Obsidian Entertainment released the first teaser for its first-person fantasy RPG Avowed last week, drawing comparisons with Bethesda’s Skyrim just as its previous game, The Outer Worlds, naturally drew comparisons with the Fallout series. While a huge step forward, the first-person RPG genre has become somewhat formulaic since Skyrim released in 2011, with next-gen needing to take it forward.
One of Skyrim’s issues is its towns and cities, many of which feel underpopulated, underdeveloped, and ultimately far too small to be believed as anything other than hamlets. If Avowed is going to take the first-person fantasy RPG genre into the next-gen, its cities will need to feel sprawling and alive, not just scaled-down representations of far larger cities that exist in the game's canon.
Skyrim's Scaled-Down Cities
Skyrim has well-developed cities. Markarth, Solitude, and Riften, in particular, all have distinct aesthetics and cultures, and feel large enough to be lived in by a reasonable amount of people if the player suspends their disbelief. It’s too immersion breaking, however, for the player to enter Whiterun and get asked if they go to the Cloud District very often when the entire city houses just 73 NPCs in total (making it the most populated in the game) and the Cloud District is not only just a few yards away but only has one building, the Jarl’s palace.
Even areas in Skyrim which have great personalities, like Riften, feel less immersive the more time the player spends in them as the feeling of size upon entering the city gives way to something quite small. Falkreath, Morthal, and Dawnstar all feel quite underdeveloped and interchangeable, with as few as 20 inhabitants.
The problem is less in the size of the cities themselves, but how large they feel. Cities like The Witcher 3’s Novigrad or Denerim from Dragon Age: Origins aren’t so much larger than Skyrim’s cities but they feel far larger, with tall houses implying dense city living and, in Denerim’s case, the city divided into explorable areas in-game that are part of a much larger city in the story. Compared to Bethesda’s most recent RPG city, Diamond City from Fallout 4, these locations feel far more densely populated.
The Outer Worlds' Cities
The Outer Worlds' towns show that Obsidian has a few of the same problems as Bethesda in this regard. When the player first enters The Groundbreaker, the entryway frames the entire inside of the space station to appear briefly like a Bladerunner-style metropolis, but once the player has walked through those doors, it quickly becomes clear that this was a perspective illusion and the interior is composed of just a few shops along a single street. It's not bad, but it doesn't deliver on its own promise and feels disappointing as a result.
Across both Skyrim and The Outer Worlds, there are smaller settlements that feel more immersive because they do not over-promise, and characters within them don’t make comments which imply a dissonance between the size of the town in the game and the size of the town in the story. The towns that feel the most immersive are the ones that do not over-promise in the story what the developer cannot deliver in the game, though it is also the case that Skyrim’s most immersive cities also tend to be the largest in scale.
Avowed's Potential Cities and Next-Gen RPGs
If Avowed is going to feel like the next step in first-person RPGs rather than retreading the familiar ground developed by both Obsidian and Bethesda over the years, it is going to need cities that feel like cities – that players are able to view as some of the greatest accomplishments of the civilization they are exploring. The Witcher 3 achieved this by prioritizing Novigrad as the largest city in the region, though smaller cities like Oxenfurt still dwarf most cities in The Elder Scrolls.
Bethesda and Obsidian games have been praised time and again for their open worlds, so it's unlikely that many Skyrim fans would be happy to see a city with as many inaccessible areas as in The Witcher or Dragon Age. The most likely path for Avowed's success is focusing on developing just one or two cities to be the metropolitan centers of the game's world, while keeping them totally explorable.
This helps avoid problems like the one faced by The Outer Worlds' Byzantium, a city which is supposed to be the capital of the region, but which the player can only access a very small part of in order to explain the dissonance between the game world and the canonical setting.
Avowed is set in the same universe as Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity series. The setting has a few cities which could be developed in Avowed, such as Defiance Bay and New Heomar. One side effect of the Pillars of Eternity games being top-down rather than open-world RPGs is that the art in-game implies these cities are realistically sized, as unlike in a first-person game, the developer is under no pressure to make every part of the city open to exploration. The downside is that if these cities do not live up to renditions in the previous games, player immersion could be negatively affected.
To add to the challenge, it is generally harder to suspend disbelief in a first-person RPG compared to a top-down game, as the player is being asked to directly experience the world through their player character's eyes, encouraging them to take the world as presented to them more literally. If any developer can pull off turning one of these top-down cities into a fully explorable and immersive cities, though, it's Obsidian.
With rumors circulating that Avowed’s world could be far larger than Skyrim, many fans may be hoping that Obsidian will be more ambitious with its towns and cities than its previous games. With Cyperpunk 2077 promising to deliver a huge metropolis in the form of Night City, giving players at least one truly explorable city in Avowed will be vital as both developers battle to bring RPGs into the next generation of gaming.
Avowed is in development for PC and Xbox Series X.