Avowed Full Systems/Gameplay Review and Feedback (No story spoilers)

[CJB]

I finished my 60-hour Path of the Damned run yesterday and have a lot to say about this game, both the gameplay and story. This post is going to focus on the systems and gameplay design. I have a lot to criticize about the writing that I might later write down in a post in the Story subforum. The recently-published interview with GAMERANT added some interesting flavor with what went down in the writers' room.

This post is primarily feedback targeted directly at the devs. I know you can do better than this, Obsidian. Every previous entry was a strong and deliberate step forward in RPG systems design, but Avowed took 5 steps back. I know he wasn't directly involved with Avowed, but you literally have the uncontested king of RPG systems design on call, Josh Sawyer. Please, I ask you to try to emulate his approach to game design in deeply interrogating what good design looks like and should be. Pillars of Eternity 2 is literally the best-designed CRPG ever created from a systems standpoint. I'm sorry, but you do have a lot to live up to with your audience. We are expecting Obsidian quality and obsessive attention-to-detail.

I'm giving feedback and criticism on what the game is as presented. You're not going to see any complaints about lack of pickpocketing or not being able to attack innocent NPCs. The point of this post is to help the devs make better decisions about future updates for Avowed, Outer Worlds 2, and Avowed 2. I really liked Outer Worlds and was eagerly anticipating the sequel, but from what I've seen of Avowed, now my hopes for Outer Worlds 2 have been tempered.

For context of my playthrough, I jumped right in on Path of the Damned. I did this because my expectation with PotD from PoE2 was that it is a difficulty level for players willing to get very familiar with the game systems, learn how to optimize their build while still allowing for style/role flexibility, and take a couple tries reloading saves to figure out how to solve interesting tough encounters. PotD is a difficulty intended to give you an airport runway on which to go full throttle with an OP build, when that OP build would end encounters in seconds on lower difficulties. This was a complete disappointment on all fronts, which I'll explain later.

I mostly played an arquebus build fishing for power attack headshots with some magic in between. My final build used Heavenstrike and Anextli's Grimoire + Magic Mistol, alternating between Heavenstrike power attack headshots and casting spells and Magic Mistol power attacks with the Quick Switch talent to skip reloads. I believe I did about 95% of the content: I completed all but one side quests due to a bug preventing turn-in to the final NPC, completed all bounties, totems, treasure maps, etc. 

 

Attributes & Dialogue Checks

Come on, guys, what are we doing here? Are we just aping mechanics from PoE2 without understanding what's actually going on? Please review Josh Sawyer's work on how the PoE2 attributes were designed with avoiding trap decisions. One of my favorite parts of PoE system design is how all attributes are valuable regardless of the character's role. In Avowed, the player character is forced into being the primary source of damage, and what the attributes do has been altered from PoE2, which forsakes their design.

Might - Mandatory to pump this because the player is the only real source of damage. Companions are just flailing wet noodles. I tell Yatzli to summon her mega death orb with a 60-second cooldown and it does... a quarter of a jobber enemy's health? Are we serious?

Constitution - Useless, especially on PotD, because of how much health you get from other sources (such as the Toughness talent), how easy it is to inflate mitigation with other means, and how much combat revolves around not taking damage in the first place. Because of how often you are fighting enemies in a higher tier who do bonus damage to you, you are constantly at risk of getting one/two-shot. 5% max health isn't moving the needle when a jobber enemy is literally whacking me for 1.3k raw damage in a single hit while I have 250 max health just because my armor tier is one level less than them, and I only survive because I have 80% mitigation with 66 flat reduction. Your best bet is to just do whatever you can do avoid getting hit in the first place. Furthermore, with regards to poison and bleed resistance, the player is never bled, and any time you do get poisoned, you can just remove it immediately with consumables. Status effects just don't really exist for the player because of how easy it is to instantly remove them with Grog.

Dexterity - Mandatory to pump this because it just makes everything faster, whether you are drinking a health potion or reloading your gun. However, Dexterity creates an odd non-bo with Quick Switch: Faster action and attack speed means that I can shoot with an arquebus, switch to grimoire, cast a spell, and switch back all under 3 seconds and I'm still forced to reload the arquebus. Quick Switch rank 2 should just be changed to "Switching to/from guns reloads them" to create the intended fast-paced gameplay.

