Obsidian said that both big and little choices will matter in Avowed. 'The choices you make and the outcomes you see in front of you will depend on what you can find.'

I've said this before and I will say it again, Pillars of Eternity 2 has to be one of my favorite CRPGs of all-time, and it's also one of the underrated. This is in large part due to the themes and choices it allows you to make. PoE2 is all about colonialism, imperialism, and how we define and conceptualize 'progress'. It's also a game about chasing a huge green man across the half of the planet. It's still impressive how you defined your character in relation with those themes. Not in some shallow binary but in all kinds of weird, idiosyncratic, and nuanced way.

This is why I'm eager to play Avowed, set in the PoE universe after the events from the second game, this February, despite the oddly timid marketing Obsidian's done for the game. The devs claim they're still thinking about choices as much as they did with the isometric games. In a recent interview with Edge magazine (via GamesRadar), Carrie Patel, the game director of Avowed, said that the game tries to emphasize "giving the player the moment-to-moment choice to express and explore their leanings."

That can, of course, take the form of momentous, world-altering, do-you-kill-the-Rachni-Queen-style decisions, but it means the smaller stuff too. Patel's choice of whether or not to administer a health potion a wounded stranger allows you to discover "who you are in this world and how you can express that."

I'm going to be honest. That particular example does not excite me. I'm pretty certain 'are you going to be a needless dud or not?' Since the 1990s, games like this ask a character-defining RPG. I don't mind it being there - the original Pillars games had plenty of straight-forward moral choices, in addition to the shades of gray - but this isn’t the kind of thing that I would call out to make my RPG stand out from the crowd.

is a little more interesting because your choices are constrained by the actions you took in the past, both during dialogue and combat. "What you find will determine the choices you make, and what outcomes you see in front of you," says Patel. If you've been wasting your health potions and charging through the combat like an idiot, you won't be able to save our Sir Dying guy.

This is not a new thing in RPGs, but it sets Avowed apart from games like Mass Effect where you are only asked to choose based on your ideologies and not your actual material reality. You didn't require 500 omnigels to free the Rachni queen.