Patient Gamers

I just finished Avowed yesterday. I give it an OK 6/10.

Visuals and exploration were top notch. The music was fairly forgettable. The story was OK... IMO it had too much speaking in metaphors to be coherent at times. One of the companions was cool, I didn't really like the others. The ending of the story was very abrupt and followed by a huge dump of written exposition.

The combat felt pretty good (I played wand wizard) but got old as the game went on as there weren't many new abilities or gear from mid to late game. The gear upgrade system was survival game level shit... open chests for 60hrs to get mats to upgrade. The gear itself was mostly pretty boring stat boosts. Unique gear is just better making all other gear useless. The uniques don't have particularly interesting effects.

I'll remember the world and the general world building fondly but not much else. Hopefully if there is an Avowed 2, the gear and ability systems will get more fleshed out. If you're gonna try it out, I think it's worth it on sale.

Next up is Cyberpunk 2077 for the first time. So far i've spent 1.5hrs on character creation and getting the game to look good with a decent framerate with the help of OptiScaler.

Edit: I actually ditched Optiscaler now. Using Proton-GE I added the flag PROTON_FSR4_UPGRADE=1 to the Steam launch options and it works great. Along with some tweaking of the graphics settings this got rid of some flickering/textural/lighting issues I had (i7-9700k & RX9070).