At one point, Avowed would have taught us to use magic with an explosive Elder Scrolls reference: ‘How about we just have a guy on the road that blows himself up’

When I spoke to Obsidian region director Berto Ritger about Avowed earlier this month, the conversation mostly focused on the game’s excellent level design and exploration. But he also touched on how drastically Avowed’s early game changed in development. While that was probably for the best, a great Elder Scrolls gag in Avowed was originally even better.

“Initially, we didn’t have the prologue and you started on the docks in Dawnshore,” said Ritger. “It was a bit linear, and we wanted to open it up more. But it also wasn’t really introducing the world and combat quick enough. And all the mechanics being tutorialized weren’t really happening in the rapid, predictable fashion that you want in the early game.”

That led to the creation of Avowed’s prologue island, which Ritger had a large hand in designing. In the initial version of Avowed’s start, crucial bits of the tutorial were scattered around the western portion of Dawnshore, a bounded, but still very open area.

“The very first version of the Grimoire tutorial and introduction [to magic] was the fellow that blows himself up on the cliff,” said Ritger. “I implemented that, which was a very fun little thing that I was happy to get into the game.”

Ritger’s referencing a point of interest early on in western Dawnshore, a crater with the charred remains of a wizard in it. The deceased pyromancer is carrying a unique spellcasting grimoire in the final version of Avowed, and you can also find his notes outlining plans for an audacious experiment that clearly didn’t end well.

But when Dawnshore served as Avowed’s tutorial zone, we would have actually seen the explosion from afar, with the pyromancer’s remains supplying us with our first grimoire and a trigger for Avowed’s spellcasting tutorial.

“We need something to draw your attention to this. In this big, sprawling environment, how about we just have a guy on the road that blows himself up, because that’s going to draw your attention,” Ritger explained. “And so he would have a Grimoire, and that would be the first one you got.

“I knew that was a keeper when I sent a video of it to [Avowed project lead Carrie Patel], I could hear her laughing down the hallway⁠—all right, this is staying in.”

I had to ask if this was an in-joke referencing one of the most memorable moments from The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind (and maybe RPGs writ large), a wood elf with a silly little hat falling out of the sky and to his death right outside Morrowind’s starting village of Seyda Neen.

Poor Tarhiel’s journal reveals he invented the spell “Icarian Flight,” which launches you into the air with no guarantee of a safe landing. Not only is it a great slapstick moment, it also serves as an introduction to Morrowind’s open-ended, potentially dangerous system of magic and spellcrafting. My CRPG dork instincts were right on the money: Ritger confirmed that Tarhiel was “exactly the touch point” for Avowed’s ill-fated pyromancer.

Fun as this would have been to see, playtesting showed it and the Dawnshore opening writ large to be too unreliable an introduction to Avowed’s mechanics: Too many points where players could just wander off and miss crucial tutorials. There’s a reason open world games always begin with some kind of linear sequence. Even if we didn’t get the full effect of the pyromancer’s failure, the aftermath is still another fun discovery in a game packed full of them.