February 28, 2025

Love it or Hate it?

The most recent game by Obsidian Entertainment, by all accounts sold well, and also has an 80+ on OpenCritic. In the gaming landscape of 2025, this is a major success. What’s interesting to me is how divided players are on their overall take on the game, considering these successes.

You will often see a discrepancy between ‘User Reviews’ and ‘Critic Reviews’ (sometimes for more legitimate reasons than others), but not as often do you see a division within the User Reviews themselves (and comments on Reddit, and other websites).

More than other big games in recent memory; some love it, some hate it.

What is an RPG to you?

The reason for this is the importance a Player puts on ‘Systems’ vs ‘Immersion’

One of these ideas always has the driver’s seat in a game; it’s what drives development of features and the hundreds of small decisions that are made throughout this process.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t ‘Immersive’ elements in a Game System, or even that these 2 elements can live without each other; they can’t, at least not completely – the best games marry at least a little element of both to weave a spell for the Player.

Generally though, just like how a game is developed, Players will focus more on one than the other – they just care more about a certain part of an experience to hold their attention and ‘lose themself’ in the title.

Priorities of ‘Systems focused’ Players

  • Values understanding the ‘extents’ of a system
  • Values learning and ‘grokking’ these systems; wants to feel in control

Systems Focused Players can get lost in the possibilities of Immersive focused games

Priorities of ‘Immersion focused’ Players

  • Values seemingly ‘unlimited’ systems
  • Values feeling like their control is limited; the game world should feel ‘real’ – I should be an actor in, not have everything revolve around me
  • Want to believe in the possibility of things beyond what they see – they need the world to say ‘yes’ when they experiment

Immersion focused Players can be left unsatisfied with Systems Focused games as they don’t let them ‘imagine’ possibilities and act out their fantasies

This is definitely not black and white, and there is a sea of nuance here, but which focus is favored in Avowed?

Avowed – A Systems Focus

Avowed is more ‘Systems focused’ and doesn’t offer some of the hallmarks of ‘immersive’ styled RPG’s. It is obvious from the many decisions they made, and is somewhat antithetical to what fans expected.

Examples:

  • Limited navigation of conversations to produce an unexpected result (Baldur’s Gate 3 feels miles different in this regard)
  • Stealing right in front of people (some say things, others don’t react)
  • Unleashing hot fury next to townsfolk to destroy a crate produces no visible results
  • Vendors have unlimited Currency to buy your wares
  • No pickpocketing

In conclusion

There are other examples to point out, but it’s clear the Developers at Obsidian took a slightly different approach than some fans were expecting – I’m personally loving this title and it’s currently my favorite game of 2025 – it doesn’t matter as much to me that I can’t pickpocket; I’m having too much fun mastering the combat system to care.