Perception - Unintuitive design. The game tells you that Perception is good for guns and bows, but its value for those weapon types is actually pretty limited. With bows and guns, you only need bonus range up to a certain point, and its very easy to fish for guaranteed crits from headshots with the Steady Aim talent, so bonus crit chance is worthless. In contrast, bonus crit chance is valuable for everyone not using bows and guns. Devs need to consider adjusting this attribute to make it more valuable like making a single "Crit" stat that is both your bonus crit chance and bonus crit damage.

Intellect - Useless. We learned this lesson from Elden Ring that bonus max mana/essence is useless when you can constantly chug potions to refill it. Your max mana/essence only needs to be large enough to cast whatever your most expensive spell is. This problem is exacerbated in Avowed when there are so many sources of essence restoration, I'm ending the game with 130+ essence potions, and grimoires dramatically reduce the essence cost of spells. Why did we change Intellect from bonus AoE radius like in PoE? That would've been so valuable in Avowed. I got a lot of mileage out of Tanglefoot, but I can count on my fingers how many times I actually hit multiple enemies with it because of how small the radius is. And like I said above with Constitution, status effects don't exist for the player.

Resolve - Useful for melee builds, but useless for PotD because melee builds are masochistic gameplay in PotD. Melee builds care a lot about stamina but ranged builds don't because nothing ranged builds do costs a meaningful amount of stamina, even sprinting in combat. Stamina is literally just a gate on how many melee attacks you are allowed to make in a row. Elden Ring understood this issue by applying a stamina cost to spells in addition to their mana cost, so you can't just freely spam spells, and then have enough stamina to sprint/dodge away from enemies. In Avowed, stamina may as well not exist as a mechanic for ranged builds. Second Wind efficiency is also not helpful because you want to avoid proccing it in the first place. It's a "betting on failing" stat instead of a "making you stronger" stat.

Builds are going to be extremely homogenized for PotD: Don't bother playing melee unless you're a masochist, put some points into Perception and pump Strength and Dexterity. Constitution, Resolve, and Intellect remain at 0 for the whole game.

Dialogue Checks - It honestly felt like 80%+ of the dialogue checks in the game, whether with attributes or my background, were simply there to activate a one-liner from the NPC with which I was talking, but didn't actually give me access to something I would have not gotten without the skill check. It just felt very odd that randomly while talking with the Ambassador, I get the option to use Dexterity to steal money from him, but this use of Dexterity never shows up again. It's like the devs heard Josh Sawyer say "Make sure every skill is used in the first area of the game" and they treated that as a checkbox, but not something to follow through with the rest of the game. It just made dialogue checks feel like they don't really matter, and then at the end of the game there's a special interaction that requires 15 in an attribute. Furthermore, I even failed an interaction in a side quest by choosing my background option. What the bleep?!? Why are you punishing me for using my unique character choices in dialogue? This isn't Disco Elysium where I have to be constantly worried about screwing up my relationship with someone with a single comment.

 

Information

Going from PoE2 where almost every single numerical aspect of every single spell and ability is displayed for you, including a breakdown of the scaling of different values, to Avowed where I'm given absolutely no numerical information about the effect of spells, is such a... I don't even know what to say. It's just completely impossible to make well-informed decisions about spells, where I should put my talent points, what grimoires I should be using. At least the Fighter and Ranger talents are a bunch of multiplicative increases to the base damage and stun values of weapons, so making decisions there is pretty straightforward. 

Furthermore, going from PoE2 where you have a codex that gives a stat block for every single monster you encounter, plus an explanation of almost every single combat mechanic, to Avowed where I just have no idea what effects to which different enemies are resistant or weak, and no source of information in game to find that information, is such a... I again don't even know what to say. I know from trial and error that shades are immune to being rooted and are resistant to frost, but I would at least like that information to be displayed somewhere, whether icons underneath their health bar, or in a bestiary in the journal.

It's just makes the game feel like such baby food slop "Don't even bother trying to think any bit about how to better play the game. Just pick spells that look cool to you to use against the expendable generic monsters. You like launching fireballs at skeletons, right? Nom nom nom here comes the generic fantasy world with modern graphics! Eat your gameslop, baby!" Complete betrayal of what "Path of the Damned" is supposed to be about. Again, we are just aping stuff that we saw in PoE, without actually understanding it.

 

Loot & Progression Economy

This was the most frustrating part of the game. The whole "you deal less multiplicative damage and take less multiplicative damage from enemies of a higher tier than your gear, on top of the additive stat-scaling" was a complete clustertruck of an idea. Who came up with this? Who playtested this and said "Yep, this feels fun!"?

