Since the release of a teaser trailer forAvowed, countless fans of Obsidian and older Bethesda titles alike have clamored to learn more about the upcoming first-person RPG. For many fans,Avowedrepresents hope for the future of the classic RPG genre on next generation hardware, with speculation running rampant about the setting, the timeline, and the mechanics. To truly bring RPGs into next generation, Obsidian will have to innovate customization, exploration, andinteraction within its setting of Eora, factors that next-gen hype demands.
Luckily, there is a lot of material out there that can help predict what directions Obsidian will take withAvowed. The trailer itself hearkens back toSkyrimimagery, but it is confirmed thatAvowedwill take place in thePillars of Eternityfantasy world, Eora, replete with its array of gods, races, factions, and classes. The other big clues for howAvowedwill play come from Obsidian’s last first-person RPG,The Outer Worlds, which was hugely popular as a spiritual successor to olderFalloutgames in the vein ofNew Vegas.
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Elder Scrolls Changed RPG Leveling For Good
The big questions thatAvowedbrings up center on mechanics. The RPG genre has one of the deepest histories in gaming, and Obsidian is known for its adherence to the things that made classic RPGs likeBaldur’s Gateall-time greats. However, to move the genre forward, and more specifically tocompete withThe Elder Scrolls 6,Avowedwill have to make some big leaps too.Skyrimis nearly a decade old now, but when it came out, it revolutionized so many things about the RPG genre that it is still looked at as a gold-standard fantasy game.
At the time,Skyrim’s world felt alive and active, its combat-dragon fightsin particular- felt natural and engaging, and its leveling system completely changed what everyone was used to in RPGs. In pastElder Scrollsgames, players would choose a class at the beginning of the game or build a custom class.Skyrim’s levels were completely free-form, with players gaining proficiency in skills the more frequently they used them, unlocking perks in individual skill trees as they became more powerful. Skill trees have since become a staple of modern RPGs, butSkyrim’s dynamic leveling is still relatively unique.
Very little is known aboutThe Elder Scrolls 6, but it’s not unlikely that it will adopt a similar free-form leveling system toSkyrim. If not, it may also try to innovate something totally new, but that would be a risky tack for a time in whichBethesda is under immense pressureto put out a game that will make up for some of the failed risks they took with their other recent titles. That just leaves the question of whetherAvowedwill adopt a traditional style class system, or try to do something new to set it a cut above the competition.
Multi-Classing in Avowed
One of Obsidian’s strengths is modernizing the mechanics of classic games and making them feel fresh again.Bringing a class system likeOblivion’s toAvowedwould make a lot of sense, especially considering thatPillars of Eternityalready has a wide array of unique and interesting classes to draw from. Even so, there’s another tool that thePillars of Eternitygames have in their belt that could makeAvowed’s class system a cut above other modern RPGs.
Multi-classing was introduced inPillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire, and it completely revamped the entire class system fromPillars 1. Multi-classing is by no means a new mechanic, though. It goes all the way back totabletop RPGs likeDungeons and Dragons, but nonetheless, it is almost entirely unheard of in modern big-budget RPGs. Some might find multi-classing too complicated and outdated, but if done well,Avowedcould use this uncommon system to set itself apart from its competition.
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InPillars of Eternity 2, multi-classing allowed the player to customize characters as a mix of any two classes in the game. A multi-class character misses out on the very most powerful abilities available to both classes, but gains all the benefits of having two sets of powers and bonuses that synergize together. For example, a Fighter/Rogue multi-class becomes a Swashbuckler, a Barbarian/Cipher becomes a Witch, and a Wizard/Paladin becomes an Arcane Knight. With 11 main classes in the game, there are 55 unique multi-class options, but with the addition of 57 optional sub-classes, the number of possible multi-class combinations is over 2,200.
That number doesn’t even take into account which skills the player might pick for each class, which stats and abilities they will prioritize, or which of the manystrange Eora racesthey might pick. Multi-classing, and even classes themselves, are not yet confirmed forAvowed, but the incredible variety in character builds that multi-classing allows would be hard to pass up.Avowedmay even add new classes beyond what evenPillars 2had, which would make the system even more variable.
The main downside of class systems is that they lock the player into a set class right from the start, and don’t allow them to try out new builds. InPillars, that was less of an issue because the player also had a party of NPCs they could customize as well, but inAvowedit looks like there will just be one playable protagonist. The possibility of a re-class option is there as well, but it hasn’t been present in any of Obsidian’s original fantasy RPGs so far. Now matter how Obsidian chooses to implement charactercustomization and growth inAvowed, fans will eagerly await confirmation or denial of this theory, among many others.
Avowedis in development for PC and Xbox Series X.
