Avowed First Impressions: A Return to Obsidian's RPG Roots
Avowed doesn't ask you to save the world. It asks you to choose who you are within it, a question made infinitely more complex by the fact you are the colonizer. This is the uncomfortable, brilliant premise at the heart of Obsidian’s return to its RPG roots, a first-person fantasy epic that trades the isometric perspective of its Pillars of Eternity forebears for a more immediate, personal lens. While it functions as a perfect standalone entry point, Avowed is steeped in the rich, morally complex lore that defines the Eora universe, using that foundation not as a barrier but as fertile ground for a story about duty, loyalty, and the heavy cost of "progress."
The port city of Paradis serves as a central hub for the Aedyr Empire's interests.
You are the Envoy of the Aedyr Empire, a figure of immense authority sent to the untamed frontier of the Living Lands to investigate a magical plague called the Dreamscourge. The narrative setup is deceptively simple, but the genius lies in the role you're forced to play. You are not a wandering hero; you are a government functionary, an agent of an occupying power that the locals view with a mixture of fear, resentment, and outright hatred. This pervasive sense of being the "other" colors every interaction, from tense negotiations in a port town to violent confrontations in the wilderness. The game refuses to let you forget that your authority is backed by imperial might, and the question of whether to wield that power with an iron fist or a velvet glove becomes your central, defining conflict.
The game's most compelling character is the empire you represent, and your relationship with it is the most important one you'll manage.
This internal conflict is made physical in your own character. As a Godlike, you are touched by the divine, a status that manifests as a permanent, visible mark—in this case, fungal growths erupting from your skin, a symptom eerily mirroring the Dreamscourge you're sent to cure. This design is a masterstroke of narrative cohesion. It makes you a walking contradiction: a symbol of imperial authority who is also visibly "afflicted," a representative of order who is fundamentally other. It complicates your interactions with both the empire's loyalists, who may see you as tainted, and the natives, for whom you are both a plague-bearer and an oppressor. Your loyalty is constantly being pulled in three directions: to your distant Emperor, to the people suffering in the Living Lands, and to the mysterious, guiding voice in your own head that seems tied to the land itself. In Avowed, your identity is not a backstory you leave in the character creator; it is the central puzzle you must solve with every choice you make.
Avowed Combat and Gameplay: Snappy, Responsive, and Surprisingly Deep
In Avowed, the moment-to-moment action is where Obsidian’s pivot from isometric strategy to first-person immediacy pays its most satisfying dividends. This isn't a ponderous, tactical affair; it’s a kinetic, weighty, and deeply responsive brawl where every parry, fireball, and pistol shot lands with a palpable sense of impact. The game earns its "action-RPG" label not through half-measures but by delivering a combat system that is both snappy to engage with and surprisingly deep to master.
Melee combat in Avowed feels weighty and responsive.
The foundation is rock-solid. Dodging is tight and responsive, blocking with a shield feels appropriately weighty, and parrying—with its generous timing window and satisfying audio-visual crackle—is a consistently rewarding skill to learn. Enemies react convincingly, flinching from heavy blows and visibly staggering when their guard is broken, opening them up for a powerful finishing move. This creates a dynamic ebb and flow to encounters that feels more like a skilled duel than a stat-check. You can feel the studio’s learnings from The Outer Worlds refined into something more tactile and immediate. The inclusion of a dedicated dash ability, usable both in exploration and combat, adds a crucial layer of mobility that keeps the pace brisk, whether you're repositioning to avoid a bear's charge or closing the gap on a distant archer.
Where Avowed truly distinguishes itself is in its radical loadout freedom. This is a classless playground where the only limit is your willingness to experiment.
You are never locked into a single archetype. The game allows you to equip two distinct weapon sets and swap between them instantly, and within those sets, your hands are completely free. Want to wield a pistol in your right hand and a spellbook in your left, casting chain lightning between gunshots? Go for it. Prefer a traditional sword-and-board knight, or a dual-wielding rogue with poisoned daggers? Equally viable. I spent one dungeon as a frost-mage, slowing groups with an ice storm before shattering them with a two-handed hammer, and the next as a ranger, using a bow to pick off healers before diving into melee with a spear. This versatility is the combat's greatest strength, encouraging constant tinkering and adaptation. The magic system, in particular, is a highlight. Spell effects are phenomenal—fireballs erupt with concussive force, lightning arcs dramatically between foes, and ice shards pepper the environment with lingering chill. The grimoire system is a nifty innovation: carrying a spellbook in your off-hand grants quick access to four "jewel spells" on a radial menu, offering potent options without investing skill points, while learned spells from the Wizard skill tree provide more foundational power.