The point of the skull indicator system in PoE2 is to tell you that "enemies here are of a higher level, but you can still attempt to fight them if your build and game knowledge are good." As soon as you leave Port Maje, you are allowed to go wherever you want in Deadfire, the skulls are just an indicator of intended level. In Avowed, you are region-locked by the story, which is fine; however, the multiplicative tier penalty literally stat-checks you out of having a reasonable fight against enemies in the region that you are supposed to currently be exploring. I have nowhere else to go explore. It's like the game is forcing you to complete the side quests and explore the different parts of a region in a specific order. I don't even really know what a good reason for this design would be, so I'm not going to attempt to guess one. You aren't even told where higher-tier enemies would appear on the map, like you would in the Deadfire; the player is just left to wander into areas they aren't supposed to be yet and waste their own time. Again, we are just aping stuff that we saw in PoE, without actually understanding it.

This multiplicative tier penalty system needs to be removed yesterday. I have not seen a single person say that this was a good part of the game.

----Looks like you already fixed this in the day 1 patch. Great job!

This issue is further exacerbated by the fact the game barely gives you any adra directly to upgrade your unique gear. It seems that you really are expected to permanently delete a bunch of the unique items you find in order to upgrade the unique items that you are committing to as quickly as possible. I'm sorry, I'm not going to permanently delete my unique items to lock myself into a single build for my entire playthrough, and you shouldn't expect me to. What's the point of being able to respec my talent points if I don't have any other unique items to try out in different builds? This forces a gameplay experience where, upon entering a new region, you spend the first half of that region constantly running into skull enemies that stat-check you while looking under ever stone and pebble for a couple adra so you can actually start having fun again. Again, I don't really know what a good reason for this design would be, so I'm not going to attempt to guess one. In PoE2, upgrading the tier of your items wasn't a huge bottleneck to your character's power. In fact, for caster characters, you could just give them a unique weapon that gave them a bonus for their spellcasting, and leave the item at a low tier for the whole game because they weren't using the weapon to make weapon attacks. Again, we are just aping stuff that we saw in PoE, without actually understanding it.

Furthermore, what is going on with unique grimoires? There's nothing special about unique grimoires in Avowed. In PoE2, unique grimoires were special because they gave you access to unique spells only available from the grimoire, and grimoires weren't upgradeable because they just gave you access to spells, they didn't increase player power directly. In Avowed, unique grimoires are a disappointment because none of them give you unique spells separate from the Wizard tree. We have an archmage show up, but we don't get a grimoire with their named spells. We get a bunch of easter eggs from Tayn of Tayn's Chaotic Orb, but we never get a grimoire that let's us cast the freaking Chaotic Orb! Furthermore, why the heck am I forced to use my scarce adra to upgrade these unique grimoires when they don't do anything different from generic grimoires? In combination with the previous paragraph, it's a disincentive to integrate a named grimoire into your character's build. Again, we are just aping stuff that we saw in PoE, without actually understanding it.

The upgrade costs for uniques need to be reduced to 1 adra for a tier upgrade, and 0 adra for unique grimoires.

I didn't find the non-adra upgrade materials to be a huge bottleneck, at least for the few unique pieces I was committed to, but you could still afford to reduce these upgrade costs in half just to encourage more experimentation with other items.

The actual effects of all these unique items are major disappointments, whether weapons or accessories, especially coming off the back of PoE2. It's just a soup of "15% bonus to random stat" and "15% chance to proc X when Y happens." Wavebinder's Robes increases the crit chance of guns. Do I need to explain why that's completely useless? It's empty both in power and creativity. What are we doing here? There's no excitement over uniques, just "I guess it's the best marginal improvement over the generic version of the weapon." I got a unique arquebus that ricochets bullets to an additional target, and my initial thought was "Oh my, is this Avowed's Red Hand? Am I about to become an absolute DPS menace?" Nope, the ricochet only does about 20% of the damage of the original hit, and only if the second enemy is standing right next to the first. That disappointment set the tone for uniques for the rest of the game. It doesn't really matter what unique you are using, the tier of the weapon/armor is far more important for player power, even if it's a generic weapon/armor of higher tier. 

