shikamaru317 on 25 August 2024
His thoughts:
The Good
- Magic and Ranged combat are great, alot more fun than the combat in The Outer Worlds
- The art design is great and the graphics have improved alot from earlier trailers, he was particularly impressed by the lighting and the color grading
- Lots of unique weapons
- Great level design, lots of alternate routes which kind of reminded him of Arkane games like Dishonored
- Some combat encounters can be skipped by players with certain abilities
- Tons of different endings, over 50 ending slides total for different questlines, characters, etc.
- More content dense maps than The Outer Worlds, while maintaining a similar scale
- A glossary of information for those who didn't play the Pillars of Eternity games or who need a refresher course on Pillars lore
- 100 full time devs on Avowed (about 30 more than The Outer Worlds I believe), plus a large QA team not included among the 100
The Bad
- Audio was lackluster, hits don't feel very powerful due to the meh audio which is quite the opoosite of Indiana Jones which he said had very visceral audio that makes Indy's punches feel powerful (this may be remedied before launch as Obsidian told him in the interview that sound is one of the last things Obsidian fixes before a game launches)
- Melee combat doesn't feel good, like an even floatier version of Skyrim melee combat
- Some janky animations
- Possibility the game is locked to 30 fps on Series X, which he feels is unacceptable since the graphics are nowhere near on par with Hellblade 2 (which was locked to 30 fps on Series X). He believes 30 fps will only make the issues with the melee combat that he experienced at 60 fps on the demo PC even worse.
