Avowed Is Full Of Discoveries And The Freedom To Find Them--Or Not

Much has been made about Avowed's approach to its setting, the Living Lands, and the fact that it is not an open-world game. Instead, Avowed's world is made up of "open zones"--large geographical areas that are interconnected with other large areas, much like a previous game from developer Obsidian, The Outer Worlds.

At least in the first of Avowed's areas, that means that Obsidian has put a focus on making sure that the entire space provides interesting adventures. Whether you're chasing side quests handed out by random characters populating the Living Lands' biggest city, Paradis, or just rambling through the area to see what's there, there are plenty of rewards for exploration. There are bandit camps, ruins, half-destroyed hovels, and groups of dead soldiers surrounding the corpses of huge bears. The Living Lands is a place dense with stories and thick with secrets to uncover, and even wandering aimlessly through the wilderness feels like an adventure unto itself.

"We have these open zones, and they're expansive, they have a lot of breadth of them, but they're manageable enough for our team size to be able to handcraft every part of them and to fill them to the adequate amount of density that we want in that environment," said region director Berto Ritger in an interview with GameSpot. "So we don't want big, big, long expanses, of just grass, that has nothing going on. There are moments of serenity and calm in the environment, but there's always a little bit of something. And we try to have enough variety as well with those things where you're not finding the same corpse of the potion in his hand over and over."

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