Give me clocks, but I take it from the online discourse that the weekend bump didn't save the games numbers? The people claiming it was seem to have gone silent on that point.
What's interesting is that i peeked at the resetera thread on avowed and most people were shitting on it there too, and it was allowed by the mods, so it must not be woke enough to justify tribal defense. Leave it to Microsoft to engineer a game in the sweet spot of bland and politically correct enough to not become a culture war football, so mediocre and lacking conviction nobody wants to defend it.
It's too woke, and thus making them look bad, and not woke enough since the devs walked back the pronoun stuff. It annoys both sides.
the basic writing was top notch. The entire game revolving around the competency crisis despite being made in 2019 before that took off was really neat, and i bet if they tripled down on those themes in new and exciting ways they'd be able to make something amazing. In general the worst parts of the game are the ones that are easy to fix (the graphics, making non-ugly characters, combat) Beyond that i pirate so i'm not wasting money if i'm wrong.
What? No it wasn't. The writing was shit from the ground up and baked into it at the core. Every dispute comes down to "white male bad" and "corpo bad". Every moral dilemma has three outcomes; A, B, and compromise C, with C always being the correct choice.
The competency crisis was predicted before release. I even remember Jordon Peterson saying if it continues, bridges will be collapsing and it'll be blamed on lack of diversity. It being a mainstream talking point now means that, as a theme, the game likely won't have it because it would "problematic" or whatever. Given it's anti-capitalism leanings, I won't be surprised if the next game condemns "rainbow capitalism".
Then there's the Rick and Morty fanfic/millennial writing.
As for the gameplay. It's all front loaded to impress reviewers who don't play past the first few hours.
That super weird because unless you're terminally online you don't see very much about Avowed in media coverage. It's not really a hot topic outside the fanbase and some curious players.
On r/Avowed you can only see the one complaining about "the haters" but no one is really trashing the game on the sub, just some normal critics you can see on every games.
If there's a real outrage somewhere it's a very small group, I won't take youtubers opinions because they're vampires who just want le grift.
Even in scandal Avowed is mid. Which is good in my opinion, it's nice for once to not have a media storm polluting everywhere I go.
Avowed is a sad game and there's nothing more to say.
This has been an issue for a while. "I don't like woke media X but..." followed by some word salad about why it's "important".
I suspect a majority of these are people playing on gamepass, but take it for what you will.
I thought that was debunked already? Successful AA and AAA games, even with game pass, pull in 6 digit player counts.