I haven’t decided if I loveAvowedor not just yet. I’ve spent about seven hours this weekend getting stuck into Obsidian’s latest RPG, and while I’ve really enjoyed getting to grips with its setting and compelling cast of characters, I’m yet to be completely hooked. Considering the game has proven to be somewhat polarising – some people love it, while others simply don’t reallygetit – this doesn’t really surprise me.
It might therefore seem strange to say that I wishDragon Age: The Veilguardhad felt more like Avowed, but damn it, this website is where I get to speak my truth even if everybody boos me for it. The fact is that these games have a lot in common. Both were long-awaited follow-ups to deep, complex fantasy RPG series, and both embraced action combat despite having roots in more complex, more tactical gameplay.
I’ve never played Pillars of Eternity, but I have played (at least some of) every Dragon Age game, and as I play Avowed, I can’t help but think that I would have enjoyed The Veilguard a lot more if it had felt more like this.
A Roleplaying Game That Lets You Roleplay?!
My problem with The Veilguard has never really been that it upped the action combat – after all, the series had been going that way long before the latest instalment, and I found fighting enemies to be fairly fun. My problems lay more with the roleplaying elements, or lack thereof.
You were plopped into the Dragon Age world, but it completely ignored almost all of your choices, to the extent thatit might have been better off starting completely fresh. And its writing was entirely toothless and uninteresting, relegating your character tobeing various flavours of nice. You couldn’t create a unique character, let alone one that was kind of annoying and mean, whereas that was an option available to you in previous Dragon Age games and even other BioWare games like Mass Effect.
But Avowed nails what The Veilguard couldn’t. Instead of trying to incorporate your choices from previous games asPillars of Eternity 2: Deadfiredid, Avowed frames itself as more of a spin-off, taking place in the same world (and even referencing characters) without making those games the jumping off point. And its roleplaying elements are decidedly stronger; while your choices might notreallymatter, Avowed offers you enough dialogue options and backstory choices during gameplay to make your character feel unique and alive.
Dated, But In A Good Way
Another thing that Avowed manages to nail is its old-school RPG vibe. The game obviously isn’tactuallyan old-school RPG, considering it’s only just launched, but it somehowvery effectively evokes big Skyrim but better vibesin its exploration and questing. I don’t mean to imply that Avowed’s appeal lies solely in how it triggers nostalgia in players, but it sure helps.
In contrast, The Veilguard instead decidedly tried to avoid feeling dated.BioWarehas long tried to keep the series evolving to meld with industry trends. That’s why we saw combat shift from tactical to solely action real-time, its smaller, constrained map zones shift to a massive open-world rife with fetch quests, and its pivot to live-service before that terrible idea was scrapped during development, after Anthem’s failure. Dragon Age is a series that has always chased the shiny new thing so it continues to be relevant to players’ evolving tastes.
The thing is, Avowed had a near identical path to The Veilguard.It was originally pitched as “Destiny mets Skyrim”, an open-world online multiplayer game, but was later cut down to a single-player narrative experience with open zones, which is what Obsidian is best at. The Veilguard did pretty much exactly the same thing, but with very different results. The Veilguard still tries to feel shiny and new while trying to adhere to what players new and old might want – Avowed just feelsdated.
I don’t say dated in a derogatory sense. Avowed feels like it could have been launched a decade ago, offering no huge technological ambitions or gimmicks, but it does so in a way that highlights what players loved about that style of RPG. Sure, your choices don’t have widely cascading repercussions (as far as I can tell), which is something players have wanted from RPGs more and more, but Avowed leans so much on the strength of its writing and the functionality of its roleplaying that none of that really matters to me. It’s fun in the way that classic RPGs are fun.
And perhaps that’s the magic of Avowed. It doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel, it just gives us a damn good wheel. Or to mix metaphors, The Veilguard and Avowed are two sides of the same coin, and man, that Veilguard side might be a little shinier, but I definitely the other side a lot better.
