In a recent interview with MinnMax, Avowed game director Carrie Patel has revealed that enemies in the upcoming action RPG will not scale with the player’s levels. What this means for players is that, despite how weak or strong your character is, the enemies will remain at a static power level. While this might lead to some enemies being too powerful to kill early on, players will eventually be able to get stronger by levelling up and acquiring better gear to take down those same enemies.
Among the questions asked by MinnMax’s Ben Hanson in a rapid-fire interview session was whether enemies will scale with the player’s level. “Enemies do not scale with your level,” responded Patel before moving on to other subjects including the key art for Avowed and misconceptions about the title.
This is an interesting change from the trends seen in other major RPG releases, where the power of enemies is often scaled to the player’s own power level in an effort to avoid having players be frustrated at the difficulty of early enemies or boredom from steamrolling through them with a late-game character. Titles like Diablo 4 and Bethesda’s RPGs tend to heavily rely on level scaling, for instance.
In the same interview, Patel also revealed that around a third of the team that worked on the Pillars of Eternity RPGs have worked on Avowed in some way. She also mentioned that the story in Avowed will have a point of no return at some point, beyond which players will not be able to partake in more side content. Players looking forward to exploring more of the game’s world will also have to start a new playthrough after the credits roll, rather than being left to explore.
Patel has also revealed that Avowed will run at up to 60 FPS on the Xbox Series X. Details on its performance on the Xbox Series S, however, have not yet been revealed.
PC players looking forward to Avowed can check out the required specs that Obsidian had revealed back in November. Among the minimum required hardware include mid-range CPUs from around four generations ago from Intel and AMD, and at minimum an AMD Radeon RX 5700 or Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 GPU, along with 16 GB of RAM.
Environment region designer Berto Ritger has also revealed back in December that players will get to make fun choices in how they tackle quests. This can include completing quest objectives out of order, and even completing dungeons before you even get the quest for it to begin with. Players will also get to figure out the choices and secrets to unlock its multiple endings, of which “at least” ten have been confirmed.
Avowed is slated for release on PC and Xbox Series X/S on February 18. It will also be coming to Game Pass on day one. More details on the title will be available once the reviews are out on February 13. In the meantime, here are our thoughts on why players that like games with choices and consequences should keep an eye on Avowed.
