Avowed Isn’t Open-World Because The ‘Pacing is Really Tough’ Without Zones

Avowed will be released worldwide on February 18, slotting into an already busy month for the RPG genre. For a while now, prospective fans have been eagerly scooping up any tidbits of information about the game, and most recently, the discussion turned to how the game is laid out.

In a recent interview with Xbox Wire, Obsidian’s developers sat down to talk about the lack of an open-world environment in Avowed. It’s very much by design and is a deliberate, strategic decision to encourage players to have e better experience overall.

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‘You Can Do Whatever You Want’

In a recent interview with Xbox Wire, Obsidian’s Berto Ritger, Carrie Patel, and Kate Dollarhyde walked readers through the nature of the ‘zones’ in Avowed.

This ambitious RPG isn’t an open-world game, but instead, it relies on a series of ‘denser’ regions locked behind borders that keep the pacing consistent and manageable.

During the interview, Dollarhyde – who works as a narrative designer – explained:

Pacing is really tough in open-world games.

You never know where the player is and what they’re doing at any given time. So having these zones that happen in sequence means we always know what content you’ve just come from on the critical path. Maybe not what side quests you’ve done, but we always know you’ve just had this core experience.

That sentiment was echoed by Ritger, region director at Obsidian:

I think it’s a good pacing mechanism.

We know roughly what you’ve done before you’ve gone to the next thing. It’s still a very open structure within those zones, where you can do whatever you want for the most part, but it’s not one contiguous area where you could be anywhere at any moment.

Having smaller, more detailed regions or zones has enabled Obsidian to scope in and focus on delivering a more immersive, choice-driven experience for players. Even with the zones being scaled down from the open-world models we might be more used to in these grand RPG titles, we can still expect there to be plenty of meat on Avowed’s bones.

Do you plan on picking up Avowed when it’s released on February 18? Let us know on the Insider Gaming forum.

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