This freedom is supported by a progression system designed for experimentation. With five skill trees (Fighter, Ranger, Wizard, Godlike, and a universal tree) and a level cap of 20, you cannot master everything in one playthrough, forcing meaningful build choices. However, Obsidian smartly avoids punishing curiosity. Respecting your character—redistributing all skill and attribute points—costs a trivial amount of in-game currency and can be done at any time. This low barrier encourages you to completely reinvent your playstyle if you find a unique rifle or a devastating new spell, turning loot discovery into a genuine "what if?" moment rather than a regretful glance at an item you can't use.
For all its fluidity, the combat interface occasionally stumbles. Being limited to only six hotkey slots for your entire party's abilities feels painfully restrictive, especially for magic-heavy builds. This forces frequent, immersion-breaking pauses to navigate radial menus mid-fight to access your full toolkit. While manageable, it’s a clear friction point in a system otherwise praised for its responsiveness. This is somewhat mitigated by the game’s parkour-style movement, which extends the combat's verticality. Ledges can be mantled, gaps leaped, and environmental puzzles often require a bit of climbing to solve, making exploration feel more athletic and integrated than simply holding forward.
Ultimately, Avowed’s combat is a triumph of player agency and tactile feedback. It successfully translates the strategic build-crafting of classic RPGs into a format that feels immediate, visceral, and endlessly customizable. While the UI could afford you more direct control, the underlying systems are so robust and rewarding that you’ll likely forgive the minor hassle. This isn't just competent combat; it's some of the most genuinely fun first-person action the genre has seen in years.
World Design in Avowed: Quality Over Quantity in the Living Lands
In an era where “open world” often means a vast, repetitive checklist, Avowed makes a defiantly old-school bet: a world is defined not by its square mileage, but by the density of its secrets and the purpose of its geography. This is a game that trades the exhausting sprawl of a continent for the curated, handcrafted intimacy of a series of dioramas. Instead of one massive map, the Living Lands are divided into roughly five distinct open zones—a coastal port, a corrupted swamp, a desert pirate cove, an ashen volcanic waste—each traversable on foot in under ten minutes. This structure is the game’s greatest environmental success and, in some ways, its most poignant limitation, creating a loop of exploration that is consistently rewarding but can feel strangely sterile once the initial thrill of discovery fades.
The Living Lands feature diverse, hand-crafted environments.
The immediate benefit of this zone-based design is a staggering sense of environmental variety and curated intent. You’re not wandering through endless, samey forests; you’re moving between fully realized, visually distinct biomes with their own ecosystems, architecture, and political micro-climates. One moment you’re in the rain-slicked, green cliffs of the Emerald Stair, the next you’re navigating the fungal, Morrowind-inspired strangeness of the Shatterscarp. This isn’t just aesthetic window dressing. Each zone feels like a bespoke level, designed with a parkour-friendly verticality that encourages you to look up and climb. You’ll mantle ledges to find hidden treasure maps, solve simple environmental puzzles by burning away vines with fire spells or freezing water to create paths, and stumble upon unique bounty bosses or lore-rich “memories” of past civilizations. The reward for curiosity is almost always tangible: a unique weapon with a compelling perk, a chunk of rare crafting material, or a side quest that tangibly alters the fate of a local faction.
Avowed understands that the joy of exploration is in the hunt, not just the loot, and its zones are expertly packed with reasons to venture off the critical path.
This curated density is supported by some of the smartest quality-of-life streamlining in the genre. The game ruthlessly eliminates busywork. You’ll never need to open every nondescript barrel; only containers with a subtle shimmer contain loot. When you’re over-encumbered—a system rendered almost meaningless by generous base limits—you can instantly send anything to your camp stash from anywhere, accessible later at fast-travel points. This respect for the player’s time means your focus stays on the adventure, not on inventory management simulators. The loot you do find encourages investment, as early-game weapons can be upgraded with resources to remain competitive, reducing the constant gear-churn that plagues many RPGs.
