Avowed did a lot of things right, but it wasn't perfect, and the game's post-launch has tweaked, improved, and added plenty of features. Obsidian Entertainment has clearly been paying attention to what people want from the game, and the newest change, which addresses a particularly fervent community request, might be one of the most essential. i5l71

Only a few months after Avowed was released, game director Carrie Patel has left Obsidian Entertainment, taking a position in Netflix's game-development division. Avowed reviewed well and has been one of Xbox's major first-party games this year. Patel's departure doesn't necessarily signal any issue with Avowed or its reception, nor any problems at Obsidian; such moves are fairly common after major projects are completed.

Avowed's new patch, updating it to version 1.4, includes a much-needed arachnophobia mode, potentially making the game more accessible to more than a billion new people. Obsidian Entertainment's latest RPG launched earlier this year, earning positive reviews, but that doesn't mean the developer has moved on from the game entirely.

We're not even halfway through the year and 2025 has already graced us with two fantasy action RPGs in the form of Avowed and Oblivion Remastered. Naturally, having played a lot of Avowed when it came out, I couldn't help but think about it while making my way through Oblivion Remastered. I really enjoyed Avowed and wondered if I'd be able to get back into TheElder Scrolls when I felt the former did a lot of things better than Skyrim, the only TES game I'd played.

As a fan of the original game, I was already looking forward to The Outer Worlds 2. However, recent updates about the game has made me excited, not just for the game itself, but for the potential future of another Obsidian RPG: Avowed. More specifically, the gameplay changes coming in The Outer Worlds 2 that expand character options have me excited that an Avowed 2 could follow suit.

I loved a lot about Avowed, but there was one major gameplay feature that I felt it was lacking. Luckily, it looks like Obsidian's other Action RPG this year, The Outer Worlds 2, will be solving that problem for me. As a huge fan of Obsidian's games, I'm absolutely thrilled to be getting two of them in the same year, and previews of The Outer Worlds 2 have me excited to return to its dystopian, but also often silly, corporatist future.

The bounties in Avowed are a big part of the game and one of the best ways to get better gear. Not all of them will reward you with better gear alone, but all of them will give you a significant amount of coins for the area you are in, allowing you to buy better versions of your favored weapon or armor. This can significantly reduce the difficulty of the enemies you face, as the number of skulls next to their names will slowly decrease.

After recently playing Avowed, I started thinking about how many great video games were also spin-offs of existing series. There are some cases where spin-off titles have become so much more popular than the games they originated from that I didn't even realize there weren't the first in the series. I quickly realized a lot of my favorite games originated from another IP in one way or another.

I recently earned a rare achievement in Avowed, and while I'm not exactly proud of how it was still a fun reminder of just how much the game understands its audience. In a massive action RPG like Avowed, with many branching choices, developers have the difficult task of deciding what sorts of decisions players want to make. Though this is hard to get right, Avowed manages to predict players' moves to an impressive degree, down to roasting me for a poor choice with a perfectly timed achievement.

I generally ignore Xbox Achievements altogether, but when I recently beat Avowed,the sheer silliness of how these digital milestones represent tasks in video games really hit home. When a major game like Avowed is released on Game , millions of players might try the game out, but relatively few will stick it out to the end. This can create several misleading impressions where Achievements are concerned. It might appear that completing a game is far harder than the percentages indicate, or that hardly any players are taking highly intuitive actions in the game. Achievements badly skew many players’ perceptions.