Avowed devs were always going to fix the RPG's combat, but mixed feedback made it clear that polishing it up had become "a big deal"

Obsidian Entertainment developers working on Avowed weren't surprised to hear criticism thrown at the game's combat since they, too, knew the sword-slashing and wand-waving needed polish. Fan feedback just sped up the process.

To rewind the clocks for anyone not in the know, Avowed snatches the baton from the studio's Pillars of Eternity RPGs, taking us to a different, funkier corner of the world of Eora, but the upcoming game is ditching its predecessors' isometric gameplay in favor of a first-person perspective and a heavier focus on immediate action. 

After debuting a brief glimpse at the combat in January's Xbox Developer Direct, the community reaction was slightly muted toward Avowed's Skyrim-like combat. Obsidian had said the game's many options, from the evergreen stealth archer to "gun-slinging mages," would make fighting flexible, but many online commenters claimed it looked stiff.

"Sometimes you can lose sight on the importance of the prioritization of some things," senior gameplay engineer Gabe Paramo said in an interview with Windows Central, while talking about how the team had planned to revisit combat later in development. "We thought [Avowed] was good enough to show as is... A lot of that stuff we knew we were going to get to before shipping." The mixed reaction made the studio revisit combat sooner than expected, though: "We just went, 'Okay, let's look at this, this is a big deal, people are noticing this, we should polish this sooner.'"

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"We really analyzed the feeling and moment when the player swings their weapon and the moment of impact," Paramo explained. "Were there any delays, was there any system that might have been preventing it from being immediate?"

Those improvements were all on show in Avowed's most recent trailer at Xbox's Summer Games Showcase, which unfortunately didn't feature a release date, though  a recent leak seemed to suggest it was still due this fall for PC, Xbox Series X|S, and Game Pass.

Obsidian made Fallout New Vegas in 18 months, but Avowed took the studio a full five years: “It’s been a long development cycle.”