However, this meticulously crafted, non-respawning world comes with a significant trade-off in long-term vitality. Once you’ve cleansed a zone of its enemies and harvested its resources, it stays cleared. Backtracking through a previously explored area reveals a haunting emptiness—silent caves, deserted bandit camps, plains devoid of the wildlife you once fought. This makes return trips purely transactional (to turn in a quest or access a vendor) and actively discourages revisiting old haunts, as there’s no dynamic life or new challenges to encounter. The problem extends to the cities, which, despite gorgeous architecture and strong art direction, often feel like beautiful stage sets. NPCs largely follow static routines, oblivious to your world-altering deeds outside of specific scripted moments. You can be the savior of the Living Lands, but walk through the streets of Paradis and you’re just another face in the crowd; the world doesn’t react to you in a systemic way, creating a disconnect between your narrative importance and your environmental presence.
This lack of reactivity is the core tension in Avowed’s world design. It delivers a masterclass in curated, reward-dense exploration that feels fantastic for a first pass through each zone. The joy of uncovering its secrets, from a hidden dwarven hall to a puzzle that grants a permanent health bonus, is genuine and frequent. Yet, by choosing a static, hand-placed design over dynamic systems, the Living Lands can begin to feel like a museum—exquisite to tour once, but lacking the unpredictable, living quality that would make it a place you simply want to inhabit. It’s a world built for discovery, not for dwelling, and your relationship with it will be defined by how much you value that first, brilliant spark of uncovering the unknown.
Narrative Depth: Why Your Choices Matter in Avowed
In Avowed, a dialogue choice is never just a flavor text branch; it’s a commitment that will quietly follow you for hours, resurfacing in a companion’s quiet disappointment, a faction’s sudden hostility, or a final ending slide that feels uniquely, uncomfortably yours. This is where Obsidian’s pedigree shines brightest, transforming a familiar fantasy premise into a masterclass of reactive, morally fraught storytelling. The game’s narrative isn't about finding the "right" answer, but about defining the kind of person—and envoy—you’re willing to become.
Dialogue choices in Avowed allow players to shape their character's personality and influence the story.
The brilliance of Avowed’s choice architecture lies in its rejection of binary morality. You are not picking between "Paragon" and "Renegade" but navigating a murky spectrum of loyalty, pragmatism, and ideology. A single quest can present you with a dozen viable paths, each with valid reasoning and unforeseen fallout. For instance, you might discover a fellow Godlike trying to redeem a potentially murderous deity. Do you help them, risking unleashing a dangerous power? Do you betray them to the authorities to maintain imperial order? Or do you take a third, secretive path uncovered only through prior exploration? The game tracks these decisions with a granularity that feels systemic, not scripted. In-game notes in your journal will dynamically update to reflect your unique journey, and seemingly minor actions—like sparing a group of smugglers or revealing the fate of a lost expedition—can ripple outwards, determining which allies you have in a climactic battle or which doors remain permanently closed. This creates a powerful sense of authorship; your Living Lands is literally a different place because of the choices you made.
Your companions are the emotional conduits for this narrative weight, serving as your conscience, your critics, and sometimes your casualties. The four available characters—including the sarcastic reptilian mercenary Kai and the furry, catlike mage Yatzli—are more than combat aids; they are perspectives you must manage. Each has a personal questline that delves into their past and beliefs, and your choices within those stories can permanently alter their fate, including the possibility of them leaving your party in disgust. Their value is cemented at the campsites, Avowed’s ingenious replacement for a day-night cycle. When you rest, time advances to night, triggering intimate, unscripted conversations where companions debate your recent decisions, share secrets, or simply banter amongst themselves. Overhearing Kai and the soul wizard Giatta conspire to steal cheese from the dwarf scout Marius, then later admit their guilt, does more for character bonding than any grand speech.
The campsite is where Avowed’s party transforms from a combat squad into a found family, making their eventual approval or condemnation of your actions land with genuine emotional force.
However, this otherwise deep system has one conspicuous omission: romance. While there are occasional flirtatious dialogue options, they never progress beyond light suggestion to meaningful relationships. In a genre where games like Dragon Age and Mass Effect have made companion romance a cornerstone of player investment, this feels like a missed opportunity for deeper connection. The social links, while rich in commentary, can occasionally feel shallow in their resolution, lacking the transformative character arcs that define Obsidian’s best work. You’ll care about your companions, but you may not fall in love with them.
