Avowed was always great, but now that it costs what it should have at launch and nobody's being weird about it online, it's kinda perfect

Pepperidge Farm remembers: It usually takes about five years for everyone to decide an Obsidian Entertainment game was actually really good. In a pleasantly surprising turn of events, it seems to have only required exactly 12 months for Avowed, last year's action-RPG spinoff to Pillars of Eternity, to get such a reappraisal.

It's still the same, great game: I loaded into Avowed to check out its big anniversary update, and found the changes closer to Cyberpunk 2077 1.5 than Cyberpunk 2077 2.0: A lot of little niceties, extras, and quality of life changes, but nothing transformative. That's okay in my book⁠—Avowed didn't need to be transformed⁠—but this game has had a bizarre, uneven reception.

A Bloomberg interview with director Carrie Patel shortly after launch implied that it was hitting sales targets, while a more recent Bloomberg piece on Obsidian characterized it as a slight underperformer. Avowed reviewed well: PCG Australian editor Shaun Prescott gave it an 82%, and Metacritic has it at a flat 80. But Avowed was the victim of one of those weird, ambient hate cycles we see now⁠—more halfhearted than with Star Wars: Outlaws or Assassin's Creed Shadows, but there.

A quick YouTube search pulls up hour-long, well-watched videos from close to launch with titles like "Avowed - Obsidian's Broken Promise" or "The Deserved Disaster of Avowed." Things were rough on X, "The Everything App," in the lead up to and immediate aftermath of release.

I have a crystalized memory looking at the comments on Avowed's character creator reveal (never look at the comments) and seeing users freaking out that it had a "body type" selection instead of "gender," then saying some pretty nasty stuff about trans people.

As far as I can tell, there were three main types of aggrieved commenter: The aforementioned gender warriors, people who didn't understand you needed to upgrade your weapons, and people who wanted it to be Obsidian's Skyrim instead of a more Mass Effect or Witcher 2-adjacent RPG, just in first person.

But that seems to have all died down, and the people who got the most mad about it have probably moved on to Highguard or something. I've even seen a few "I hated this game in 2025, it's fine now" vids and comments, even though nothing substantive has changed.

You're just allowed to like Avowed now, similar to how the narrative around Cyberpunk 2077 changed in 2022 with its first major content updates and the Edgerunners anime, even though it was fundamentally the same game as at launch.

If you haven't tried Avowed, the real game changer is that it's 50 bucks now, not $70. $50 should be the normal price for a new, big game⁠—I'm drawing on the gut here, not the fake science of economics; see also how a graphics card should cost $300. My conspiracy brain would like to blame Game Pass for why Avowed had to launch at $70 and The Outer Worlds 2 was almost sent out to die with an $80 price tag.

I'm committed to a full replay at this point, I think, and it really is the perfect time to buy Avowed if it passed you by last February: It costs what it should, and nobody's posting about it being part of a war on the family or white race anymore.