Avowed kicks off its media campaign leading to its release with a massive billboard at New York’s Times Square. Read on to find out more about the campaign!
Avowed Billboard Up In Times Square
A Sneak Peek Into Eora
Upcoming fantasy action-RPG Avowed begins its media campaign leading up to its release with a large billboard in one of the world’s busiest pedestrian areas, New York City’s Times Square. The massive "anamorphic" billboard (as described by Xbox’s Games Marketing VP, Aaron Greenberg) captures a peek into the "living, breathing world of Eora in action," featuring its lush, flora and fauna-filled locale.
Fans interested in seeing the billboard live may do so for a while—there are no details as to the period of time the billboard will be showcased in Times Square, but it will most likely be up until the game’s eventual release in two weeks as it is part of the game’s overall marketing campaign.
Avowed is an upcoming fantasy action-RPG by Obsidian Entertainment (Fallout: New Vegas, The Outer Worlds, Pentiment) and published by Xbox Game Studios where players will set out on a journey in the world of Eora as an envoy from the Aedyr Empire, tasked to investigate the Dreamscourge terrorizing its land. It is slated for Early Access release on February 13th, followed by the highly anticipated public release on February 18th, 2025 on PC and the Xbox Series X|S.
Additionally, the game shares the same universe as one of Obsidian Entertainment’s other well-known titles, Pillars of Eternity.
Incredible Freedom, Your World, Your Way
Obsidian is known for their RPGs that abide by a certain motto—"Your worlds, your way," and Avowed is surely made with that philosophy in mind, more than ever before. The Avowed team sat down with Xbox Wire for an interview last January 24th, sharing just how the process went into creating this high fantasy RPG with a lot of player freedom.
Avowed Narrative Designer Kate Dollarhyde said, "My inclination is always to leave as much as possible for the player to discover…When a world is easily digested and handed to the player, it takes away a lot of mystery because there’s less to find." The team wants the players to engage with the content as much as possible in order to find the correct answers, but also leaving room for freedom to do what the player wants.
Obsidian strived for the perfect balance between freedom and gameplay, offering opportunities for the player to engage deeply with different aspects of the game just the way they like, all without being too into their faces nor feel like they’re being led on by the game. "What makes RPGs special, and what makes our RPGs special, is the idea that we’re building a lot of content. We know that no one player is going to have the exact same experience, and part of what makes it fun and rewarding is when you find something and think, ‘I found this on my own, and I wonder how many other people did,’" chimed in Game Director Carrie Patel.
Alas, No Romanceable Characters
However, there’s one aspect in the game that players won’t have any freedom at all to pursue—the art of romance. In an interview with Windows Central last July 2024, the team made it clear that while Avowed’s companion characters are fully fleshed-out and offer much more depth to the overall story, there will be no romance between the player character and any of them.
"We don't have romance in Avowed. I know it's something that many players love, and it's something that we very seriously talked about, and considered the investment required to do it," Patel shared, adding that adding romance would have taken away time to give the characters more depth, and subsequently it would have led to a longer overall development time for the game. There are four companion characters to meet in the game, and a romance subplot for each of them definitely requires a lot of investment.
"Given how much we were investing in our companions as characters who are really tied to the central story in a way that they haven't been in many of our previous games, we wanted to make sure that if we were going to do romance, we were going to really, really, really do it right — or not at all. For Avowed, we decided to focus on other aspects of our companions," she continued. But even without the fluttering aspect of romance, there is still a lot of content and writing between interactions, ranging from playful banter to deep, heartfelt stories that will definitely have the player engaged.
Source:
Aaron Greenberg’s X (Twitter)
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