I don’t care about being able to kill everybody and steal the Mayor’s pants in an RPG like Avowed, and I’m tired of pretending it’s mandatory

There comes a time, dear reader, when us writers at PC Gamer are at odds—and I find myself on the other side of a fence shouting: ‘Nonsense! Balderdash! Tomfoolery!’ at my unfortunate colleagues Joshua Wolens and Robert Zak, who have got it into their heads that Avowed is somehow lesser for its lack of reactivity or, most crucially, the inability to rob shopkeepers after you’ve paid them.

In fact, Avowed is a game that has come under constant scrutiny for this simple fact—and to be fair to its detractors, they are correct by technicality. Avowed is not a very reactive game. There’s no real stealth system, there’s no theft system, there’s no bounty system, you can’t kill everyone you come across, NPCs don’t have daily routines. It’s a world trapped in amber that you are invited to wander through, but not live in. If you were expecting those things, you’ll be disappointed.

Despite the fact I’ve been denied these RPG staples, as apparently necessary as bread and water, I’ve somehow managed to enjoy myself. And that’s because Avowed is an extremely focused game—its narrow scope hones in on a few things: Combat, exploration, environments, and story. And you know what? It does all of those things well—its story is maybe the weakest of those points, but even then, as a fan of textured, sleepy worldbuilding and nuanced fantasy politics, I’ve been having a grand time.

But Harvey, says a person I just made up, Skyrim had all of those things. You could kill a guy and steal his pants in Skyrim. You could murder a chicken farm in Skyrim. You could relentlessly follow some guy and find out what pre-ordained tasks he’s programmed to do in Skyrim, and then also kill him and steal his pants and murder his chickens. Why didn’t Obsidian do a Skyrim, are they stupid?

No. Look, the issue with this train of thought is that it assumes that modern videogames are dreams spun together with psychic brain magic, and not painful tangles of code that barely function even after hundreds of people work very hard on them for far too many hours. Yes, from a consumer viewpoint, Avowed is a full-priced game—so if your argument is that you wanted more bang for your buck? I can disagree with you, but not dismiss you entirely. Only you decide what your money’s worth.

But the implication that anyone who worked on this thing simply thought ‘nah, we won’t put a theft system in there’ is boneheaded—resources went elsewhere, and Obsidian as a studio tends to have several irons in the fire at once. It’s why we’re getting both Avowed and a new Outer Worlds this year. Sure, games like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Skyrim are more immersive, but they also take a long goddamn time to make.

There’s also this underlying idea I find equally maddening that if you make an RPG, it has to let you engage in NPC-stalking pants-stealing chicken murder. If it doesn’t permit you to live your most Groundhog Day of butcher-fantasies, it’s somehow a bad RPG. Something to be cast out of the canon. And I’m here to stand up and say: Since bloody when?

Yes, RPGs with huge amounts of freedom are arguably the landmarks of the genre. They’re the hardest to make, sure, but they’re also the most enduring. Still, they’re also not the only RPGs that exist, nor should they be. You couldn’t go on murderhobo sprees in Knights of the Old Republic, or Mass Effect, or The Witcher 3. No-one’s saying that Final Fantasy 7 is a lesser RPG because Cloud Strife couldn’t pull out the buster sword and do a little purging for Shinra.

And you know what? I don’t think I care all that much in the first place. In games where murder-sprees are possible, I’ve found actually sticking to them to be eminently unsatisfying—sure, there are other perks that the immersive, reactive template grants, but are they required for me to have a good time? Not one bit. And that’s all a matter of personal taste, but that’s exactly what I’m saying. RPGs, like any other genre, should get to run the gamut of reactivity—from entirely systems-driven sims like Kenshi to the most JRPG of JRPGs like Metaphor: ReFantazio. Both. Both is good.

It’s ostensibly absolutely fine for a game to go ‘this is what I’m good at, and I’m going to stick to it’—and I think putting Avowed under this kind of scrutiny is a little unfair. It feels like the masses saw a first-person RPG and let their pattern recognition do the thinking for them, rather than ask themselves what kind of game Avowed is interested in being, and judging it based on those merits. No, Avowed isn’t a Skyrim. You know what it is? A solid action RPG, and historically speaking, we like those. We like them a lot.