Avowed is easily one of the most exciting releases of this year, thanks to developer Obsidian's experience with crafting complex RPGs like Fallout: New Vegas and The Outer Worlds, which respect player agency and allow for creative problem-solving. This is also the first time players will get to explore Eora from Pillars of Eternity and Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire in first-person and scour its locations from head to toe with Avowed’s exciting movement mechanics.

While the Pillars of Eternity games introduced players to the world of Eora, Avowed will be the first time they get to explore the Living Lands, a wild and eccentric frontier only hinted at in the Pillars games. Building a world like the Living Lands is no easy feat, especially in a game like Avowed which will let players explore its maps in depth.

Aside from the physical environment, creating the world of Avowed also meant shaping the game’s narrative elements to create a rich world full of role-playing potential. ScreenRant interviewed Game Director Carrie Patel and Region Director Berto Ritger to discuss the world-building process for a game like Avowed, how it fits into the wider fantasy genre, and how its narrative elements translate to gameplay.

Building A World Like Avowed

How Avowed Took The Living Lands From Flavor Text To Reality

ScreenRant: I wanted to start out by asking about the world-building for an RPG as opposed to writing a prose fantasy story. Your story is being delivered through a gameplay experience as opposed to a curated narrative, so how do you approach delivering that information?

Carrie Patel: We always have to understand what is the ‘gold-tier’ information that players have to know, what is the ‘silver-tier’ that is useful and informative but not required to get through, and then what’s the ‘bronze-tier’ where it’s like ‘this is fluff, this is flavor, this is additional world-building for people who really want to get into the details.’

So whenever we’re writing a quest - which Berto [Ritger] can speak very well to - when we’re developing a quest, writing character dialogue, putting together a major scene, or even just understanding a player’s trajectory through a particular region or the game as a whole, we map out what is that information the player must know, and that’s the stuff we’re going to make sure they’re finding through some quest or through dialogue.

I worked as a narrative designer before becoming Game Director for [Avowed] and that was something we were constantly mindful of in both writing and structuring those dialogues: where are we letting the player digress a bit and when are we bringing them back to the things they absolutely need to know.

In general, I think it’s best to take a minimalist approach to that ‘gold-tier’ information, for players - whether they are on their third playthrough and they’ve seen this before, or they’re there more for the exploration and combat than thoughtfully digesting each and every dialogue - you want to make sure you’re giving them enough grounding to understand the situations they’re in and decide how they want to navigate it. By and large, the additional context and information always feel best when you let a player opt into it, and when it’s something that they have found through their choices, their engagement, and their sense of curiosity.

Berto Ritger: The thing that comes to mind is in prose, there is a lot of descriptive text that isn’t really necessary at all in an RPG, particularly a 3D medium where we can off-load that to the art of the environment, and that will communicate what would otherwise be described like ‘the shimmering water reflects the majesty of the city,’ [in Avowed] it’s like ‘oh I just see the river, it’s right there and it looks great because of ray tracing.’

So you will see things like a shanty town which is a good piece of visual storytelling that communicates that there are a lot of people who have been displaced by the Aedyrans that have come in. And that’s both told to you by people saying things very strategically as you walk around, notes that you’ll find, but also just the visual juxtaposition of these really ramshackle wooden structures added on to this big city.

That’s an aspect that we’re always trying to think about how it feels, both as a gameplay experience, how the environment is shaped as a place you can have fun engaging with, but also a place that communicates the implicit narrative of the region of the quest it’s pulling you through.

ScreenRant: Carrie, you mentioned your past as a narrative director - you worked on Pillars of Eternity - and you mentioned ‘bronze-tier’ lore and the Living Lands kind of started as that in Pillars of Eternity in item descriptions and in-game books. How much of an idea was there for the Living Lands going into this, and how much was this you all deg a place from the ground up?

Carrie Patel: We had a pretty good flavor for what this setting should feel like, and it was the details and also the whys behind that flavor that hadn’t really been filled out yet. We had enough to serve as a guiding star - one of your backgrounds in [Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire] could also be from the Living Lands - so there was just enough to understand, ‘okay it’s this wild, sort of out-there place.’

