I confess
Obsidian
Xbox ran through five different features of the game during Thursday’s Developer Direct, with the most positive discussions surrounding Hellblade 2 and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, apparently. But the upcoming RPG from Fallout New Vegas/The Outer Worlds developer Obsidian is sure to attract very polarized reviews.
I’ve seen a number of people, especially many Xbox fans, say that Avowed looked surprising And they were really impressed with the show. But I find myself doing Ryan Gosling Award Shows Face Memeand I’m not entirely sure what everyone saw here.
There was something…different about this entire presentation and how the gameplay looked. In my first reaction, I said it looked like a VR game, which are usually first-person games that feel very dated, limited by the technology, but are supposed to make up for that with the newness of VR itself. The recognized is… not this. It’s a regular PC/console game, and as such, the effect is quite jarring.
While the stylized color palate looks neat, the combat itself in the demo looked overly harsh. In addition to the VR effect, it seemed as if something was wrong with the field of view, which was too narrow and restricted the effective combat area.
He. She He is It’s very difficult to make spellcasting and first-person melee combat work effectively. We don’t see that everyone This is often, or if we do, it’s in line with more traditional fireworks. But here, this combat somehow feels more unnatural than in 13-year-old Skyrim. Not that I was expecting a game of this scope and depth, but something about it just didn’t sit right with me on a visceral level.
Obsidian’s best strength, RPG storytelling, also looked a little strange in this demo. Its animations are once again pretty rough, even more so than Bethesda’s Starfield, which was criticized for its somewhat awkward animations when many games moved to full performance capture. Here, it’s mostly just a mouth and eyebrows that move like a puppet. The dialogue itself and its delivery also don’t seem to match the characters saying it.
Some have taken these complaints to mean that I hate low-budget games and that I’m wrong for an industry that demands perfection with an excessive AAA budget. But I can name a million AA or indie games that are fun or look good in different ways. And again, while no one should have expected Elder Scrolls 5.5 from this, it felt clunky, harsh, and outdated in a way that wasn’t particularly attractive or hype-inducing. For me at least.
This is not a judgment on the final product. Combat can be a lot of fun when you get your hands on it. The story is much bigger than the two minutes of dialogue we saw. But I’d argue that this was the kind of strange presentation that didn’t leave much of an impression for one of Xbox’s most anticipated games. We’ll see how it turns out this year, supposedly.
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