Baldur’s Gate 3’s romance system is one of the game’s most famous and popular features, and while Avowed’s choice not to have a romance system of its own may raise a few eyebrows, director Carrie Patel expressed her confidence during an interview at EGX that the game is better off without one.
The latest RPG from the storied Obsidian Entertainment, taking place in the same universe as its Pillars of Eternity series, Avowed is currently on course to release early next year. While excitement for the game is high, comparisons are already being drawn between it and Larian Studios' triumphant 2023 hit, Avowed is set to follow its own path, focusing on only four well-written companions, with the lack of romance being key to how players will experience their stories.
“It’s a ton of work”, Patel notes, on romance systems. “You want to make sure you do it right. And part of that is also you want to make sure that a player who opts not to romance but still wants to have a very deep relationship with those companions gets to have just as thorough and meaningful an experience on a friendship or ally path as [if] they went on a romance path. And so we felt that we could best tell our companions' stories and our players' relationships with them without the romance option”
For the Avowed team, ensuring that all of their companions are equally fleshed out, and their stories can be experienced equally by all players is key to the game’s story, and by extension, key to players’ experiences. “With the four companions we wanted them to all have key roles in the story, different party roles, different personalities, and ways that they compliment each other and let them tell the story of the Living Lands to the player”, Patel explains.
The lack of a romance system is particularly important with regards to one companion, who Patel explains is in a relationship, something which is key to their development over the course of the game. “[It] isn't a story that I think you often get to see in a lot of games with a party member who's travelling with you”, she begins “and so one thing players will really get to explore with here is kind of how she navigates having her heart in one place, while knowing that she really needs to be here”.
At the end of the day, Avowed and Baldur’s Gate 3 are, of course, different games, and while Patel accepts that romance “works very well in some games”, that is not necessarily the case with Avowed. Though comparisons between the RPGs are unlikely to go away anytime soon, Patel remains confident that Avowed’s quality will inevitably do the talking. “Players will always respond well to a really good character.”