It’s a bit distant and disconnected. Everything there is a little bit strange, people are a bit more extreme and a bit more eccentric. In of the landscape, the wildlife, and what you’ll encounter, it’s bigger, it’s bolder, it’s more colorful, and it’s more dangerous. And that all sounds extremely exciting to design around.

What we hadn’t really gotten to is that nobody had drawn a map of the Living Lands, and we hadn’t ever delved into the story of what makes the Living Lands special, what makes it unique, and also what role is it going to play in the evolving world and geopolitical context of Eora. Getting to mine the backstory and figure out why the Living Lands is the way it is, and what the player gets to discover and influence, and the role of who gets to maintain power in the Living Lands going forward and how it’s going to be situated in Eora, that was a lot of fun. And that was stuff we got to develop for Avowed.

Berto Ritger: The only thing I would add is, while working on individual regions in the Living Lands we didn’t have so blank of a canvas where you’re sitting there having choice paralysis. We had enough of an overarching theme of ‘the land is hostile, these are eccentric people coming to a frontier’ which was our guiding light for the whole game, but there was a lot of variability across different regions that give them their own identity too.

ScreenRant: You’ve both touched on the idea of who maintains power in the Living Lands, and Berto you touched on people being displaced by those coming into this area. How do you approach crafting a complex narrative that touches on some real-world themes (colonialism comes to mind)? What do you draw on when creating this kind of world?

Carrie Patel: We normally try to cast a pretty wide net, but we’re not trying to create an analog for any specific context or situation. At the end of the day, what we’re doing is we’re creating something that is informed by the context of Eora, what we know about the existing powers and players and dynamics.

One of the things that makes the Pillars IP very compelling to develop in - and certainly to write stories in - is that it’s not a world of highfalutin ideals and pure good or pure evil characters. It’s full of complex, messy people: some of your favorite characters will do things you don’t approve of, and sometimes your antagonists have a point. Nations and powers and empires are driven by self-interest more than abstract representations of values and ideals.

It’s about keeping all that in mind, which is very easy to do, because that’s very much the world we all live in, and about being thoughtful and respectful about the stories that we tell and the characters we portray, and the roles we give everybody. But also not shy away from putting the player into complex situations and asking hard questions.

I think that’s something that players have loved about our games for years is that we trust and respect them enough to give them the nuance and the full complexity of the stories we’re creating and let them find their way through it. Sometimes there aren’t easy answers and I think that’s also something that’s very relatable. You’re going to meet imperial powers and agents who feel very villainous, but then you’re going meet some who are regular people just trying to get paid.

ScreenRant: Going off the idea of giving players agency in the world, how do you see the role of the player when you’re developing the story?

Carrie Patel: The player character is always their own individual character. How players choose to pursue their roleplay is always a very personal and very differentiated question. Some people play RPGs like this to play an idealized version of themselves. They want to see themselves in that character, and they want to be heroic and enjoy that power fantasy. Sometimes, players enjoy a game like ours and they have a specific headcanon or flavor that they’re trying to pursue. Say they want to play a master of the arcane and the mystical and who is hungry for knowledge and that is their motivating force as they play the game. And for some players, it’s just ‘I want to see what buttons I can push, what levers I can pull, and what kind of wacky choices I can make.’

With that in mind, we know that those are all our players and part of our job is to make sure that the options we’re giving them are both varied and also consistent enough that however they’re choosing to roleplay their character - whether they are trying to play a bit of a villain, whether they want to be a heroic archetype, whether they just want to have fun and see what the game lets them do, or whether they have a particular headcanon in mind - that we’re offering them role-playing hooks consistently throughout the game so that they can play and feel like they’re really inhabiting that role.

Berto Ritger: I think RPGs are always finite in a sense. They try to be as infinite and broad as possible, but always - especially in a game like ours - everything is made by hand, so at a certain point you can’t do everything under the sun. It’s a fantasy game, and there’s magic, and there’s rules to the world of Eora, and we have to adhere to those things. So we try to play within those bounds and give you as many opportunities to be the character you want to be.