The enchanting of the uniques is also a let down from PoE2's variety of enchantments. Avowed completely floods me with enchanting materials, but I don't really use them because I only have enough adra to maintain a couple unique items. Oddly, in the case of Magic Mistol, I actually don't want to enchant it because I value dealing high stun to a single enemy more than moderate AOE stun or reload speed on kill.

This gets even worse for armor, specifically. It's like Avowed's devs watched Josh Sawyer's talk on armor systems and the only thing they successfully took away from that was "Percent mitigation plus scaling flat reduction is the best armor system." There is also a scaling penalty to increased percent mitigation from heavier armor; the issue is that that "penalty" is a reduction to your max stamina and essence, which I already articulated above is a meaningless "penalty." Especially when you consider the incoming damage you are contending with in PotD, the 30% mitigation you get from heavy armor far eclipses any other benefit you could get from armor, including any bonuses from unique light armors, with the one exception that I found being the Helwalker's Vestments if you want to attempt to play a glass cannon no-hit melee build. Why did we change the penalty from recovery speed like it was in PoE2? Action/attack speed is a good penalty because it's something everyone cares about.

It's like the devs read Josh Sawyer's work on trap choices and interpreted that as "homogenize everything to within 20% variance regardless of player choice," instead of Sawyer's intended message of "make a bunch of cool powerful effects with meaningful drawbacks so there is not a strictly best option."

 

Enemies & Difficulty

Avowed's difficulty selector says that Path of the Damned "requires mastermind strategization of builds and loadouts." Nothing about the combat required mastermind strategization, not the least in part because of what I articulated in information above - you can't even become a mastermind of the game's systems if you wanted with the (lack of) information presented in the game. The actual difficulty only came from the ever-present risk of getting one/two-shot because you are forced to fight a tier below the enemy, and being swarmed with an insane number of enemies in some encounters. But the actual mechanics of the encounters, whether in the open world or "boss" fights, were way too simple. I only felt like I actually got to fight something interesting when I encountered the unique enemies at the end of the game - and there's only 9 of them before the game ends.

Whether you are fighting xaurips, skeletons, or kith, every fight against non-beasts/primordials is the same: there's shield-users that rush you, priests that spam a mass full-heal, and ranged spear-throwers/archers/arquebuisers. Maybe there is a wizard that can one-shot you with their gatling gun ice spell. It's the same encounters for the entire game. Against the same fundamental enemies, just wearing different skins. You use the same strategy every encounter: kill the priest asap, and then CC the melee while you line-of-sight and kill the ranged. At no point did I have to stop and think about how to beat an interesting new encounter. At the end of the game, my character sheet showed that 2/3 of the non-kith enemies I killed were either xaurips, skeletons, or spiders. 

Furthermore, the devs did a good job implementing verticality when it came to exploring, but every fight felt like it took place on a flat plane anyway. Completely missed opportunity to take advantage of the new environment systems to create interesting encounters. For example, why is there not a single fight that takes place on platforms over water/lava, where you fight enemies while using ice to get between the other platforms; there could even be a boss that jumps between the platforms and makes you chase them around. Maybe there's a boss that summons a maze of briars or webs that you have to burn down to get to them. Would be so cool to have a fight where you amble around the rooftops of one of the towns. Such a missed opportunity to make memorable encounters.

The "boss" encounters were a huge disappointment because almost all of them were a basic melee jobber enemy, but with more health and damage. This created an odd situation where the boss fights, especially ones with no minions, were actually the easiest in the game because alternating roots from Tanglefoot and godlike power, and taunts completely trivialized every boss fight. You just keep the boss perma-rooted and they just stare at you menacingly. I handedly beat the final boss on the first try. Are we scared of actual difficulty here on "Path of the Damned"? I'm perfectly fine dying and taking a couple tries to figure out a tough and interesting boss encounter. None of them were, though. I only died to letting myself get one-shot from off-screen enemies. That's just not an interesting form of "difficulty," especially in encounters that summon an absolutely stupid amount of enemies, like the double ogre bounty in Galawain's Tusks.

But there was this strange experience with the tier scaling system: the game only actually felt challenging at all when I was fighting below tier, but it was too challenging. Fighting at equivalent tier was too easy (maybe because my build was too good?). I only had to actually think at all about my gameplay when I was fighting under tier. In addition to removing the multiplicative scaling from the tier system, I would recommend also nerfing player damage by a bit across the board. Player damage should be about halfway between fighting equivalent-tier, and under-tier. With the day one patch, I fear PotD will just be too easy, but maybe that is just an irrelevant problem.

