Avowed Story Trailer Suggests You'll Be Dealing With A Lot Of Liars In The Living Lands (2024)

By Phil Hornshaw on June 9, 2024 at 11:56AM PDT

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There's a lot going on in Avowed, with its world being infested with a life-twisting pestilence called the Dreamscourge, but a new trailer suggests you'll also have a lot of competing influences of the human variety to deal with during the game.

Developer Obsidian Entertainment showed off the trailer during the Xbox Games Showcase, with a whole lot of new gameplay and voiceover from three different characters--all of whom suggest the others are lying to you. That already creates a convoluted sense of the plot in the Living Lands, the game's setting, where it seems a lot of people will want you to help them achieve their goals, and it'll be up to you to navigate their agendas to do what's best for you, and maybe, the rest of the island.

Check out the trailer below.

The description for the trailer provides a little more context, giving a little further depth on the fact that, yeah, a lot of people want to shape the Living Lands for their own ends.

"Explore the Living Lands, a mysterious island filled with adventure and danger. As an envoy of Aedyr, you are sent to investigate rumors of a spreading plague with a secret that threatens to destroy everything. Can you save the island and your soul from the forces threatening to tear them apart?"

Meantime, the trailer shows the kind of power you're going to wield as you decide what to do about all these different folks and their ideas about what the future of the Living Lands should be. That includes a ton of powerful magic that you'll use against people who look like they've been infected by the Dreamscourge, which is described as "a mysterious plague of the soul," to turn them into some kind of strange, almost-ethereal creatures. We also spied some other gameplay, including some light first-person platforming, suggesting you'll be making your way through the Living Lands' deep wilds as well as its towns and cities.

Obsidian shared even more details in an Xbox Wire article. Your role as the envoy of Aedyr puts you at the epicenter of tensions between the empire and the locals of the Living Lands. The first voice in the trailer is Aedyr's emperor, who's worried the Dreamscourge could rampage through the Living Lands and eventually threaten his realm, so your job is to find the source of the plague and stop it. The second voice is Inquisitor Lödwyn, who adds some caveats about conquest to the proceedings. She's "the leader of the Steel Garrote--an extremist paladin order from Aedyr--[who] believes there’s something more sinister at play and calls on you not only to eradicate the Dreamscourge, but also to bring the island’s unruly factions to heel."

The third and final voice is that of Giatta, one of your four companions in the game, who we also see in the trailer zapping people with magic. She's an animancer, someone who studies soul magic, and according to the article, "perceives a larger and more mysterious force at work in the land and urges you to embrace it in all of its awe and chaos. As a stranger to these shores, you’ll need to navigate your relationship with all three of these factions, work to uncover the source of the Dreamscourge and prevent it from plunging the Living Lands into madness."

As for other hard details, there aren't many in the trailer. We know Avowed is coming to Xbox Series X|S and PC sometime in 2024, and that it'll be on Game Pass on day one--but that's about it.

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