Avowed: A Stunning Showcase of Obsidian’s Technical Mastery

Avowed caught me off guard. This stunning, expansive open-world role-playing game is visually impressive, running smoothly on both PC and Xbox, and it utilizes the latest features of Unreal Engine 5 nearly flawlessly. Anyone familiar with Obsidian Entertainment’s rich history would recognize that their track record for technical refinement isn’t particularly stellar, making this a surprising achievement – it stands out as a prime example of a recent Unreal Engine 5 title that harnesses the engine’s best attributes while sidestepping its major drawbacks.

At its foundation, Avowed follows a structure not unlike The Outer Worlds: an open world game with a tighter, more focused scope compared to the broad designs we expect from studios like Ubisoft or Rockstar. This plays to Avowed’s strengths, as The Living Lands offer beautifully crafted, vibrant areas to explore. The world is divided into moderately sized segments, yet each of these spaces is rich with sights and activities, featuring intricately designed locations filled with atmosphere. I might describe the game’s visuals as a fascinating blend of Elder Scrolls and Chrono Trigger (!), boasting striking colors, unusual shapes, and towering structures.

Typically, Obsidian’s first-person RPGs come with a hefty dose of bugs and a general lack of polish. While Avowed is not flawless, and you may occasionally encounter rough edges, it is surprisingly well-tuned, managing to steer clear of many of these issues. Animation, camera movement, NPC behavior, and combat all feel impressively refined.

As a title built on Unreal Engine 5, it’s no surprise that Avowed employs its three key features – Lumen global illumination and reflections, Nanite virtualized geometry, and virtual shadow maps – but it’s the manner in which they are utilized that truly showcases their value.

Consider Nanite, for example. It’s designed to provide a seamless and continuous shift between various levels of detail to minimize the perception of pop-in. This is essential for open world games, where the size of environments means you need to rely on level of detail (LOD) transitions to maintain high visual quality – so those transitions should occur without the player noticing. However, the initial UE5 release did not support using Nanite for transparent objects, making it difficult to implement elements like trees with this system.

Avowed, on the other hand, effectively leverages Nanite for nearly everything. Trees are detailed with a high level of fidelity up close, allowing you to admire them from afar, then walk backward while keeping your gaze fixed on them without ever detecting a noticeable drop in quality as you distance yourself. That’s Nanite in action. The same applies to buildings and the landscape, which feels consistent regardless of your position within the game, giving The Living Lands an exceptionally authentic feel.

There is still some minor pop-in with certain objects, such as grass clumps, in Xbox performance modes and lower PC settings, but this is a very rare occurrence. This contrasts sharply with The Outer Worlds, built on Unreal Engine 4, which suffered from frequent LOD swaps using older systems, so Avowed’s implementation of Nanite represents a significant improvement.

Avowed also blends an intelligent combination of virtual shadow maps (VSMs) and screen-space shadows for impressive detail. VSMs are advantageous as they eliminate the drawbacks of cascaded shadow maps, yet they can be resource-intensive and demanding on memory. To address this, Obsidian has deliberately excluded smaller details from the VSM, instead relying on screen-space shadows to fill in those absent details. This hybrid approach is more efficient and generally looks good, although you may spot some visual artifacts and edges on screen if you observe closely.

Now let’s discuss Lumen. Avowed integrates both Lumen GI and reflections, although quality can vary depending on the settings. At its pinnacle, Lumen delivers a sophisticated solution for real-time global illumination (RTGI). Avowed features a dynamic day-night cycle and Lumen allows this lighting to behave more naturally: distant shadows and crevices are filled in effectively, and color shifts appear as light bounces throughout the scene, while Lumen reflections enable reflective surfaces to show subtle results.

When you combine all of these techniques with exceptional artistic direction, you create something that genuinely impresses. Obsidian has been using Unreal for some time, and this is their first 3D game that successfully navigates many of the rendering challenges previously observed in open world RPGs. It’s evident that UE5 has provided significant advantages to the team and enabled them to craft their most extraordinary world to date.

This includes 30fps quality, 60fps performance, and 40fps balanced (exclusively for 120Hz screens) modes on Xbox Series X, along with an uncapped frame-rate toggle for VRR displays. This is promising – we’ve been advocating for 40fps for years, yet it’s still relatively rare for Xbox titles. Meanwhile, the Series S offers basic quality and balanced modes, with the balanced mode once again limited to utilize…

with 120Hz screens.

For Series X, both the standard and balanced settings showcase the robust machine Lumen with RTGI and reflections, alongside an increase in the density of small objects across the environment, particularly vegetation. The quality mode features a slight increase in vegetation compared to balanced mode, although it remains connected. The performance mode sacrifices some features, resulting in less detailed Lumen GI and the absence of Lumen reflections, leaning instead on SSR. A significant amount of environmental detail is also compromised, and shadow quality is diminished. The quality mode for Series S aligns with the balanced mode of Series X, while Series S’s balanced mode sits between the performance and balanced modes of Series X, lacking Lumen reflections.

As one might expect, resolutions also vary across modes, with Series X’s quality mode typically running at 1440p, upscaled to 4K, while performance mode operates at around 1080p. The balanced mode is more complicated to determine due to constraints on our end, but it seems to function within similar ranges as the quality mode – albeit possibly with more variable outcomes. Meanwhile, Series S’s quality mode is approximately 1080p, and balanced mode runs at around 720p. The latter resolution feels too low, exhibiting noticeable noise and artifacts, so I would not recommend it.

Performance remains reliably solid across the 30fps and 40fps modes, with only occasional stutters on both Series X and Series S. Series X’s performance mode is the least reliable option and requires VRR for optimal results, as larger areas struggle to maintain a steady 60fps. Nevertheless, this is by far Obsidian’s best-performing console game – not perfect, but satisfactory nonetheless. If you have the choice, I suggest opting for balanced mode on Series X and quality mode on Series S.

The PC version offers options for enhanced performance and superior visuals, including hardware Lumen RTGI and reflections. My initial impressions were mostly positive despite some stuttering – the experience was noticeably smoother than other recent UE5 titles. There are still some 100-200ms stutters due to shader compilation, even on high-end systems, but these latency spikes are at least less frequent than in other UE5 games.

In terms of visual elements, hardware Lumen reflections appear significantly superior to the machine mode, offering more detail.