Poison, Fire, and Bleed are useless for players because you simply want the enemy to be dead before the status effect has time to accumulate and then tick down. Some additional effects of some kind need to be added to theses status effects, like slowing the enemy or reducing their damage. Shock is nice because of the AOE effect, and enemy A can spread shock to enemy B, who then reapplies shock back to enemy A and so on. Frost is really strong just as a CC tool, which is really useful on PotD, but the "combo" effect of explosive damage didn't seem to do a meaningful amount of damage. If I'm going through the effort to apply freeze and then deal explosive damage, that shouldn't be dealing only a fifth of a jobber's health.

I never felt like I discovered some interesting interaction of the game's mechanics except for one thing, which made the whole combat experience get pretty old by the end of the game. The one cool interaction I found was that, when you make a special stun attack with an arquebus, it will deal the full damage of the special stun attack to all enemies the bullet passes through, regardless of range or order. If enemies A, B, and C are in a line, and B is stunned and I special attack them for 6k damage, I will deal 6k damage to all 3 enemies. This opened up opportunities for some devastating amounts of damage when the stars aligned.

 

Companions

The companions are next-to-useless, both from being too squishy, and dealing too little damage. There's a reason one of the most popular Nexusmods is literally "x5 companion damage." That just needs to be implemented into the base game. It's crazy how much the bear summon outclasses the companions, it actually does respectable damage and can live for its entire duration. Whatever supplements the bear is using needs to be given to the companions.

The companions are also really squishy and keep getting downed. This is annoying but it's not particularly frustrating given that there are actually some pretty nice bonuses you can acquire for reviving companions, the first godlike ability you get is a mass revive with infinite range, you can revive them while invisible without breaking invisibility, and there's even a food item you can craft that revives them. Would still like the companions to just be tankier so I don't have to keep reviving them as often.

----Looks like you addressed this in the day one patch. Good job!

Mechanically, Yatzli is the least useful companion in combat because all she does is damage, but not really actually. Her combat effectiveness is just standing there and looking pretty. But I still felt required to bring her along to dispel illusions. Yatzli's ability to dispel illusions is such a sharp contrast to Kai's fire and Giatta's jolt. In addition to all the fire and shock spells, there's a fire/shock plant within 10 feet of almost every briar/web/essence generator. The devs really wanted to make sure you wouldn't run into a web that you couldn't get through. Oddly, the same cannot be said for illusions. We need a spell for illusions or something so we aren't required to bring Yatzli for them.

Additionally, it's disappointing to go from the really cool AI customizer tool in PoE2, to a complete lack of any ability to really manage what your companions are doing in Avowed. There are some companion abilities where I just want the companion to use them at will against whomever, like Marius's Heartseeker and Yatzli's Essence Explosion. But I don't want Kai to waste his taunts and Yatzli to waste her slow on random jobbers. Would really like an option to toggle "fire at will" for each companion ability in the companion ability menu.

 

Suggestions

The ultimate opinion I have on Avowed's gameplay is that it is a very strong skeleton for a good game and new franchise, it's just that the devs forgot to put any meat on the bone. The game is just not that deep, even though it looks pretty and the combat is fun and fast-paced on a surface level. Here are some suggestions for future updates to help make this game more complete:

