Avowed Has Big Stealth Archer Potential

ign.com:

From the moment its cinematic announcement trailer revealed that it would be played from a first-person perspective, Avowed has been viewed as Obsidian Entertainment’s answer to Skyrim. It’s a position Obsidian itself has tried to distance itself from, largely because Avowed is a smaller scale RPG made up of interconnected zones rather than a huge, sprawling open world game. Despite this, the Skyrim comparison makes a certain amount of sense; after proving it could do Bethesda games better than Bethesda itself with Fallout: New Vegas, Obsidian created its own Fallout analogue in 2019’s The Outer Worlds. It cut short the agonising wait for Fallout 5 with a similar style of RPG (sure, it wasn’t open world, but it was directed by Fallout’s original creators), and so eyes have naturally turned to Avowed – could this be the game that finally gives us a new Elder Scrolls-like adventure years before Bethesda ships its own Skyrim successor?

At gamescom 2024 I was able to play an hour of Avowed. That’s hardly enough to say if it truly is capable of standing up to such a landmark RPG as Skyrim – I didn’t even get to explore outside of a single cave. However, what I did play suggested it may well equal (or, hopefully, actually better) Skyrim in one important area: the stealth archer build.

It’s a meme among the Skyrim community that everyone will eventually spec into a stealth archer build, no matter their initial intentions for a playthrough. That’s because playing a shadowy sniper in Skyrim is incredibly satisfying. You can decimate entire dungeons largely unseen and the thud of an arrow hitting an enemy’s skull is delightful every single time, particularly when it triggers a slow-motion killcam. I think Obsidian knows all this and has gone to lengths to ensure its own ranger class is equally strong.

The gamescom demo’s example ranger build was, naturally, equipped with a bow. The fundamentals of it will be familiar to anyone who’s played not just Skyrim but any other game