3d ago

Reception for Avowed has been very positive with Xbox and Microsoft, game director says

www.retbit.com Reception for Avowed has been very positive with Xbox and Microsoft, game director says

It’s not the easiest task, quantifiably speaking, to gauge exactly how successful a game has been when it’s released from day one on Xbox Game Pass in addition to a regular release but all signs point towards a “so far, very good” reception for Avowed, the highly-anticipated fantasy RPG from Obsidia...

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jinkyanderson @lemmy.world

3d ago

Reception for Avowed has been very positive with Xbox and Microsoft, game director says

www.retbit.com /2025/03/12/reception-for-avowed-has-been-very-positive-with-xbox-and-microsoft-game-director-says/

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doesn't have a really firm metric
Translation: Numbers look like shait otherwise we'd brag about them.
It’s always a bit of a letdown when you see a character who has a clear personality, and goals and interests, and suddenly, in the service of this romance that the player has embarked on with them, they now become the player’s yes-person
Looks at Dragon age Origins and Morrigan... How do these people, with 0 knowledge of the actual medium they work in, get to leadership positions? Was it a tokenism thing? To see how the brilliant Avelone got pushed out years ago, and clearly incompetent people are now promoted is truly baffling .
- Don't act like Avellone was the only talented creative at Obsidian, it's one of the best AA teams out there.
  
  It's a AAA studio and it's part of the MS roster.
  Clearly Avellone did something right, other than the great pentiment (which started as a rogue project), they have yet to release anything of note since he left.
  
  Pillars II, he did minor work on Pillars I and was not the only person working on their other hits.
- The numbers are an 81 on Open Critic, 77% positive on Steam player reviews, and about 6M people played, mostly through Game Pass.
  There is a large contingent of people who don't like romance mechanics in their RPGs, often for the reasons she states in the article. Obsidian doesn't do it often in general.
  
  Resounding success, barely anyone touched it outside game pass.
  The publicly available data for those 6M comes from mimdgame, which is as reliable as divination.
  There is a large contingent of people who don't like romance mechanics in their RPGs, often for the reasons she states in the article
  Give me an example of an Obsidian RPG romance option where the character becomes a yes person? My argument is that reason is bullshit, either that or we hear it from the director that they believe Obsidian doesn't have the talent to write such characters. You know what, that actually makes sense, the talent is not there, clearly.
  They should change their motto to: Obsidian, making mobile games for simpletons
  
  They told people to play it on Game Pass, and that's where people played it. Mimdgame is about as reliable as divination (source: Viri4thus) even though it's in line with what we can measure for Indiana Jones and Call of Duty? 6M (a two week old number) is about 1/6 of Game Pass's subscriber base. Although I guess it's more like 5.5 since they probably sold a little less than half a million by now.
  Give me an example of an Obsidian RPG romance option where the character becomes a yes person?
  It's not an opinion I hold. It's an opinion that Obsidian developers have seemingly held for a long time. They'd be likely to try to avoid the things that they criticize romanceable NPCs for.
  Do you actually enjoy video games? I've only ever seen you being miserable and claiming that you don't enjoy the ones you're talking about because you're just too darn smart to enjoy them.
  
  Let's put the marketing cope for the absolute flop aside (marketing can get anyone to install a game on gamepass for "free", we've seen with HiFi Rush and Veilguard that mimdgame is complete trash at predicting anything).
  I like games, what I don't like is being advertised a deep RPG from one of the old greats, paying 70€ and refunding because I was not served an RPG but a middle of the road first person fantasy shooter with a static world and a bunch of numbers on weapons, that are even more insignificant that the RPG elements of destiny. Logically that creates antibodies towards what was supposed to be a great game and, conversely, ended up as a mindless shooter that would not be out of place among steam greenlight projects.
  Avowed is not a good game, it's a C, painfully mediocre and unimaginative. Coming from Obsidian, with 6y of development and after the ad campaign they did, together with asking for 70€ upront!? Fuck that noise, that is unacceptable. Of course, Microsoft has a great marketing team, so they created a culture war around the game, if you like it, you're woke, if you don't, you're a chud. This poisons the well and destroys the discussion about how one of the dearest RPG developers in the West is now writing characters that sound like they were written by chat GPT. There's a reason the best RPGs of the past few years come from independent European devs and the best Action games come from Japan... So, keep your dearest mediocre game and your culture wars, Obsidian lost yet another fan and because of people burying their head in the sand, they won't know about the very large amount they lost... Well, they kinda do, looking at Grounded (not a masterpiece but a mediocre game like Avowed that conversely did not promise the wprld), priced at max 39€, and already for a long time on gamepass, 30k peak, current 3,5k. Avowed, the deep RPG, 19k peak, 2,8k current. Avowed flopped hard. Keep your feelings about the game however you want, it's quite obvious for anyone with two neurons avowed flopped and is yet another symptom of the "mobile game" trajectory a lot of US American devs are taking due to the subscription model becoming ubiquitous. Strap in for the slop avalanche à lá Netflix.
  
  There it is with your two neurons again. But those neurons sure seem to be betraying you if they're telling you this culture war bullshit was Microsoft's doing or intention, or that Game Pass isn't a material factor in this game's success. For someone who claims to be so smart, that seems very dumb.
  
  Never once claimed to be smart, for someone claiming to be so smart, reading comprehension is not your forte. If minimum A -> B is a pretty easy concept to grasp.
  Regarding the purported success of Avowed I just have to sit and wait for the other shoe to drop, so, I'm good. See ya at the next layoff party.

14 comments