• Just add more abilities and spells to play with. Would be cool to have a "Spiritualist" tree for cipher and chanter spells, and a "Mystic" tree for priest, druid, and monk spells.
• Add unique spells or effects (other than reduced spell cooldown and essence cost) to the unique grimoires to actually justify needing adra to upgrade them.
• Buff and add more interesting effects to the uniques and enchantments. These should be build-defining items but currently they are just "better than a generic until I find a generic of a higher tier."
• Add more talent points, both to the player and companions. Because of how much of your player power comes from your gear, as opposed to your talents, and the use of abilities is still gated by essence and action speed, I don't think it would be game-breaking to have a lot more talents. I also don't think it would be game-breaking to have all of the companion's talents filled out by level 30 given how weak they currently are.
• Add some kind of gear enchantment randomizer system, where the generic gear you find will have random enchantments of the "+15% to random stat" kind. You can then salvage these to get a corresponding rune that can be applied to other gear items at the crafting table, up to like 3 runes per item, or something like that. This would make the random gear you find have some level of interesting going on, as opposed to mass salvage/vendor fodder.
• Add a new game+ mode that carries over your level/talents and totems, and increases the level cap to 60 with continued enemy and gear scaling. The totem effects would be really fun to start with on a higher difficulty.
• Add more and tougher enemies to populate the world and give more variety. Why are the Steel Garrote that everyone is constantly worried about just wimpy kith jobbers like every one else? The Steel Garrote should be elite paladins wielding divine powers from Woedica. You don't even really have to add new spells, just make Steel Garrote fighters use Charge and Into the Fray against me, their priests cast Arcane Veil and Ring of Fire on their allies, and their rogues go invisible and deflect my projectiles. The world just feels so static, but it would be so much cooler if there were scary Steel Garrote patrols and checkpoints everywhere that I actually had to decide if I wanted to fight or let them pass/walk around. This would especially make sense after the ending of the second region. You could do the same thing with dreamthralls getting empowered with new abilities and patrolling everywhere and having random fights with Steel Garrote patrols after the ending of the third region. It would be so cool if you could get side quests to return to previous regions and fight more powerful enemies there, instead of just abandoning them forever. The Dreamscourge could revive previous bounties and give them new abilities. This would add so much to the sense of RPG zero-to-hero progression. Why the heck am I still fighting xaurips in the fourth region, and it still takes me the same amount of time to kill them because of the gear scaling system? It takes away any sense of feeling more powerful and strong enough to face scarier enemies. We're constantly told about the threat of the Steel Garrote and how they are trying to take over the whole area, but we only actually see and fight them in scripted story events, never in the open world, and they are no different from a group of skeletons or xaurips.

 

Bugs

I didn't experience any game-breaking bugs, but there were two that were annoying. Grimoires don't reduce the cooldown of duration spells like Arcane Veil, and the minions that the final boss summons will go completely invisible.

[thelee]

i only have like ~10 h so far, so this is just based on early impressions and also for general discussion.

1 hour ago, CJB said:

Might - Mandatory to pump this because the player is the only real source of damage. Companions are just flailing wet noodles. I tell Yatzli to summon her mega death orb with a 60-second cooldown and it does... a quarter of a jobber enemy's health? Are we serious?

i find might to be in a similar situation to poe1 and deadfire, a nice to have but not at all critical.

1 hour ago, CJB said:

Constitution - Useless, especially on PotD, because of how much health you get from other sources (such as the Toughness talent), how easy it is to inflate mitigation with other means, and how much combat revolves around not taking damage in the first place. Because of how often you are fighting enemies in a higher tier who do bonus damage to you, you are constantly at risk of getting one/two-shot. 5% max health isn't moving the needle when a jobber

it seems like this might be a "either useless or useful" dichotomy of an attribute? It will never ever ever help you survive a hit on PotD if you couldn't, but when you're up to >80 DR, it can mean the difference between taking an additional hit or not.

1 hour ago, CJB said:

Perception - Unintuitive design. The game tells you that Perception is good for guns and bows, but its value for those weapon types is actually pretty limited. With bows and guns, you only need bonus range up to a certain point, and its very easy to fish for guaranteed crits from headshots with the Steady Aim talent, so bonus crit chance is worthless.

i agree that the design is unintuitive. i think it would help if perception also helped with crit damage, to help with the bow/gun tension of getting auto-crits with weak points, or probably better still let weakpoints and crits be independent things so weakpoints can still crit (currently the fact that guns have a severe crit chance malus is canceled out by anyone with good twitch aiming skills or the ability that slows down time while aiming). i still come into situations where i'm far enough away that damage drops off with a bow or gun, but those situations come up much less frequently, so the returns are extremely diminishing. edit: it would also be more in tune with the poe/design attribute design philosophy of universality if spells could also crit (as far as i can tell they cannot), which would give perception greater overall utility.

1 hour ago, CJB said:

Intellect - Useless. We learned this lesson from Elden Ring that bonus max mana/essence is useless when you can constantly chug potions to refill it. Your max mana/essence only needs to be large enough to cast whatever your most expensive spell is

i think the fact that essence potions and essence foods are overflowing is the main killer here. max essence would still be useful because essence potion regeneration is pegged to your max essence, so the more you have the more you get out of them. but it's hardly a concern right now with my hybrid build because i'm tripping over sources of essence regen (i actually just sold half my essence potions). i don't know if resistances are useful from intellect because at my current modest intellect level it's not enough to prevent from getting basically one shot at times, and i'm not sure i'm willing to invest all the way to 15 to see if that situation changes. not sure what the better situation here would be that wouldn't just involve nerfing the player (like adding a cooldown to essence potions).

