments and the player character is obviously using their hands to swim.
This certainly is an exciting feature that will add more depth to the exploration in Avowed.
The Arrow icon for character backgrounds
As spotted by eagled-eyed Redditor gingereno, during the dialogue with Private Nauki, one of the dialogue choices that players can pick features an arrow icon which looks very similar to the arrow icon that represents the Hunter character background from Pillars of Eternity.
If this is what the arrow really represents in Avowed, this means that we'll get to choose our character background during character creation. This was the case in Obsidian's recent title Pentiment, which had you choose from various backgrounds that resulted in unique dialogue choices throughout the game.
Shatterscarp region is massive
Obsidian Entertainment mostly focused on showcasing one region in the Developer Direct deep dive and that region was a desert biome Shatter Scarp.
During the preview, we saw a ton of shots featuring this stunning region which tells us Shatterscarp will be a massive world, brimming with things to explore. We've seen caves, large sand dunes, rocks, settlements and even a stunning green oasis. All these gave us a feeling that Avowed will be a huge game in terms of region size, which is another aspect of this RPG that makes us very excited.
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