Обзоры игр

Sure, it's true that you can't do certain things that you can in many other games: no stealing, no pickpocketing, but there's a certain irony in complaining about Skyrim rereleasing twenty times and then getting upset that a different game doesn't offer the exact same experience with a shinier coat of paint. At some point, you have to judge a game on its own terms.

So let's talk about what Avowed does well. The world is absolutely gorgeous. I often found myself wondering if they deliberately leaned so hard into the mushroom heavy aesthetic as a nod to the glory days of Morrowind. The combat, by comparison, is much more engaging and fun than Skyrim, it's quicker, more reactive, and genuinely satisfying. The story constantly challenges you with difficult, meaningful choices, and the world pushes back no matter which path you take, highlighting the wide grey areas between black and white. Your companions are nuanced and flawed, whether you love them or hate them, and they feel like real people with real baggage.

There's also some excellent quality of life features that many games in this genre don't have: instantly depositing gear to camp, transmogging your outfit, respecing your entire build right from the main menus, and even the ability to change not just your appearance but your race at camp.

And performance wise? My game crashed exactly once for now. Maybe it was different at launch, and I'll never begrudge someone for criticising a game based on technical issues, but for me, a single crash in that many hours might as well be a miracle.

Now, I do have one major complaint, which is the fog of war on the map.

I don't know who thought it was a good idea to automatically clear the entire fog of war once you've uncovered about 75% of it, but this is genuinely one of the worst design decisions I've ever seen in an open world RPG. I understand why it was implemented, but now we have a totally different problem: once you hit that threshold, you no longer know where you haven't explored. I ended up missing unique gear, fast travel nodes, and entire areas because the map just gave up on showing me what I'd missed. It's genuinely bewildering how bad a call that was.

In conclusion, Avowed is an incredible addition to the first person open world RPG catalogue, and the only thing I'm more upset about than the map system is that I didn't play it sooner.