‘Avowed’ Launches With ‘Very Positive’ Steam Reviews, Decent Critic Scores – Forbes
AvowedAvowed has launched in all-too-common-now paid early access on Xbox and PC, and players are getting their hands on the game for the first time as the critic embargo drops for reviews. So we can analyze the early reception here, a bit.The Avowed metascore among critics has settled at an 80 on Xbox and a 79 on PC. In the unfortunately eternal 6-10 video game scoring system (anything that’s a 60 or under may close your studio) that’s something I would classify as “good” not “great,” where that exact phrasing has been used in many reviews. We can compare that to Obsidian’s The Outer Worlds, which had an 85, and Fallout: New Vegas at an 84, so it’s a bit below both. And the world it’s from, Pillars of Eternity, has an 89 for the first game and an 88 for the second.Meanwhile, the player numbers we can actually track on Steam currently have the game scoring 82% “Very Positive” among those who own it. Metacritic user scores are not live yet, but those are unreliable given that you do not have to actually own the game to score it. I’d argue an 82% positive score is probably better than an 80 metascore in the context of how the two standards differ. This is, however, lower than the 91% positive of the recent Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, and also its 88 metascore. So, all of this points to good, not great, in terms of reception.AvowedHowever, given that this is an Xbox Game Pass game, there is likely no real way to know if Microsoft is going to consider it a success or not, as loads of players are just going to play it day one there, and Xbox sales are not even close to a trackable metric now. Steam sales are, and currently Avowed is #1, but that’s no great surprise. That is opposed to a publisher like EA who eventually said outright that Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s 1.5 million “engagements” was less than the 3 million they wanted. I would not expect Xbox to say anything like this one way or the other.Avowed is one Xbox exclusive that has not been announced as one that’s coming to PlayStation, seemingly in a similar class to Starfield, a big exclusive that has also not been announced to be making the leap. My guess is that if Avowed has not been confirmed to be coming to PS5 yet, that if it does, that wouldn’t happen until at least a year from now, if it happens at all. Just because Microsoft has said that all games are on the table to be shipped to competitors, that doesn’t necessarily mean all of them will be.I think that players may ultimately receive Avowed better than critics, but that remains to be seen, and “true” launch is still a few more days off. We’ll check back then.Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Bluesky and Instagram.Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.One Community. Many Voices. Create a free account to share your thoughts. Our community is about connecting people through open and thoughtful conversations. We want our readers to share their views and exchange ideas and facts in a safe space.In order to do so, please follow the posting rules in our site’s Terms of Service. We’ve summarized some of those key rules below. Simply put, keep it civil.Your post will be rejected if we notice that it seems to contain:User accounts will be blocked if we notice or believe that users are engaged in:So, how can you be a power user?Thanks for reading our community guidelines. Please read the full list of posting rules found in our site’s Terms of Service.
