I've been playing a lot of Avowed this week, and while we'll all probably be writing a lot more about it--it's really good!--I wanted to take a moment to highlight the important way even the seemingly smallest of features can make an enormous difference to a game.
I deeply appreciated, for example, a screen you see right after booting, which tells me exactly why shaders were compiling, not just an announcement telling me they are. But the stuff I want to talk about in more detail today is the game's conversation system, and how it has been built to support both the weight of the universe's lore as well as the needs of a large and varied playerbase.
Up top is a screenshot of the conversation screen in action. Looks normal, right? A character talks, you select some responses, a conversation happens. But look at the two buttons down the bottom. The one of the left toggles subtitles on and off. Normally this is a main menu kind of thing, something you're supposed to toggle once based on preference then never touch again. Here, though, you can do it on the fly, which is amazing! I'm normally a subs off guy, but this game has some wild accents and creatures, so the button lets me turn them on for some (when I need to understand them) and off for others (so I can enjoy the game's gorgeous characters and environments unobscured).
I'm even more impressed with the button on the right. Avowed basically shipped with a wiki attached to its conversation system, so whenever a character or location or even concept from the Pillars of Eternity universe is mentioned, you can stop, check the conversation's logs and get a great little explainer on just who or what was mentioned. This has been life-changing to me, a guy who wanted to play this game in particular but isn't really a Pillars of Eternity guy, because now I'm fully up to speed about this universe's lore in ways I wasn't with, say, Baldur's Gate 3 even after 60-70 hours.
Accessibility is an important word in video games, and it's one that we usually--and rightfully--associate with making games more accessible to those who would otherwise be unable to play them. Here, though, it also means making a game more accessible generally, right down to people's tastes for subtitles and lore. I think it's been a huge success here, and I will really feel its absence next time I try and play you, Yakuza, yes you, I'm looking at you.
