Avowed is the upcoming game from Obsidian Entertainment that has many Skyrim fans wondering if the studio’s new RPG could spiritually succeed The Elder Scrolls series. If the trailer is anything to go by, the new game will share many features with The Elder Scrolls from its first-person perspective to its sword-and-sorcery gameplay.
Avowed will be set in the Living Lands, an ecologically diverse northern frontier in Obsidian’s world of Eora, first seen in the two Pillars of Eternity games. While Bethesda is working on The Elder Scrolls 6, Avowed’s setting has an underrated advantage over the next Elder Scrolls game’s most likely locations.
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Avowed will be set in the Living Lands, described as a “lawless land where communities band together, fall apart, and fight petty wars with eachother constantly.” The two Pillars of Eternity games were set in Dyrwood, a warring kingdom, and the Deadfire Archipelago, a distant chain of islands populated by pirates and outcasts.
One of the reasons Obsidian is moving its Pillars of Eternity setting to a first-person RPG format is financial. As well-received as the Pillars of Eternity games were, it is hoped that moving the RPG series to a more recognizable format will help draw new players. This, in turn, would help further establish Obsidian Entertainment as Microsoft's RPG powerhouse (especially considering the Bethesda acquisition).
However, the fact that Pillars of Eternity isn’t nearly as well known as The Elder Scrolls could be Avowed's biggest advantage. For many fans, Skyrim was their first introduction to the world of The Elder Scrolls, making uncovering the strange lore and secrets hidden within its world all the more rewarding. Almost a decade later, fans have seen far more of Tamriel. While placed like Elsweyr and Black Marsh were once distant-feeling and intentionally alien in their descriptions, they’ve now both been depicted in modern detail in The Elder Scrolls Online.
To make matters worse, the long wait for news about The Elder Scrolls 6 has had many fans deep-diving the lore in search of hints about the next game’s potential setting or story. Simply put, ten years after the immense mainstream success of Skyrim, Tamriel isn’t nearly as interesting or unknown for many players as it was in the franchise’s past.
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Avowed has the opportunity to take advantage of a familiar format and broadly known fantasy tropes while still taking place in both a world which fewer players have explored before, and a part of that world which has never even been seen in a Pillars of Eternity game. While Elder Scrolls fans got to explore all of Tamriel’s provinces in The Elder Scrolls: Arena, the game’s old graphics left so much to the imagination that the potential to explore those areas in a future Elder Scrolls game was still exciting. However, many of those areas have now been depicted in The Elder Scrolls Online, and Tamriel is feeling much smaller than it once did.
Most fantasy fans also have far fewer expectations when it comes to Avowed’s lore and what they might expect to find in the Living Lands. While players of The Elder Scrolls 6 might find exploring Dwemer ruins less exciting and more familiar than it was when they first played Skyrim, Avowed's players are far less likely to know about aspects of the lore like the ancient Engwithan ruins running underneath Eora and their connection to the world’s backstory.
Open-world games need their worlds to feel immense and unexplored at the start of the game. There’s an argument to be made that The Elder Scrolls 6 could still achieve this - after all, Skyrim was able to create a world that felt worth exploring despite previous games like The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion. However, while Oblivion sold under 10 million copies, Skyrim surpassed 30 million sales all the way back in 2016, and could risk being a victim of its own success, unable to capture the sense of originality players felt in the last game.
Not only have far fewer players had a chance to interact with the world of Pillars of Eternity, but its inhabitants are just as weird and wonderful as those in The Elder Scrolls. It isn’t known whether or not Avowed will have multiple playable races yet, but alongside Eora’s more standards fantasy Elves and Dwarves are the Orlans, a diminutive race of fur-covered people, the Godlike, whose bodies are radically changed when they’re "blessed" by a deity, and the large semi-aquatic Aumaua.
As much as Avowed’s gameplay resembles The Elder Scrolls based on what little has been revealed so far, exploring its world doesn’t risk revealing too many more similarities. The world of Eora has a huge amount of lore that far fewer players have come into contact with than The Elder Scrolls’ story. From the fact that many of its nations are recently liberated colonies to the idea that the gods of Eora were artificially created using animancy - the science of souls - Avowed’s world could be just as rich as The Elder Scrolls’ with the advantage of being far less familiar.
It is possible, of course, that The Elder Scrolls 6 will not take place on Tamriel. Descriptions of other continents on the planet of Nirn from the monkey and snake people of Akavir to the lost land of Yokuda suggest that Bethesda could find a fruitful new landscape to explore if it leaves the series main setting behind. However, most rumors point towards The Elder Scrolls 6 being set somewhere in the west of Tamriel, with many claiming that it will be in Hammerfell. If so, The Elder Scrolls 6 will be set in a province already seen in Arena, Daggerfall, Redguard, and The Elder Scrolls Online.
All things considered, Avowed might have more than just time on its side. The game is almost certain to release before The Elder Scrolls 6, with lower expectations, a less familiar world, and original fantasy races. Whether or not that will be enough for Avowed to be considered Skyrim’s spiritual successor remains to be seen.
Avowed is in development for PC and Xbox Series X.