When I had the chance to talk to Avowed region director Berto Ritger recently, I had one thing on my mind: How every nook, cranny, dead end, rooftop, and pond in the game had something hidden in it that was worth my time. Even a bit of vendor trash or upgrade materials in the right place seemed to say, "Hey, we knew you'd look here, we see you."
The towns and countryside of the Living Lands may not have had the simulationist "real place" vibe of a Deus Ex or even an Elder Scrolls game, but the more videogamey joy of always being rewarded for exploration in Avowed tickled my brain in a different way.
Ritger characterized his role as overseeing area design, environment art, and narrative design for particular regions of Avowed's world, ensuring that everything fit together and gelled with the zone's identity, while occasionally pitching in with more direct design contributions.
Ritger specifically oversaw Dawnshore, Emerald Stair (for part of development), The Garden, and the ending sequence, while he had a more direct hand in designing the prologue island and the opening of the memorable quest, Dawntreader—that's the one with the magic crystal mech and the weird golden priest.
Part of the reason Avowed is full of so many rewarding secrets, to hear Ritger tell it, was its parkour system, which was in Avowed's earliest iterations and survived a development reboot in 2021. The robust clambering, climbing, and jumping demanded vertically-oriented levels to support it, but also made it easy for testers to break the game and reach places the designers didn't expect.
Hey, player, we see you. You came up here, and we put a little bird's nest, a little coin in it.
Ritger said the team suppressed the impulse to combat that behavior with invisible walls or unclimbable surfaces. "People are going to figure out a way to get up on the roofs. Let's just lean into that and commit to rewarding that exploration, because it is so fun to just clamber on all this stuff."
Ritger clarified that it didn't always have to be a huge or game-changing thing, "but more of that little acknowledgement of, 'Hey, player, we see you. You came up here, and we put a little bird's nest, a little coin in it.' And that's going to make you feel good, because I know as a player, that feels good for me, and that'll just keep encouraging [exploration] throughout the game.
"Then as people were building things, people on the team would play test, and they'd climb up to something, or they'd go around the corner that you wouldn't expect them necessarily to, and [we'd] try to fill the dead ends with stuff or cut off the dead ends so you don't think, 'Oh, this is going to lead somewhere, right?' And then you end up like, 'Oh, it's just a wall, whoops.' We tried to make sure all those felt as intentional as possible."
A secret is revealed
Some of Avowed's unmarked secrets and rewards are surprisingly substantial. My personal favorite is a tiny sewer/cistern underneath the starting docks that I stumbled on completely by accident. It's full of challenging specter enemies in tricky close quarters, and rewards you with one of Avowed's powerful unique items.
Nearby NPCs will remark on hearing sounds down below in ambient chatter, but crucially there's no journal entry, quest, or formal conversation directing you there, adding to this feeling of it being something secret and special. Ritger credited this little gem to Obsidian area designer Ryan Torres.
"There is a chest in Shatterscarp, it's near the Leviathan hollow, and it's a little lock box with a bunch of severed hands grabbing towards it," Ritger told me when I asked about his own favorite flourishes in Avowed. "If you interact and you loot all of it, it sinks into the ground, and all that stuff just disappears. That was [Bre Seale], the designer who placed that really awesome little moment."
While he didn't want to spoil too many of them, Ritger also shouted out an awful little Orlan (furry Hobbit-person) poet you can find behind a waterfall in one of Avowed's regions, with dialogue by Obsidian narrative designer Katie Tenney. In an unmarked quest, you can workshop his poetry to help him woo a lady Orlan back in town.
"Around every corner there's a little something that somebody hand placed for everyone," said Ritger, and he argued that this sort of incentive is necessary if you want players to explore and meaningfully interact with a game world over the course of a long haul RPG.
"If you have a lot of dead ends that lead nowhere, you learn the lesson as a player: This game doesn't have much to offer me, there's going to be a lot of things that just kind of lead nowhere, and I'm not going to bother looking at them," he said. "I'm just going to go through whatever looks like the main path."
Ritger contrasted that with his own impulse as an RPG fan, something I and a lot of players share: Clocking the main quest or critical objective ASAP, then doing literally everything else first. To that end, the Avowed team always tried to explicitly signpost the critical path in a dungeon or zone, with an unspoken promise that all the little side paths you see spiraling off will still be worth your time.
"We try to have them lead you to something or give you something, so that every time you try that you're going to feel like, 'Okay, that was worth it. I'm going to keep doing that," Ritger said. "And every environment I go through, I'm going to stop and pause and look around and then kind of put off the main part for a second while I poke around.'"
That was definitely my experience with Avowed, which remains on my personal game of the year shortlist. Word from project lead Carrie Patel is that DLC may be in the cards, but we've also got another full game from Obsidian to look forward to in 2025. The Outer Worlds 2 is set to launch before the end of the year.
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