Avoweddoesn’t have a standard class system, though it does have standard classes. In your skill tree, you will see three ways to deposit points:Fighter,Ranger, andWizard. These are pretty straightforward. Fighters use big, heavy weapons, Rangers use small, quick weapons or attack from range, and Wizards use magic. You can build yourself into a combination of all three, which is what I did. But Avowed is unusual in this regard.
Whether games let you assign points freely as Avowed does, lets you bounce around different classes asDragon’s Dogmadoes, or makes you choose a specific class then lets you experiment with variants asDragon Agedoes, balanced combat is a key part of RPGs. I play most of them as a Fighter (orWarrior, as Dogma and Age comma Dragon call them), and that’s pretty hard to get wrong. Hitting things with a hammer is good, clean fun, and that’s why I choose it. But Avowed understands the allure of magic better than most.
Being A Wizard Is The Best Way To Play Avowed
I changed my loadout a lot more in Avowed than I usually do. Where I would often simply upgrade the same type of weapon toone with better numbies, this time I was testing out builds. I started on spear and shield, but mixed in all swords great and short, hammers, axes, wands, grimoires, bows, and two different types of gun. Eventually I settled on wand and spear as my main loadout, with ‘whatever my biggest weapon is’ for my secondary, but there was more allure in magic than ever before.
A wand is not really a magic weapon in Avowed. You level it up in the Wizard tree, but it’s really just a gun that you don’t have to reload. Mine,Minoletta’s Conduit, sent Shock bolts that could electrify any water my enemies stood in, but I basically used it as a pew pew stick. And in most games, that’s what magic would stay as. A regular attack flavoured with a magical edge, and maybe a couple of true spells (shout out to my girl Fan of Flames) thrown in there for good measure. But if you grab enough grimoires, you can actually be a Wizard for once.
It can be a little tough to figure magic out, which might put people off. You can cast first tier spells either by using skill points or buying grimoires, but as the game goes on you may find grimoires lock you out of spells. That’s because you also need to level up your grimoire skills in the tree, but conversely, don’t need to use skills on spells if they’re already in your grimoire.
Once you figure that out and find a grimoire that works, you’re able to cast fireballs to cover the ground, use vortexes to pull enemies into the flames, spray poisonous gas in their faces, and send lightning towards one of them that then jumps between their bodies to electrify them all at once. With a grimoire, you can even do this while wielding a spear in the other hand to stab at them from a safe distance.
While there’s still mana (or Essence, in this case), the heavy use of stamina for melee weapons puts Wizard skills on an even keel and the speed at which you can unleash and combine spells, especially at a higher level, is far faster and more impressive than most other games. Where modern RPGs tend to leave spells for geeks who want to sink deep into the lore and save fighting for the real heroes, Avowed brings Wizards to the frontline.
Avowed Gives Magic More Respect
The reason I brought up Dragon’s Dogma and Dragon Age are in part because they’re the other most recent high fantasy RPGs, and so Avowed is being compared to its peers, where (for magicalness at least) it comes out on top.Dragon’s Dogma 2has Mage and Sorcerer, which are fine enough but make you feel far more passive than Avowed allows as a spellcaster. There are more active magick specialisms, like Magick Archer or Arcane Trickster, but they feel more like rangers with magical abilities than actual Wizards.
LikewiseDragon Age: The Veilguard, which fails to make its Mages as interesting (narratively or mechanically) as previous Dragon Age games. In fact, the vast majority of Veilguard players would tell you to turn the fricken frogs gay that playing as aSpellblade(basically a magic Warrior) is the only way to be a Mage and still feel part of the action. Neither have the raw spectacle of power in your hands the way Avowed does.
Other RPGs have done this well, of course. Turn-based affairs likeBaldur’s Gateor olderFinal Fantasygames have managed to make magic just as vital as a big ol' sword, but as gaming has shifted to faster paced combat, it feels as though magic is struggling to keep up. It may also come, especially in The Veilguard’s case, froma desire to remove the complexitythat is inherent with spells for friction-free action, but that just leaves everything feeling the same. Avowed manages to make magic feel magical again, and that’s worth celebrating.
