Avowed game director Carrie Patel says the RPG has a bunch of content that you can easily miss if you aren't careful, and although there are a ton of games with big chunks of missable content, it's nonetheless hard not to be reminded of what Larian Studios so masterfully accomplished with Baldur's Gate 3.
"One of the big delights of being a developer on a game like this is creating so much for players to find, and knowing that not everybody's going to seek it out, and not everybody's gonna find it, but knowing that the players who do are really going to enjoy the secrets they discover," said Patel in a deep-dive writeup on Xbox Wire.
Again, there's an endless list of games with skippable and missable content - take any game with side quests, for example - but the way Patel is putting an emphasis on this part of the game in particular is what made me think of Baldur's Gate 3. Remember back in September when Larian's Swen Vincke discussed the importance of "investing heavily in things that maybe 0.001% of the audience will see?"
Just to really drive it home, a new podcast that's part of Xbox's new deep-dive on Avowed reveals that the quest demonstrated in last week's gameplay showcase is "absolutely missable."
"Discoverability and letting players be the author of their own experience is obviously very important to us," Patel said. "So the content you're seeing here, the quest you're encountering, the little stories and nuggets of adventures you're finding, that's really for players who go out and seek it out."
More than just having optional quests and areas of the map, Avowed also places a big focus on player choice and a branching narrative that should, in theory, make numerous playthroughs feel unique from each other.