All that leads to a sense that the whole story is playing out in a logical way that makes sense for the character that you are, and we try to pursue as much opportunity within those constraints as possible. Obviously you can’t do everything, but everywhere we try to look for fun opportunities for roleplay or silly decisions that actually fit the character, or really dark stuff if you want to lean into just being terrible in a certain situation because it fits that moment. That happens through iteration and through collaboration, like the designers are constantly playing through it and talking about it and saying ‘okay this moment doesn’t have as many opportunities for roleplay as we’d like so let’s add some more here.’

ScreenRant: How do you know when it’s time to cap something like that? If you’re play-testing something and adding to it, how do you know when it gets too big?

Berto Ritger: That’s a great question, and it’s kind of always different because sometimes it’s the schedule that tells you ‘no, we can’t do this anymore’ or it’s the quality. It’s like ‘We’re not happy with this, we need to take some time away from this other thing to do this’ or if you’re really early on extend the project. Usually, it’s a tension between ‘Can we do this with the time we have and the people we have?’ and ‘Is this meeting the quality bar we want?’ and those things are always in conversation.

Some Fantasy And Fictional Inspirations For Avowed

How Avowed Compares To Other Fantasy Stories, And Its Inspirations

ScreenRant: You mentioned that you approach your story from a human angle and look at characters on an individual basis. Where do you think Avowed fits into the fantasy genre as a whole? Does it stray away from something like Lord of the Rings which is more about big ideals to focus more on an intimate human story?

Carrie Patel: It’s a good question, and it’s a tricky thing to pin down because one thing that has always defined the things set in the Pillars universe is that there’s these two main threads. There’s this world of the gods and souls and reincarnation, and that is all about mystery and discovery and those are these huge world/continuity forces. And, at the same time, you have these very grounded political stories where nations and individuals and powerful people (and people who want more power) act in all the ways we’d expect. And the player character tends to have a foot in both worlds.

So, there’s something that blends both the awe and the wonder and the sense of mystery that many of us come to the fantasy genre for, with a sense of very grounded conflict in a reality that makes these choices feel compelling and sometimes challenging or interesting that resonates with all of us living in the world that we do.

ScreenRant: Carrie, I know you worked on The Outer Worlds, and Berto you mention on your website that you’re a sci-fi fan. Was there any cross-pollination between genres when creating the colorful and otherworldly aspects of Avowed?

Carrie Patel: A lot of the aesthetics with the Living Lands started with the lore and what we already knew about it, which is it's supposed to be your land before time or journey to the beyond where you’re going to see strange colorful and big things. So, with that in mind, we wanted to really lean into the color and the spectacle, and also lean into the variety that players are going to encounter over the course of the game.

We did talk about Annihilation as a reference point, particularly for some of the Dream Scourge elements. The natural world has plenty of examples of things that are beautiful and colorful because they’re dangerous and venomous, and there’s something very cool about the way Annihilation - the movie - visually represents this force that is mysterious and transformative and disturbing, but also really beautiful in a way. And that’s something we really wanted to portray with some of the mysterious forces in Avowed. Personally, I’ve also really loved the world of Morrowind. It is so colorful and weird and varied. But there are certainly lots of wonderful fantasy worlds to draw influence and inspiration from.

Berto Ritger: I didn’t originate a lot of the ideas in Eora, but one of the things I really love - which you’ll see in the second region Emerald Stair - isn't ‘sci-fi’ necessarily, but it is a fictional science, which is Animancy. It’s a study of souls, and you’ll see that reflected in the architecture and the tools and stuff that are used in that environment. They’re trying to use soul energy to farm and the land doesn’t quite like that, but you’ll see in that region a lot of glowing purple objects that are tied with wires to each other with sparks going down the wires. It’s not something you’ll typically see, that type of mechanical stuff in fantasy, but it fits really well and it works with the metaphysics of the world in a very interesting way, and I’m really excited about that aspect.

How Narrative Elements Influence The Avowed Gameplay Experience

Avowed Allows Players To Role-Play How They Want

ScreenRant: Carrie, you mentioned in a previous interview with us that the politics in The Living Lands are as dangerous as the creatures. How do you balance making the role-playing elements feel important without feeling like you’re punishing players who don’t dive as deeply into that aspect of it?

