Avowed Tips To Help You Save The Living Lands

Avowed, a fantasy RPG from Obsidian, features a quest to the Living Lands to investigate a mysterious plague. This systems-heavy RPG gives you a ton of flexibility and options for how you play, some of which aren't fully explained to you. Luckily, we have plenty of tips to help you navigate Avowed, from looting best practices and different points of view.
Obsidian is no stranger to crafting compelling RPGs. For more help on the team's latest effort, use our Avowed guides hub.

Enjoy a hearty breakfast

There is no shortage of food items and plants that you can eat to restore your health, but there are benefits to eating with a full health bar too. When you consume food that would overfill your health or essence, the extra restoration is held and will be used when you take damage. In combat, food restores health slowly, but it does still restore it, and when the fight is over, it will refill faster. This lets you automatically health post-combat, making it a nice boost to have.

A packrat's paradise

Avowed does have encumbrance, but it's pretty forgiving once you understand it. First, only weapons and armor have weight. Equipment like rings, trinkets, gloves, and boots do not have weight, and all other items, like food, materials, and upgrade materials, also don't have weight. You can carry an unlimited amount of unweighted items, so collect anything and everything you can find. Weapons and armor can be stashed to camp or dismantled straight from the menu, letting you quickly unburden yourself if you loot too much stuff.

No stealing in the Living Lands

Turns out, stealing isn't a crime in the Living Lands, at least not for you. You can take anything you find; it doesn't matter if it's on a store shelf, in a chest, or on someone's table in a bar. If it can be looted, you can take it without any consequences. Occasionally, an NPC will comment on you going through their belongings or taking their stuff, but nothing comes from it, so grab anything your heart desires.

The Loot Chime and map markers

Avowed provides a ton of opportunities to find loot, and that includes some audio and visual clues. On the map, you can see markers for loot, with four main symbols. A small sprout shows an edible plant, a branch with some extending smaller branches shows an upgraded materials plant, a circle is a throwable plant, and an X marks a dead body with loot. In addition to these symbols, bodies with significant loot and all chests make a chime-like noise that is constant when you are near them. The noise gets louder as you get closer to the loot, so if you hear it, look around for some loot.

A short rest

Going to camp has lots of benefits: healing any missing health, providing a short break, letting you speak to your companions, and upgrading equipment. That said, camping spots can be placed pretty spread out, but luckily Avowed has a great feature for that. If you fast travel to a camping spot from the map, when you walk out of the camp, you will have the option to either exit where the camp is or to exit at your previous location. This means you can quickly fast travel to camp and return to where you left with ease, letting you quickly perform camp activities from anywhere.

A new perspective

Avowed can be played in both first-person or third-person, but you don't have to choose between the two options. Instead, you can swap between the two modes while playing just by holding the right stick on the controller. Combat and exploration can both be done in third-person mode, so if you aren't sure which POV you would prefer, you can quickly swap and try out both.

The power of friendship

After completing a quest, you will occasionally see an icon in the bottom left corner of the screen depicting one of your companion's symbols. This means they have new dialogue beats waiting for you back at camp, most of which just fills out their personality and provides an opportunity for them to tell you how they feel about your choices. However, if you converse with your companions enough in camp, they will offer to train with you, which rewards you with a permanent passive buff, usually in the form of some point in your stats.

Small world

Avowed is a smaller RPG than most, offering a few open regions compared to a massive open world, but that smaller setting applies to the characters in the Living Lands too. It's not uncommon to run into NPCs from both main and side quests multiple times, and they do remember the choices you have made. When it comes to making decisions in Avowed, you really need to consider what will happen if you run into those same characters again.

Skulls and Tiers

When you see an enemy in the environment or view a quest in your quest log, you may notice a sword with skulls on them. These are meant to indicate the gap between your gear and the enemy. One skull means a tier or two worth of upgrades, two means a bit more, and three typically means a whole quality tier. If an enemy is an entire quality level above you, your weapons do less damage and your armor negates less damage as a stat penalty. If a quest has this symbol on it, that means you will encounter enemies with those skull levels, so you may want to find a way to get better gear first.

Bounty hunting

There will be plenty of times when you need better gear in Avowed, meaning you either need money to buy it, materials to upgrade, or you need to find rare loot. One of the best ways to knock out all three options are the bounties found in each major city in each region. There are about five in each region, and these will take you to parts of each region you may not explore under normal circumstances. Most of these bounty targets have chests near them in addition to the monetary reward, plus you will likely find lots of loot while you travel to each one. Plus you get a decent amount of XP for turning them in, so it's a good place to start in each region.

Up your arsenal

Avowed's combat can unfold using a ton of different types of weapons, and you can really mix up what you're using. You get two loadouts that you can swap between on the fly, but more importantly, you have two hands for each loadout. If you use a large, two-handed weapon, that's all you can have for that loadout, but if you use single-handed weapons, you can mix and match however you like. Some combos are obviously like a wand and grimoire, but you can have two wands, two maces, or a pistol and sword if you want. There aren't stat penalties for playing this way, so use which combination your heart desires.
Obsidian is no stranger to crafting compelling RPGs. For more help on the team's latest effort, use our Avowed guides hub.

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