Navigating this complex web is made accessible by one of the game’s smartest features: a reference guide that functions like Final Fantasy XVI’s Active Time Lore. Whenever a proper noun—be it a faction, deity, or location—appears in dialogue, you can instantly pull up a concise, spoiler-free explanation. This is a lifesaver in the dense Pillars of Eternity universe, allowing newcomers to grasp the difference between the Aedyr Empire and the Rauataians without breaking immersion or resorting to external wikis. It respects the depth of the lore while ensuring the player is never lost, making the political and spiritual stakes of every decision clear.
Ultimately, the narrative’s greatest strength is its unwavering commitment to moral ambiguity. As established from the start, you are an agent of a colonizing empire, and the game never lets you forget it. The most compelling antagonist isn’t a monster, but Inquisitor Lödwyn, a fellow imperial who represents the ruthless, iron-fist approach you could choose to emulate. The locals’ pervasive mistrust of you is not a bug but a feature, a constant reminder that your very presence is an extension of an oppressive force. This transforms every "heroic" act into a question: are you helping these people, or are you pacifying them for imperial assimilation? Avowed forces you to sit in that discomfort, making your final allegiance—to the Emperor, to the Living Lands, or to the mysterious voice within—the defining choice of a journey that feels profoundly personal. This isn’t a story about saving the world; it’s a story about deciding what the world is worth, and what you’re willing to sacrifice to shape it.
The Balance Problem: Loot, Tiers, and Difficulty Scaling
This is where Avowed’s meticulously crafted adventure stumbles, not in a single misstep, but in a foundational design choice that warps the entire gameplay loop. The game’s controversial gear tier system and steadfast refusal to implement enemy scaling create a world where your power is less a smooth curve of progression and more a series of jarring, frustrating plateaus. Obsidian’s attempt to streamline the RPG grind paradoxically introduces a different, more insidious form of friction.
Avowed's gear tier system requires specific materials to advance equipment levels.
The core issue is that in Avowed, your equipment tier is vastly more important than your character level. The game features four distinct tiers of gear (five for uniques), each with three internal levels, and these tiers are effectively gated to specific zones you’ll visit in a sequential order. This means you can be level 15 with a fully fleshed-out skill tree, but if you’re wielding Tier 2 weapons in a Tier 3 zone, you’ll be dealing chip damage to common enemies. Conversely, once you spend the resources to upgrade your gear to the appropriate tier, you can steamroll the entire area you just struggled through. This creates a binary, seesawing difficulty: an area is either an insurmountable “artificial wall” or a trivialized playground, with little satisfying middle ground. The much-praised freedom of exploration suddenly feels constrained by invisible gear-score barriers.
The system’s most punishing flaw is its scarcity economy. To ascend a weapon to the next tier, you need a rare material called Adra, which is finite and tied to specific exploration and quest rewards.
This bottleneck becomes painfully evident in the late game. You might find a fantastic unique rifle that perfectly suits a playstyle you’ve wanted to try, but if you’ve already spent your stockpile of Adra upgrading your sword and spellbook, you’re faced with a brutal choice: dismantle your old, powerful gear to cannibalize its Adra, permanently committing to the new build, or leave that exciting new weapon gathering dust. For a game that otherwise brilliantly encourages build experimentation through cheap and easy respecs, this resource scarcity actively punishes it. You are forced to specialize not by choice, but by dwindling supplies, which can lead to a frustrating grind in the final hours if you’re short on materials for a crucial upgrade.
This is compounded by what many critics rightly identified as “threadbare” crafting and enchantment systems. Upgrading gear is a simple matter of dumping common resources into stat increases, while the enchantment system—where you can add one of two possible effects to a weapon, irreversibly replacing its original perk—feels like an afterthought. There’s no deep crafting tree, no ability to socket multiple gems or create truly custom gear. In a loot-focused RPG, this lack of systemic depth makes the act of upgrading feel transactional rather than creative. You’re not forging a legendary weapon; you’re just making the numbers go up.
Furthermore, the static, non-respawning world means you can’t farm for more Adra or common materials. Once you’ve cleared a zone, it’s picked clean. This raises the specter of a potential soft-lock if you sell or dismantle too many key items early on, and it severely limits replayability. A second playthrough with a different build will net you largely the same gear in the same locations, following the same power trajectory. The lack of a traditional New Game+ at launch only underscored this issue, making subsequent runs feel less about discovering new synergies and more about retreading a familiar, rigidly paced checklist.