Carrie Patel: We try to offer players a lot of levers to opt more into the experiences they really want, and out of the ones that they’re less interested in. Not 190%, obviously, but if you are less interested in really getting into the combat, you can set your difficulty to Storytime mode. If you are less interested in thoroughly trying to get to know the characters and the nuances of the situation that you’re in, you can generally choose shorter paths through dialogue and fewer options that really have you delving into those nuances. In some cases, you can even just pick options that are basically just ‘Point me in the direction of the thing you need me to kill’ or ‘Not my problem, let’s move on.’ And that can be part of your roleplay, that I’m just the more taciturn character who is just here to get something done.

As Berto mentioned earlier, there is also a lot of the visual design and just the layout of the world and the nature of the content that players are going to come across that reinforces the story we’re telling them and the situation we’re putting them in. Not because we need them to do a whole lot of reading for this but because this is the game, and if the story we’re telling you is, ‘You’re the envoy, you’re here to represent Aedyr, and you’re here to choose what the means for you,’ that’s going to factor into quests you encounter and how you decide to complete them, and it’s going to factor into some very interesting smaller interactions that you have.

Many of those can also be testbeds for players to sort of try out their role, see how they want to do things, and say ‘Oh, these are the kind of things I have to decide, these are the things people are looking to me for. Maybe I don’t want to be this kind of person, I want to be that kind of person.’ In an RPG that’s really built around choice and around players defining their character through their choices, I think it is important to offer those little interspersed moments alongside the big ones so that you’re not just making big set-piece choices. You’re constantly, as you move through the game, defining yourself through your actions and through your choices and getting a taste for - as all of us do in the real world - what it takes to be a particular type of person.

Berto Ritger: From the perspective of region design and quest design, we have side-quests that are going to be a lot more narrative-heavy just for the people that really want to dive into that. We also have bounties that we offer in each region that are more narrative-lite. They’re not devoid of narrative, but those are a lot more combat-heavy, they’re harder, and you’ll get more unique gear and money for them. So, they’re opt-in content as Carrie mentioned. If you want your playthrough to be a lot more combat heavy you can opt for that content more frequently than other content.

But, as developers, we love all of it. We love combat, we love conversations, we love the world, so we try to balance all those things in all the content. If you’re going through a side-quest it’s not just ‘I talk to this person, then I go over here and I walk and talk to this person, and then I walk and talk to this person it’s done’ because that - even if you like conversations - gets kind of tiresome at a certain point. So we try to balance those things, so you’re not doing the same thing over and over. You’re going to talk to somebody, you’re going to run around and explore and climb a bunch of stuff, you’re going to get lost for a second, do some combat, and then have a conversation after that. It’s that kind of cycle where you get to see a little bit of everything and as you do, hopefully, you build more of an appreciation for each aspect.

ScreenRant: We’re running up on time, so if there’s anything you felt like you wanted to touch on that we didn’t, I will leave it open to you for any last comments.

Carrie Patel: I’m really excited for players just to get into the exploration aspect of Avowed. One thing that has been incredibly exciting and rewarding at this stage of the project is seeing so many people on our team, who have worked on this game for years, focusing on their own playthroughs, getting through the game, and in regions that they themselves have worked on saying ‘I’m finding things I didn’t even know were here. This feels new and fresh to me, and I’m having so much fun finding these little things I want to check out, exploring them, and then feeling rewarded for that.’ I think that is one of the most subtle, difficult, but valuable loops that an RPG can give players, and I’m excited for them to experience that on their own in Avowed.

Berto Ritger: A big plus one to that. I have really been enjoying my playthrough just wandering around and finding cool stuff people have laid in. And it’s all so bespoke, handcrafted, different, and varied. You’ll find funny things, heartwarming things, dark things, and interesting things all over the map. The game is very dense, in a good way. I hope people agree with that, but I really love that aspect of it and I’m excited for people to get their hands on it and just wander around and have fun.