1 hour ago, CJB said:

Resolve - Useful for melee builds, but useless for PotD because melee builds are masochistic gameplay in PotD. Melee builds care a lot about stamina but ranged builds don't because nothing ranged builds do costs a meaningful amount of stamina, even sprinting in combat. Stamina is literally just a gate on how many melee attacks you are allowed to make in a row. Elden Ring understood this issue by applying a stamina cost to spells in addition to their mana cost, so you can't just freely spam spells, and then have enough stamina to sprint/dodge away from enemies. In Avowed, stamina may as well not exist as a mechanic for ranged builds. Second Wind efficiency is also not helpful because you want to avoid proccing it in the first place. It's a "betting on failing" stat instead of a "making you stronger" stat.

i think this would be more useful if sprinting required stamina as well, at least in combats. that might be too punishing for lower difficulty.  with a ranged hybrid build i'm spending most of combat dodging left and right, and i'm never short of stamina with only like 3 resolve. edit: i don't mind it working with second wind, it's not really a "betting on failing stat" so much as it is a parallel survivability mechanism to health (and both work together, essentially). my problem is that investing in resolve for this is not going to be totally effective because of just how frickin' long the cooldown is, combined with the obscure mechanics means i don't see a way in which this ever triggers more than once in a typical fight regardless of investment, so you get more clear survivability benefits from constitution. so it's not that "betting on failing" it's more like constitution gives you +X health and resolve gives you like +constitution/2 health, so it's always a worse choice if you want the survivability, if that makes sense.

Edited Tuesday at 10:03 PM by thelee

[Lonlon]

All the things you mention in your post are things that also seemed disappointing to me, however I have to admit that this game still features some good ideas (rewarding exploration, beautiful and engaging open world, ...).

Overall I think it is complicated to compare Avowed with PoE2. It just doesn't target the same audience, you can see that right from the beggining at character creation.. Personally this is what shocked me the most in this game, I don't understand why it contains so many references to PoE lore (mostly fan service) when it is clearly not aimed at PoE enthousiasts. Feels a bit weird. That, and also the quality of the side quests which is completely uneven. Some were written and worked with a lot of love and diligence, others are just: find this item, talk to this guy, come back to me...

Also you didn't mentionned it in your post but i'm completly triggered by the "uniques quality scaling" system (if you own an exceptionnal quality weapon, all unique weapons you drop will be exceptionnal). Forced me into metagaming I didn't want to deal with during my first playthrough.

[Jim Hawkins]

1 hour ago, Lonlon said:

Personally this is what shocked me the most in this game, I don't understand why it contains so many references to PoE lore (mostly fan service) when it is clearly not aimed at PoE enthousiasts. Feels a bit weird. 

Honestly, Obsidian did this with New Vegas and classic fallout and even if it's a little on the nose, i love it. It acknowledges old fans, it makes the world feel consistent and it goes a long way to introduce new fans to older titles, because they can smell when there's lore. How many people went from New Vegas to Fallout 1 and 2? I'm hoping a similar things is about to happen with avowed and pillars and i'm so here for it.

Overall i don't think it's really that different an audience as people make it seem between mainstream and non mainsteam cRPGs. I think that if you aren't old, "modern" rpgs can be a gateway to classic cRPGs, at least that was my own story back when i was younger and played new vegas. 

[CJB]

You're right about the Deadfire references. It felt really off how much the talk about Avowed before it's release was "Don't worry, you don't have to play the previous games before jumping right into the world of Eora in Avowed!" And then the writing in Avowed is constantly dropping references to Deadfire by characters who weren't there during the events of Deadfire. It turns into a situation where new-to-Eora players who want to get their feet wet in Eora feel like they're are being drowned in lore they are already supposed to know from previous games or need to read through (see Skillup's review), and fans of Deadfire feel like they are constantly being teased by empty fanservice. I'm constantly thinking "I know what happened in Deadfire, you don't need to keep bringing it up! Talk about other parts of Eora please, Eora isn't just Deadfire! If you love Deadfire so much, where are the Deadfire characters besides Lodwyn and Sanza?" It's like they tried to have their cake and eat it too with regards to connecting to the previous game.

[MrBrown]

Wow, OP really has a hard-on for Mr. Sawyer.

I agree with a lot of what you wrote, though.