As soon as the release date was announced,Avowedwas tied for first place as my most anticipated game of the year. (The other gold medalist got unveiled in the same presentation:Indiana Jones and the Great Circle). Knowing that Avowed is arriving this year has me thinking about the preparation I need to do before it hits. Some of that prep ishardware related, but some will require doing a little gaming homework.
To be clear, there are no other games you need to play before you play Avowed — as indicated by the lack of a 2 or colon in its title. It’s just Avowed, the first game in whatObsidianlikely hopes will sell well enough to become a series. So there are no earlier games you need to play to understand its story.
But… Itisset in the same universe as the Pillars of Eternity games. For me, that’s an invitation to give myself the assignment of playingPillars of EternityandPillars of Eternity 2: Deadfirebefore Avowed comes out. Invitation might be too light a word; if it’s an invitation, it’s a strongly worded invitation and I am powerless to resist.
I don’t know why I’m like this. Some of it is definitely residual freelancer mindset, the vestigial remains of needing to sell myself as knowledgeable in order to land a gig. Before I got this job at TheGamer, I wrote about games on a freelance basis for four years, and did reviews as a volunteer before that. When you don’t work with one outlet all the time, you’re constantly sending pitches every day. And you’re not just pitching an article on a game; you’re pitching yourself and your expertise.
If you don’t have expertise, you have to go out and get it. When Valve revealedHalf-Life: Alyx, I knew that it would be a big game and wanted to cover it. But, the thing was, I had zero experience with the Half-Life franchise. So I bought all the games on Steam (at some point in those months leading up to Alyx, they were bundled together and on sale), played through Half-Life, Blue Shift, Half-Life 2, Episode 1, Episode 2, and, most uselessly, Lost Coast, and effectively familiarized myself with the franchise. I learned enough that I was able to pitch and write not just a review of Alyx, but a piece on the Half-Life timeline, too. More importantly for me now, I fell in love with the games and now consider it one of my favorite series, andHalf-Life 2an all-time favorite game.
So, when I look forward to writing about Avowed later this year, I can’t help but think that it would really be worthwhile to do the homework ahead of time. I don’thaveto; plenty of players will be coming in fresh with Avowed, and Obsidian designed the game to be a clean entry point. It doesn’t have Pillars of Eternity in the name for a reason. But wouldn’t I write about it better if I could place it in the proper context?
Maybe, though the topic of whether a series' most knowledgeable fans are really better at critically evaluating an individual game than newcomers who experience it on its own merit is a bigger discussion for another day.
This is how I tend to think about everything. Sometimes I’m momentarily paralyzed when I look at a book’s bibliography and think about how much better I would understand the topic if I read all those books, too. I’ve rarely related more to a character than Bill Nighy’s James Lake in the romantic dramedy About Time, who used his time travel powers to do all the reading he wouldn’t have had bandwidth for in everyday life. And though working as a games writer has exacerbated this trait for me, I know that other people feel it, too. It’s the same impulse that sends moviegoers down a wiki rabbit hole after the post-credits scene in aMarvelmovie, or tells them that they can’t just watch theStar Warsmovie they’re in the mood for without watching the entire saga. Even those of us who would never platinum a game may have a dark completionist urge lurking inside us. Hopefully, I can get it under control before I play through all of Obsidian’s back catalog, just to be safe.
