Obsidian Entertainment - Avowed

Go play Pillars of Eternity!!!!

Yes, the first cgi trailer and marketing were for a AAA Skyrim-like budget game on paper, but that game was rebooted after it got stuck in development hell (I didn't follow that drama super closely, the game director ended up leaving from what I remember). The current Avowed is a reboot/downsized version of what they originally showed under a new director that fits better with Obsidian dev team size and knowledge.

Confirmed to be classless with different skill trees with a focus on unlocking skills instead of putting points into stats for growth. This was confirmed in a recent interview.

Obsidian designers are big fan of classless systems. Pillars of Eternity 1 and 2 are only class based because they were pitched as "classic D&D-like games". Even the TTRPG based on Pillars of Eternity is classless.

Also, only human and elf has playable because "Aedyr envoy" PC.

I wonder if they had to dial it back a little because they had themselves spread out too much on different projects. If I recall they had Grounded, Outer Worlds 2, Pentiment and Avowed all being worked on at some point. Personally, I'm perfectly fine with the game being scaled back a bit. I think too many developers have been going for the super long games and it can be hard to actually getting around to finishing many of them.

Sometimes having a long tail of sales can count, and hopefully that's the case for POE2 for a POE3.

For Avowed, I wanted to see more, and I got to see a little more, and I'm now interested. No hype or anything, and I'm not entirely sure about its art style, but it seems nice. Hey, an in-between reaction counts too!

Latest videos make the game look like a cheap Oblivion knock off. They need better presentation. Unless that's really all they can offer...yikes.

For me the visuals are actually the only halfway decent thing about it to me, lol. For AA it looks pretty good imo. Is this first person only? That would suck. I already hated this about Outer Worlds. I need to see my custom character! One thing I don't like about Cyberpunk either.
While I do play Bethesda games 90% in first person I do look at my characters all the time and take screenshots too.

I think it looks pretty good. I like the visual style they are going with. Not every game needs to look ultra realistic. Though I do think they need to add some more impact to the combat. It looked very Elderscrolls Online/Oblivion as far as enemies reacting to being hit. Def looking forward to seeing more as the year goes on.

Also, some companions info from Obsidian cosplay guide.

Kai:


Giatta:

Although he no longer works at Obsidian but Chris Avellone was the same way.  He did not like writing romances for his games.

There was a discussion about this in another forum and my take was that typical RPG romances are most like what you see in dating sims, harem anime, and certain romance novels and films: a nondescript blank slate protagonist the audience can project into enters a relationship with a fully fledged character. From a writer's perspective, this automatically makes for a weaker story that relies on the audience imaginatively inserting characterization and dynamics into the relationship that simply aren't in the text.

I generally enjoy RPG romances, but I see them more as fanservice than quality storytelling, and developers reluctance to push the envelope with them confirms that impression for me. Obsidian have their artistic pretensions—I'm familiar with the Sawyer post you're referencing and Patrick Weekes' response to it, and that exchange strikes me as a textbook example of someone who fancies they're making "art" versus someone proud of producing pure escapism. Of course, I find it disingenuous of Sawyer and Obsidian at large to pretend they are too good for fanservice, when they're still making games where the player avatar is a badass, a leader, and a seismic force for change.

Interview with Carrie Patel:

Yay for third person!
The latest gameplay trailer still left me very underwhelmed. The art style still looks bland to me. A friend who played Pillars said this is just what their world looks like, very familiar to him and you either like that style or not. So I guess I don't. But maybe it will look better when playing myself. I think I'll buy it at some point just because there are not many western RPGs coming out right now. But nothing I've seen so far has caught my eye. It looks very cheap. Didn't feel like this with The Outer Worlds promotional material and that was AA as well.

Maybe it's one of those games that are a lot better than they look.