Why Avowed Shares An Actor With Gaming's Best Sci-Fi Saga
The RPG’s memorable cast of companions is Obsidian’s strongest yet.
Obsidian Entertainment, the team behind classic role-playing games like Fallout: New Vegas, Pillars Of Eternity, and The Outer Worlds, is no stranger to creating the perfect sidekick. Making sure quieter moments are filled by characters players care about is as important as the rest of the role-playing experience, particularly when you’ll be spending dozens of hours with them across sprawling imaginative worlds.
In Avowed, Obsidian set out to make its most in-depth companions yet. Its cast of four party members is unusually small, but according to game director Carrie Patel, the narrowed roster allowed the game’s writing and narrative focus to be tighter than ever. She tells Inverse that Alex Garland’s 2018 sci-fi film Annihilation was the unlikely inspiration for Avowed’s tight-knit crew.
“I always think of that scene at the beginning of Annihilation when you’ve got four characters walking into that big bubble where things are going to get weird and they’ll have to depend on each other,” Patel said. “Having a smaller roster allowed us to make the party feel more intimate. It also allowed us to write more connections and banter and evolved relationships.”
The change in perspective from the isometric Pillars Of Eternity games allowed Obsidian’s character artists to bring the world’s cultures and fashion to life.
Avowed’s four party members, Kai, Marius, Giatta, and Yatzli, have a surprising amount of dialogue, saying something new almost every time I made camp to upgrade my equipment or enchant weapons. The dynamic feels natural, and they’re full of memorable jokes and hard-hitting emotional gut punches. And for players new to the universe (Avowed is set a few years after 2018’s Pillars Of Eternity 2: Deadfire), the dialogue is an engaging peek into the nuances of the world’s factions, races, and religions. Such seamless world-building should make Avowed one of the year’s early stand-out RPGs.
Reimagining the world of Pillars of Eternity was a big part of making Avowed, according to lead character artist Dimitri Berman. Avowed is the first time players are seeing the lands of Eora through the eyes of its people and not from an isometric, CRPG view, and Berman says the change in perspective required the team to rethink the finer details of the outfits characters wear.
“We have a lot of threading, embroidery, stitching, modeling buttons, and bolts in armors now. There’s a lot of culture in the world, so we try to give them textiles that give them each their own vibes and backgrounds visually,” Berman said. “We didn't do this stuff in previous Pillars games because the characters were so small it wouldn’t read anyway.”
Marius, seen here in concept art, is introduced as a curmudgeon but eventually warms up to the player.
A character’s outfit can help bring them to life, but writing them to feel like real people who are impacted by the unfolding story is a major part of what makes the party memorable, and there’s no better example of that growth than the Dwarven master hunter Marius. He’s capable on the battlefield, but is also introduced as a bit of a curmudgeon. Writing a character who’s abrasive without chasing away the player is a fine balancing act, according to Patel.
“Characters like that become projects,” she said. “There’s obviously something that Marius is holding on to and you have to work at him to break those walls down. Giving characters that depth, and also trusting players to spend some time with them to get to know him is all part of it.”
“You also want to make sure that with a character like that, they may be a little blunt, a little suspicious, but they should never be downplaying the adventure you’re having. It‘s about amplifying the danger, expressing skepticism about the right course ahead, but never telling the player this is not worth your time.”
Kai, Avowed’s well-traveled first companion, helps introduce the game’s starting cities.
On the other end of the spectrum is Kai, the affable Aumaua who players meet at the start of their adventure. Getting the semi-aquatic race to look just right from a first-person perspective started with Kai, Berman said.
“We spent a while dialing it in, what we liked and didn’t like, what may be off-putting to players or pleasant to players because you have to look at companions for a long time,” he said.
Kai is a comfortable character to settle in with, as he’s charming and rarely challenges the player’s ideas in the same way Marius does.
“When designing a roster of characters, we always have this concept of ‘who’s the one you’d get a beer with?’ And Kai is the one in this party that you’d get a beer with,” Berman said. “Those often make for really good first companions. They can introduce players to the world, not put them off of anything, be companionable, and lightly tutotrialize early mechanics in a believable way.”
Kai has a lot in common with fan favorite Mass Effect ally Garrus Vakarian.
The casting of Brandon Keener, best known for his role as Garrus Vakarian in the Mass Effect trilogy, will also help ease players into the world. Patel says that while the mercenary Turian was a reference point for Kai, Keener’s casting had more to do with his performance during Avowed’s more touching moments.
“Garrus was a reference point for Kai. He’s your bro, the chill guy with a bit of a military background,” Patel said. “As Garrus he does a great job with the dry humor, the sense of casual camaraderie. When we did auditions, the thing that sold me on Brandon Keener for this role was the incredible job he does with Kai’s vulnerability. Hearing the way he delivered lines where Kai really opens up about the things that brought him to this stage in his life, where he really has his rawest moments with the player, that’s what sold me.”
Kai is a favorite for Berman, who said that he usually selects the Aumauan to fight alongside the mage Giatta. “I really enjoy their personalities,” he said.
Kai (left) and Giatta (right) are Obsidian character artist Dimitri Berman’s favorite party combo.
Patel said that she sticks to Yatzli, the quirky wizard.
“Yatzli has a lot of fun, high-damage magical abilities, including a slowdown ability that is especially helpful when fighting a miniboss or a brute,” she explained. “When you combine that with Giatta’s accelerate ability which puts you all into turbo mode, you can have a lot of fun.”
Both say they're looking forward to seeing how players lean.
“I can’t wait to see what party compositions players like, which companions they get to know, and how deep they go into their stories,” Patel said. “There’s some really good stuff in there.”
