Avowed surprised me. This beautiful, open-ended role-playing game is gorgeous, it runs smoothly on PC and Xbox alike and it leverages Unreal Engine 5’s latest features almost without fault. Anyone familiar with Obsidian Entertainment’s storied history would know that its track record for technical polish isn’t exactly sterling, so it’s an unexpected triumph – one of the best showcases of a modern Unreal Engine 5 title that uses the engine’s best features while avoiding its biggest pitfalls.
At its core, Avowed follows a model not unlike The Outer Worlds: an open world game with a smaller, more focused scope versus the more sprawling implementations we expect from the likes of Ubisoft or Rockstar. This works in Avowed’s favour as The Living Lands offer some beautiful, interesting places to explore. It’s broken up into moderately sized chunks, but each of these areas has a lot to see and do, with genuinely beautiful areas with plenty of atmosphere. I would almost describe the game’s aesthetic as an unusual cross between Elder Scrolls and Chrono Cross (!), with bold colours, unusual shapes and towering structures.
Obsidian’s first-person RPGs typically arrive with a hearty helping of bugs and a general lack of polish. Avowed isn’t perfect, and you will still bump into rough patches from time to time, but it’s surprisingly well-tuned, managing to avoid most of those pitfalls. Animation, camera movement, NPC behaviour and battles all feel remarkably polished.
As an Unreal Engine 5 title then, it should come as no surprise that Avowed uses the three headline features – Lumen global illumination and reflections, Nanite virtualised geometry and virtual shadow maps – but it’s how they’re used that really helps demonstrate their worth.