Although only a teaser trailer has been released so far, Obsidian Entertainment’s upcoming first-person fantasy RPG Avowed is quickly becoming many fans’ hope for a spiritual successor to Skyrim.
However, with Skyrim approaching its 10-year anniversary, Obsidian Entertainment will need to do more than emulate Bethesda’s successful series if it’s going to step out from its shadow and create an experience that feels genuinely next-generation. If Avowed is going to take the RPG genre to the next level, there’s an important choice the developer is going to have to make.
A Tale of Two Theories
Over the last decade or so, Western RPGs have divided themselves into two rough camps. These camps are separated by their design philosophies. One the one hand there are games like Skyrim, Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, and Obsidian’s last game, The Outer Worlds.
These games prioritize their settings, usually involving an open world and often being named after that central location. These settings serve as a huge sandbox for players to explore, where they can often activate any quest-line in almost any order. In The Outer Worlds, this was slightly more limited, at least at the beginning, but the world opens up a lot more once they player can get the ship The Unreliable back up and running.
Even the name The Unreliable itself is indicative of the way the settings and quirks of these worlds tend to take center stage. Indeed, far more time is often spent characterizing the world than the characters within it. While the characters in games like Skyrim usually have their own quirks, they often feel like extensions of the setting itself, and it’s rare for them to get given much complexity or character development.
The reason this style of RPG design is so popular is because it emulates one key aspect of tabletop RPGs. The player can totally imagine their character themself. When done right these games often establish very little about the backstory, age, or race and sexuality of the protagonist.
It also rare, however, for the game world to react to many of these factors very much either, leading to a strange dissonance in games like Skyrim where there are situations like Argonian and Khajiit players being allowed into cities without explanation while their countrymen are barred from entry.
At its best this style of game design allows the player to directly roleplay as the character, which is why these games usually avoid having the player protagonist voiced even when all of the NPCs are. In Fallout 4, Bethesda established a clear backstory for the Sole Survivor and gave the Fallout 4 protagonist a voice in an attempt to create a more in-depth story, but instead this made the exploration and enjoyment of the setting feel dissonant with the plot and greatly limited roleplaying opportunities.
The other school of design can be found in RPGs like The Witcher and Mass Effect, where the player has less control over their character, instead directing them in broad strokes and usually choosing dialogue options which are then rephrased by the protagonist when spoken aloud. This allows these games to tell more developed and character-driven stories, but comes at the cost of character customization, and usually necessitates a smaller world and fewer characters.
Why Not Both?
There are games which have demonstrated the possibilities for synthesizing these two schools of design. While not nearly as open-world as Skyrim, Dragon Age: Origins is very character driven while leaving the protagonist an almost completely blank slate with no voice actor and a wide array of origins to choose from. The origins don't prescribe too much detail in most cases, leaving their further history up to the player’s imagination. However, this works in part by limiting the scope of the explorable world and the amount of characters involved.
If Avowed is going to step out of Skyrim’s shadow and give players a truly next-generation RPG experience, it will need to decide how it is going to approach creating a game that allows the player a great deal of freedom while also telling a satisfying story, and, where it runs up against the places where these design theories are incompatible, what it prioritizes. If it doesn’t do so, it will be retreading well-trodden ground, and will likely be unable to live up to Skyrim’s sizable legacy.
Avowed is in development for PC and Xbox Series X.