is game is impressive on a surface level, but anyone who has played RPGs previously will be able to detect the illusion of choice very rapidly - and i'm not just talking about dialogue. There is no decision other than right and wrong.
Imagine two spells. One spell says "heals you and damages the enemy" and the other spell says "damages the enemy." Any person who has played an RPG will assume that the spell with an additional effect likely does less damage. This is how games work. There is a power budget to skills and you make decisions based on utility or damage. Well in this game, they will both do the same damage, but the tooltips will not tell you that. Now there is an objectively incorrect choice, but the only way you will discover this is through experimentation. This means some people will make the wrong choice and not even know it, and it will create two dramatically differing experiences. Some players will struggle because their intuition and logic did not lead to the correct conclusion.
I enjoy the combat, and I think there are some interesting ideas here, but this problem of choice ensnares every mechanic in the game.
Dialogue choices do not seem to alter most outcomes. Your character says something different, but it gets the same response from NPCs no matter what is said. Even skill checks don't seem to do anything but allow you to say a line, affecting nothing in the grand scheme. Everything will result in "fight" or "don't fight." There is no choice here.
Equipment is on a complete railroad. You cannot reasonably fight enemies that are higher "level" than you, so you must upgrade your equipment to be able to challenge them. The only way to get upgrades is through quests and exploration, which forces you into a very static progression. If you encounter anything higher than your current tier, you will be in for a horrible time, or you'll logically go about doing another quest instead. For example, you'll go to a town and get quests at difficulty 1, 2, 3, 4. There's no reasonable way you are going to complete them in any order other than that. The mechanics in the game overwhelmingly reduce the amount of damage you deal to higher level enemies, which constrains you on the specific quest path to gain the upgrades to challenge higher tiers. Once again, there is no choice here.
The companions are way too split up. You will get your first two companions rather quickly, less than a couple hours. But the next companions will not join your team for potentially tens of hours past this. This leads to two problems: The first is that you enjoy the early companions and will grow attached by the time you get new ones, which means you will not swap; The second is that you will dislike these companions, but now you are stuck with them for a large portion of the game. You're never gonna believe it, there is no choice here.
I want to like Avowed, but it feels like a game masquerading as an RPG instead of actually being one.
