Avowed is Obsidian's upcoming answer to The Elder Scrolls, or at least that's what many fans hoped when the trailer first dropped back in 2020. The teaser's first-person perspective medieval fantasy style naturally drew comparisons with Bethesda's flagship franchise. Despite the potential benefits of those comparisons, earlier this summer head of Xbox Phil Spencer claimed that Obsidian's new game would be "very different" from The Elder Scrolls.
There are some good reasons, however, that the opening of Avowed should have more similarities with the opening of Skyrim than the opening of Obsidian's last major first-person RPG, The Outer Worlds. Here's a breakdown of why Skyrim and other games have such good introductions for their open-world RPG goals, where The Outer Worlds' opening falls short, and what Avowed needs to do to make sure its intro sticks the landing.
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The Outer Worlds may not take place in a single, large open world like Skyrim, but it shares one important design principle. The Elder Scrolls games, the Fallout games before Fallout 4, and The Outer Worlds all have voiceless, blank-slate protagonists. Their heroes have next-to-no personal backstory or predefined characteristics. Their appearance and personality is supposed to be totally up to the player. Roleplaying freedom is prioritized over character-driven storytelling where necessary, and in a lot of cases that compromise pays huge dividends.
The blank-slate protagonist comes at a cost, however. To truly make the player feel free in their roleplaying experience, the game can't just give them the power to be whoever they want to be, but to do whatever they want to do within the context of the story. At the same time, these games feel the need to set up at least some aspect of the main plot in the introduction. This is where the differences between a game like Skyrim and The Outer Worlds become more apparent.
The introduction of Skyrim only establishes one thing about the player character – that they were accidentally taken captive as part of an Imperial attack on the Stormcloak rebellion while trying to cross the border between Skyrim and Cyrodiil. It's never even established which way the player character was going. Right when they're about to be executed, Alduin attacks Helgen, and with many of the other captives they manage to make a break for it.
This sets up the main plot – the return of the dragons – without actually prescribing any clear course of action for the player. Yes, they can go and warn the residents of Riverwood and eventually Whiterun about the dragon attack on Helgen, but that hardly seems urgent for a recently-escaped prisoner, and it's perfectly reasonable to assume that the news will spread regardless. By the time the player escapes Helgen the stakes have been set up, but the player's own ability to do anything about the dragon threat has not. This makes exploring the game's open world and completing any number of questlines before the main quest feel perfectly immersive.
A similar move is pulled is an older Obsidian game, Fallout: New Vegas. At the start of New Vegas,next-to-nothing is established about the player aside from the fact that they took one delivery job which ended in them being kidnapped, shot in the head, and left for dead while Benny took off with their delivery, a Platinum chip. The premise of the plot is established, but as with Skyrim's Helgen intro, the player's ability to influence events is not made clear. Likewise, they aren't given any initial motive to pursue the main quest beyond curiosity. Just as Skyrim's Dragonborn plotline doesn't begin until several steps into the main quest, the fact that whoever holds the Platinum chip holds the fate of New Vegas in their hands is not revealed until the player has already made some progress into the main story.
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In contrast to both Skyrim and New Vegas' intros, The Outer Worlds begins with the player being told all about the stakes of the setting and their own vital role in the fate of Halcyon, the solar system in which the game takes place. While the player is still literally frozen in place, they are told the following:
"Your colony ship was inexplicably knocked out of skip space and forced to complete its journey at sub-light speeds. This means that you – and every other colonist on the Hope – have been in suspended animation seventy years. […] Unfortunately I used the last of my chemical supplies saving you. I know it's a lot to ask, but I must have your help securing more if we're going to save the rest of your fellow colonists. I'd see it done myself, of course, but the Board has a sizable bounty on my head."
This introduction doesn't just set up the stakes, but it makes it clear that the player character is the only person who can help the Hope colonists right from the start. Players get the chance to make their character, but they aren't given any opportunity to find their own motivations or place their character in the game's world before the main quest makes their ultimate goal clear. It's all well and good giving players freedom over their character's appearance, but Obsidian ultimately gives them very little freedom to explore their own story before launching the plot in earnest.
Avowed's introduction can set up the main threat facing its world, but it should not be clear that the player is a key part of stopping that threat until later in the main quest. It may not seem like much, but that structure gives Skyrim and New Vegas players a huge amount of roleplaying freedom that The Outer Worlds' introduction doesn't quite give its protagonist. The Outer Worlds is already a more linear game and doesn't have an open world, but Avowed has already been confirmed to be a fully open-world game. If the player's freedom to explore that world is going to extend to them role-playing as a character of their own imagining, the game needs an introduction which drops them into the setting without putting them on a clear path of action from the start.
Avowed is in development for PC and Xbox Series X/S.
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