The problem is exacerbated by a noted lack of enemy variety. Fighting through a 50-hour playthrough means seeing the same skeletons, spiders, and an overabundance of bears dozens upon dozens of times, even in environments where their presence feels nonsensical. When the core combat is this satisfying, repetition is less of an issue, but when that combat is also governed by a tier system that creates sudden difficulty spikes, fighting the same bear for the twentieth time—only now it’s a damage-sponge “Tier 3 Bear”—feels less like a challenge and more like a chore. The game’s brilliant encounter design, where groups feature healers, ranged attackers, and bruisers to prioritize, is undermined when you’re applying that same tactical approach to the same five enemy types for the entire campaign.
Ultimately, Avowed’s balance problem stems from a philosophy of over-correction. In seeking to avoid the bloat of endless loot comparisons and the perceived artificiality of universal enemy scaling, the game creates a different set of imbalances. It trades the dynamic challenge of a living world for the predictable, zone-locked progression of a theme park ride—one where you must be exactly this tall to ride, and once you are, the ride offers no further thrills. It’s the one major area where Obsidian’s otherwise masterful streamlining creates more problems than it solves, leaving a noticeable seam in an otherwise tightly woven adventure.
Technical Performance: Is Avowed Stable on Xbox and PC?
The most impressive thing about Avowed on a technical level is what doesn’t happen. For a modern, large-scale RPG, it is, by and large, remarkably stable. Across a 50+ hour playthrough on Xbox Series X, I experienced zero crashes and only a handful of minor bugs—an almost shocking achievement in a genre where a launch-day patch is an expectation, not a surprise. This bedrock stability is the game’s greatest technical asset, allowing its vibrant art direction and snappy combat to shine without the constant threat of progress-halting glitches.
Avowed features vibrant environments that test hardware performance.
This stability is delivered through two distinct performance profiles on console. Avowed offers a Quality mode that prioritizes visual fidelity and a Performance mode targeting 60 FPS. The choice here is clear and consequential. Performance mode delivers the fluidity essential for the game’s reactive, first-person combat, where a well-timed parry or dodge can mean the difference between victory and a loading screen. However, this comes at a cost. In busy scenes, especially dense outdoor areas with complex foliage, the framerate can dip noticeably, and texture pop-in becomes more frequent. Quality mode locks things down visually, offering richer lighting and more stable environmental detail, but at the expense of that buttery-smooth combat feel. The lack of a true “Balanced” 40 FPS option for high-refresh displays feels like a missed opportunity, forcing a compromise between visual polish and gameplay fluidity.
While the core experience is solid, Avowed is not without its blemishes; it’s a game that often looks stunning in screenshots but can feel slightly unpolished in motion.
The visual presentation is a tale of two engines. On one hand, the art direction is confident and colorful, a welcome departure from grimdark fantasy. On the other, the technical execution can be inconsistent. Character animations, particularly during dialogue, can be rigid, and lip-syncing occasionally falls out of step with the otherwise excellent voice acting, creating a distracting disconnect. Lighting, while generally beautiful, can sometimes behave oddly in interior spaces, with shadows flickering or ambient occlusion seeming to vanish. These aren’t game-breaking issues, but they are persistent reminders that you’re playing a game with seams, occasionally pulling you out of the otherwise immersive world of the Living Lands.
On PC, the story shifts to one of raw horsepower. Built on Unreal Engine 5, Avowed can be a resource-intensive title, particularly if you aim to max out its graphical features like ray tracing. This is where technologies like NVIDIA DLSS and Reflex become not just nice-to-haves, but essential tools for achieving a stable, high-framerate experience without sacrificing visual quality. Players with mid-range systems will need to engage in careful tuning of settings, but the payoff is a version of the game that can surpass the console experience in both fidelity and smoothness when properly configured. It’s a demanding but scalable port that rewards powerful hardware.
The game’s technical state has been bolstered significantly by post-launch support, most notably the Anniversary Update. This free content drop addressed several community requests, adding a proper New Game+ mode—a crucial feature for an RPG with such consequential choices—and a Photo Mode to capture the Living Lands’ vibrant vistas. More importantly, it expanded player agency with three new playable races (Dwarf, Aumaua, and Orlan) and the ability to change your character’s appearance at any time. These additions show a commitment to refining the experience based on player feedback, smoothing over some of the initial rough edges and adding meaningful reasons to return for another journey.
