Avowed Review (Registered Flex Offender)
TLDR: Avowed does everything Skyrim with mods does but with less of a story to grip it's players, less player agency, less refined voice acting and animation and a too safe approach to the genre.
PERFORMANCE:
Let's start with the biggest issue that isn't dependant on how long one plays the game. The game suffers from infrequent FPS drops that are irritating and the load times are unacceptably long despite having a 4090, i9 14000K and 32GB of RAM, I found it to be wholly unacceptable for the elevated price. Aside from the infrequent issues it runs well enough during regular gameplay.
STORY, ART DIRECTION, WRITING AND VOICE ACTING:
While yes the time played from me isn't all that long and thus isn't the most all-encompassing the story and art direction is disappointing. I had hoped it would be much more gripping but there isn't much about the story that can retain my interest. It could be a fault of mine having not interacted with the Pillars of Eternity universe before, however the understanding that there would be players like this shows the necessity for creating a cohesive story for a newcomer. The writing comes across extremely heavy handed and provides far far too much exposition for even a run of the mill player to maintain interest. The dialogue could have been better fleshed out as some of it is just problematic. The voice acting seems to miss the mark in a lot of regards, there are a fair few times the voice of the character doesn't even closely match what the character looks like or from their appearance what I had anticipated from them in that moment (such as a younger voice on an older looking person or a piece of dialogue that reads like a character is incensed but it comes out less angry and more nonchalant). Dialogues have obviously been recorded individually which isn't inherently bad on its own but it gives a feel of the characters talking to themselves more so than the other characters in the scene. The player character's dialogue could have really benefited from refinement, some of the options given are very cringey at worst and at best they come off as weird power trip fantasies.
ANIMATION:
Animation seems as though some faces have been over animated which is disorienting and then other times faces barely move at all for the situation. Some NPC's look odd, understand totally that it's a fantasy RPG however the human looking NPC's should somewhat resemble an actual human.
GAMEPLAY/PLAYER CHOICE:
Some choices are okay and some are very weak, moral dilemmas work sure but they need weight put behind them for me to care about. The cities suffer from feeling like window dressing because the player can't enter other buildings other than the ones they may need at some point or another and a lot of items within the world have no reaction to anything the player does. For me personally a lot of player agency has been stripped from them with this game because there is no option to pickpocket, attack nor steal from any character such as guards etc. I've noticed that the only items that actually have weight are weapons and armour which is kind of whatever but the entire thing is made pointless because you can move items to the stash with the press of a single button. I think a lot of people are becoming very tired of the stock standard industry formula of having completely incompetent NPC's who can do nothing and others who automatically give you the solution to a puzzle almost as soon as you've picked the item up. Players would be grateful if they had more agency and had less of a hand hold on them. Worse yet is when getting in the fight to help Marius it starts a fight, okay sure but after it's all over, no one says anything, no guards to arrest you nor fine you not even a single reprimand.
COMBAT:
The combat is almost the exact same as Skyrim with a bunch of mods installed which is extremely disappointing. I had hoped that the dev team would have looked at what had already been achieved within the space and decided to innovate a bit or even just move in any direction that isn't stock standard. The combat doesn't offer any real depth as you further and further which is annoying, to know that the combat of the first hour won't change in the slightest if anyone was to go any further. However the idea of having spells interact with the environment is quite good but this is another thing older games have already done and doesn't challenge the status quo of the industry.
All in All so far from my experience the game is another carbon copy of similar RPG titles that don't do anything to innovate, transform or revolutionise the space. Given all of the reasons listed above I can't recommend the game for the elevated price and would advise to wait for a sale.