The moment the announcement trailer for Obsidian Entertainment’s upcoming first-person fantasy RPG Avowed dropped, observers were quick to note the game’s apparent similarities with The Elder Scrolls series. Not only will Obsidian’s new game take on the same genre, perspective, and sword-and-sorcery style combat as Bethesda’s flagship franchise, but there is another strange similarity between the two settings.
Avowed is set in Eora, the world from Obsidian’s Pillars of Eternity games. Eora shares a big similarity with Tamriel, the continent that comprises the main setting for The Elder Scrolls. Elder Scrolls fans who enjoy a certain aspect of the games’ exploration and dungeon-diving may have something to look forward to in Avowed, though there are also many differences between the two settings.
The Dwemer and the Engwithans
The Dwemer are the dwarves of The Elder Scrolls, and the remnants of their once vast empire can be found underneath key Elder Scrolls settings like Skyrim. One of the most memorable aspects of Skyrim for many players is spelunking deep into Dwemer ruins, discovering their lost and often dangerous machinery as well as being treated to the culture’s unique architectural style.
The Dwemer in The Elder Scrolls aren’t actually a distinct race, but a subspecies of The Elder Scrolls' elves. Their identification as dwarves is explained in The Elder Scrolls lore as a miscommunication, with the perspective of the giants found in places like Skyrim causing a misunderstanding that was then passed down to the humans of the region after the Dwemer disappeared. The Dwemer created some of the greatest technological marvels of Tamriel, including fully automated guardians, powerful armor, elaborate observatories, and even methods for safely storing the franchise's eponymous Elder Scrolls themselves.
Pillars of Eternity also includes an ancient, lost civilization with ties to a lot of the major technological discoveries made in the setting. The Engwithan civilization has ruins which can be found all over Eora. Like the Dwemer, the Engwithans weren’t actually a distinct race. However, unlike the Dwemer the Engwithan civilization was composed of all of the races found in Avowed’s setting.
The Engwithans, like the Dwemer, built huge underground structures all across their world. These structures were known as adra pillars. Adra is an important mineral in the Pillars of Eternity setting, found to have the ability to channel souls. In the ancient history of Engwith, the civilization was ruled over by many separate tyrannical kings. One king named Od Nua was driven mad attempting to use adra and the study of souls – called animancy in Pillars of Eternity – to bring his dead son back to life. The giant adra statue he build to house his son’s lost soul would later become the vessel for the god Eothas in Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire.
Unlike the Dwemer, however, the vast majority of the Engwithan civilization – known as Engwith – was actually build above ground in a region of the Eastern Reach known as Eir Glanfath, where its citizens were known as “builders” by the less technologically advanced societies of the area at the time. The distinction between the Engwithans and the other civilized "kith" races was one of societal structure, not race or inherent ability.
By the time of the first Pillars of Eternity game the Engwithan civilization is long gone, but some of its remaining known adra pillars form huge multi-story megadungeons that the player can explore. Like the Dwemer ruins in Skyrim, these dungeons can prove to be some of the most expansive and challenging in the game, encouraging players to return at different levels to make further progress. One such dungeon in Pillars of Eternity is named The Endless Paths of Od Nua, and descends for 15 levels.
The Differences
The Engwithans have a unique role in the world of Avowed, however, that the Dwemer do not have in Tamriel. Over the course of Pillars of Eternity it is revealed that the gods of Eora were created by the Engwithans using the power of animancy. This required the souls of thousands of their own citizens to create false idols that each represented a pure ideal.
At some point in the Pillars of Eternity timeline a young elf woman called Iovara ix Ensios discovered the truth about the gods of Eora, starting her own atheist movement as a result. In response the Engwithans created an inquisition to make sure that the truth about the gods and their origins never came to light. The Dwemer may not have created the gods of the Elder Scrolls cosmology, but they are also connected to some of the biggest mysteries in the world of Tamriel. The cause of the disappearance of the Dwemer is one of the biggest mysteries in The Elder Scrolls, and many fans will be hopeful that The Elder Scrolls 6 might reveal more details about the history of its most famous lost civilization.
The disappearance of Engwith, however, is not a mystery. There are few reasons given in Pillars of Eternity that provide accounts of Engwith’s dwindling population. One of the reasons is that Engwithan missionaries swore never to have children, a tactic originally intended to prevent missionaries from passing on the truth about the gods of Eora to their children or loved ones. Another reason is more grim – it’s implied that the need for souls to power their machines caused the once great empire to cannibalize itself.
Many Elder Scrolls fans hoping to get their fantasy fix in Avowed will be pleased to hear that Obsidian’s upcoming game will also likely have expansive, technologically advanced ruins to explore underneath the game’s main setting, the Living Lands. Though there are differences in the lore, both the Engwithans and the Dwemer provide opportunities for their respective developers to add a whole new dimension to their already large open worlds, allowing players to plunge deep into the bowls of the earth in search of enemies to fight and secrets to uncover.
Avowed is in development for PC and Xbox Series X.