Current Obsidian design director and RPG veteran since the early aughts Josh Sawyer has been making games in some capacity for more than 25 years, but he's still working on creating an armor system he likes as much as the one in the 1992 RPG Darklands.
Sawyer is a known Darklands obsessive, having cited it as one of the main inspirations for his 2022 historical RPG Pentiment, and he's also talked about it in numerous videos on his YouTube channel, so it's no surprise that he holds poor old Avowed up to its immeasurably high standards. Specifically, when it comes to armor systems, he feels Avowed's "is not really what I had in mind."
The latest video on Sawyer's newly reinvigorated channel is aptly titled Armor Chat, and it's a good watch if you're interested in the inner workings of an RPG legend and, crucially, how he thinks armor systems should work in video games, but I'm more intrigued by how candidly Sawyer criticizes his own studio's most recent RPG. Sawyer says "no," Avowed isn't a good encapsulation of his plans for a new "tier system," which he detailed in a years-old video.
"I would say the Avowed armor system is not really what I had in mind by tiered armor when I made that video," Sawyer says. "It was designed as a progression gate, and to a certain extent, it kind of worked, except that nobody liked it," he says, laughing.
Of course, Sawyer worked in an advisory capacity on Avowed and only did "a little bit of writing" on the game, with director duties having been handed to Pillars of Eternity and The Outer Worlds narrative designer Carrie Patel, who left Obsidian in 2025. Still, Sawyer obviously had very direct insights into Avowed's development, and he says the armor system was originally designed "to kind of force the player to upgrade armor and weapons throughout the game," adding that "there were a number of issues with it, many of which were patched out not long after the game came out."
Specifically, one of the main pain points, in Sawyer's view, was that the secondary damage threshold applied to defensive gear would apply a flat damage reduction after the initial percentage-based damage reduction. Sawyer says the issue there was that the additional damage reduction threshold "didn't scale with damage," and it would "be pretty hard for it to scale with damage" because "damage values increased like 20 times their base value." Compare that to other RPGs, where "damage progression is much more modest," and you can see the conundrum.
Instead of all of that, Sawyer says the armor system he had in mind for Avowed was, drum beat, "something more like the old Darklands system," which was "pretty simulative and more historical," with weapons that would "match scale, match leather, match chain, match plate," and if there was an armor type that a weapon couldn't penetrate, it did "quite minimal damage." Sawyer likes that type of system because you can easily visually identify what armor type an enemy is using and determine which weapon type you need to have equipped to deal with them.
At the end of the day, Sawyer admits this isn't "super important talk" even though he's "always thinking about armor." Obviously, he's responsible for some of the most beloved modern RPGs, and it's not as if his games' armor systems are notoriously controversial, but Sawyer's his own worst critic in that department: "Armor presents interesting challenges in game design, and my own systems haven't done a great job of addressing issues that I see with existing systems, but I'm gonna keep on trying."
