I had high hopes for Avowed.
After all I’m a huge fan of western RPGs and this was being developed by Obsidian who initially made their name producing sequels to other, successful, RPGs with Knights of the Old Republic 2 and Fallout: New Vegas.
Sure, they’d been given some freedom to create something original and given us the disappointing Alpha Protocol, but Outer Worlds was okay, even if it played a little like a Fallout knock off.
I managed to avoid paying for early access as, even though it looked like the sort of thing I’d enjoy, there still seemed something “off” about it.
It wasn’t the first person view, I’ve ran through Cyberpunk 2077 multiple times and never had a problem with that… but as I listened to a few podcasts and heard from people who had played it, the more I heard… the less I wanted to play.
It’s not that these people didn’t like it, most were 40-50 hours deep into it, exploring as much as they could before finishing it… but what they were praising didn’t sound like the sort of thing I’d enjoy.
So… I passed on the game.
Another reason I wanted it to be good is that, overall… much of what I’ve played on Xbox so far this year has been utter dross, or updates to dross, or updates to dross I played last year.
At time of writing, I’ve scored 42,768 points this year… of which maybe 1,000 stands out as quality (that being Hero of Fate, a Vampire Survivors variant) whereas the rest… is… garbage.
Now I’m well aware I’m to blame, if I hadn’t bought the shovelware in the first place then I wouldn’t feel compelled to work through the updates to that shovelware when it gets sent out into the world.
But… thus far… I’ve played 24 updates to titles… most of which took under 10 minutes to finish (and in one instant it took longer to download the game than it did to unlock the 5 Achievements in the update) but it still feels like a sorry state of affairs that what used to be my go-to console.
Digging deeper… I had £50 in credit on my account having converted a gift card into Xbox credit… £9.99 was spent on Hero of Fate, with £7.47 left standing there now, this means I’ve spent £32.54 on garbage titles this year. All in sales… self-control is clearly not my strong point.
By contrast, on PlayStation, I’ve played 3 games to completion (granted I’d already played all of them on Xbox originally) and 2 of those 100% completed for the Platinum, and a 4th game I’ve put in close to 17 hours and I’m enjoying the hell out of it even without the steady pop of Trophies being unlocked.
I’ve joked in the past about Xbox for Quantity and PlayStation for Quality… but it’s starting to look ridiculous now.
The next shining light on the horizon for Xbox is Atomfall… sure it’s a multiformat game, but it’ll be free to play on Xbox at launch… so maybe something other than Balatro to play there for quality gaming time.