Ultimately, Avowed succeeds on the fundamentals of technical delivery. It runs, and it runs well enough that its systems and story take center stage. The occasional pop-in or animation quirk is a minor tax to pay for an experience that, crucially, just works. In an age where broken launches are commonplace, Obsidian’s focus on delivering a stable, playable RPG from day one is a virtue that cannot be overstated, even if the sheen of its visual presentation isn’t always flawless.
Final Verdict: Is Avowed Worth Your Time?
In the end, Avowed asks a simple question: do you value a brilliant story more than a flawless system? This is a game of stark contrasts—where some of the most incisive writing and reactive choice-making in the genre is housed within a progression loop that occasionally fights against its own best intentions. It’s an experience defined by its focus, trading the endless sprawl of a modern open world for a curated, 20-30 hour main campaign that respects your time from start to finish. For completionists willing to delve into every cave and side quest, that journey stretches to a meaty 50+ hours, but it never feels padded. The structure is lean and purposeful, a direct rebuke to RPG bloat that ensures nearly every hour spent in the Living Lands is filled with meaningful character interaction, a new combat toy to test, or a secret that tangibly alters the world.
Magic and combat are highlights of the Avowed experience.
This design philosophy positions Avowed in a fascinating middle ground between genre titans. It blends the open-zone exploration and environmental storytelling of Skyrim with the focused, character-driven mission structure of Mass Effect. You have the freedom to wander off the critical path and uncover hidden dungeons or lore-rich memories, but you’re always funneling those discoveries back into a central narrative about loyalty and colonization. It’s a hybrid that works brilliantly for players who crave the thrill of discovery but don’t want to get lost in a hundred-hour checklist. The game’s greatest success is proving that an RPG doesn’t need to be a life-consuming commitment to feel epic; it just needs every moment to count.
Avowed is a game for the player who finishes a 50-hour RPG and thinks, "I wish that was 30 hours." It’s Obsidian at its most distilled.
Consequently, its target audience is clear: this is a game for fans of Obsidian’s signature strengths—morally complex writing, reactive worlds, and companion depth—who actively prefer a streamlined, choice-driven adventure over one drowning in systemic complexity or endless side content. If your ideal RPG is defined by deep crafting economies, endlessly respawning dynamic events, or building a home in a living world, the static, curated nature of the Living Lands may leave you cold. But if your primary metric is the weight of your decisions and the quality of your conversations, Avowed delivers in spades. The campsite banter, the difficult alliances, and the constant, uncomfortable reminder of your role as a colonizer create a narrative gravity that few games this generation can match.
This brings us to the final calculus. Avowed’s strengths are monumental: its snappy, versatile combat is a genuine joy, its world is a vibrant gallery of handcrafted secrets, and its choice-driven narrative is a masterclass in player agency and moral ambiguity. These elements combine to create an experience that is, moment-to-moment, incredibly easy to recommend. However, its weaknesses are structural and impossible to ignore. The flawed gear tier system and lack of enemy scaling create jarring difficulty spikes and punish experimentation in the late game, while the limited enemy variety and non-reactive world can make the back half of a long playthrough feel repetitive. These aren't minor quibbles; they are core design choices that prevent the game from reaching its full, genre-defining potential.
Ultimately, Avowed is a triumph of craft over ambition, a polished gem that plays it safe. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it polishes an existing one to a brilliant sheen. For its exceptional writing, satisfying combat, and profound respect for the player’s time, it earns a strong 8.5/10. It’s the kind of game you’ll finish and immediately want to discuss—not for its groundbreaking mechanics, but for the deeply personal story it allowed you to tell, and the heavy cost of the loyalties you chose to keep.
Pros:
- A masterfully written, choice-driven narrative where decisions have tangible, long-term consequences.
- Snappy, deeply satisfying combat with unparalleled loadout freedom.
- A focused, 20-30 hour campaign that respects player time, packed with meaningful exploration.
- Excellent companion interactions and the brilliant campsite dialogue system.
- Remarkable technical stability at launch.
Cons:
- A flawed gear tier and scaling system creates frustrating difficulty spikes and punishes build experimentation.
- Noticeable lack of enemy variety over a long playthrough.
- World and cities can feel static and non-reactive once explored.
- Plays it safe, lacking a truly groundbreaking or innovative mechanical hook.