Avowed’s fight wasn’t ready to show at reveal, Obsidian admits, but they’ve made it “juicier” since then

Obsidian has spent a lot of time polishing Avowed’s combat in response to negative reactions to the new action RPG’s first reveal footage during an Xbox developer direct, with gameplay director Gabe Paramo conceding that the team could have oiled the hinges and polished the contacts a bit more before showing the game.

Speaking to Windows Central, Paramo noted that Obsidian had always planned to give the sword and sorcery component of the game some love, but was convinced by the feedback to prioritize it before showing Avowed again at this year’s Xbox Summer Showcase. “Sometimes you can lose sight of how important it is to prioritize certain things,” he told the site, adding that “we thought Avowed was good enough to show as is… We knew we were going to address it before release.” The developers took the feedback lightly: “We just thought, ‘Okay, let’s look at this, this is a big issue, people are noticing it, we should polish this up sooner,'” Paramo said.

So where and how did they add some jazz? “We really looked at the feeling and the moment of the player wielding their weapon and the moment of impact,” Paramo explains. “Were there any delays, any systems that might have prevented it from being immediate?” The developers also “studied posing… to give that visceral and immediate feedback”—posing being, in my very limited understanding of video game animation, the introduction of character poses designed to catch the eye and stick in the memory. “We really focused on that, as well as blood impacts, VFX feedback, and audio,” Paramo continues. “We basically looked at all the elements that make combat more interesting.”

I find this story interesting, not least because I’m always interested, and alarmed, to hear what developers can change after they’ve released a video game without giving themselves tons of extra work and losing sight of what they’re doing. Paramo’s description sounds as elementary as changing a few speed values ​​somewhere, but it probably isn’t. In my experience, every video game production is a Jenga tower where every last piece is somehow the one at the bottom.

Here’s one thing Obsidian probably couldn’t have introduced in response to the trailer’s comments: Avowed’s choice of first-person or third-person perspective, because no, it’s not as simple as removing the camera from your character’s head. “[Third-person perspective]is definitely something that needs work after you’ve solidified and understood the game you’re making,” Paramo commented elsewhere in the article.

“If I do a first-person swing, I now have to do a third-person swing, in a different view. These are not shared meshes or animations – they are different, and our system supports playing them at the same time,” he continued. “If you look at your shadow, you will be able to see the same animations in third person that you see in the first-person representative mesh. So we had to do that early, because we actually had to double the number of animations.”

There’s more in the full discussion, including thoughts on whether Obsidian has considered adding multiplayer given the success of Baldur’s Gate 3 on its front, and given that Avowed was “really pushed” internally as a co-op RPG to begin with. In short, it would have disrupted the game’s narrative, and Obsidian doesn’t have Larian’s long track record of co-op coal mining. Here’s everything else we know about Avowed at the time of writing.