In a 31-minute Gamescom preview of Avowed by GameSpot, Obsidian has finally revealed when in the Pillars of Eternity timeline its upcoming action RPG Avowed takes place. The first-person Pillars spinoff begins sometime after the end of Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire.
Avowed was never announced as a direct sequel to Obsidian’s Pillars of Eternity games, but rather as another story set in the same Eora setting. Yet the events of Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire in particular were so big, so transformative, and with so many ending variations that fans like me had to wonder if Avowed took place after the original games or sometime in Eora’s distant past.
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And I assumed – and this seemed to be the consensus of the community – that Avowed would go the prequel route. The first trailer looked a bit more medieval than the gunpowder-infused age of sailing ships in Pillars itself. And if you want to get it Really Looking more closely at the lore, the importance of the Aedyr Empire – the protagonist of Avowed is the Emperor’s envoy – lent further credence to the prequel theory. Aedyr entered its era of “final imperial decline” at the time of the Pillars Games.
But no, not only does Avowed take place after Pillars of Eternity 1 and 2, the quest at the center of the Gamescom preview also cheekily references the events of Deadfire before directly confirming the timeline. In the quest, you help a priest of Eothas – the divine antagonist of Deadfire who possesses a magical crystal colossus to wreak existentially motivated havoc – unearth a relic of Pillars’ “most problematic favorite deity.” In the background, you can see the disturbingly calm priest building some sort of giant crystal effigy of Eothas.
In wonderfully classic Obsidian style, the friendly priest is actually a bit of a Freakjust like his god, and the crystal statue is a small magical Gundam he prepared for the Eothasian Artifact, a sort of miniature of Eothas’ Continent Destroyer form in Deadfire, which is also powered by damned souls. In case you think this is just a meta-reference for players, the quest’s dialogue directly mentions Eothas’ Deadfire rampage as a past event.
So Avowed moves the world of Eora forward, which is especially exciting considering how much the end of Deadfire upended everything: no matter what you do, Eothas manages to reverse the setting’s cycle of death and rebirth, leaving the people of the world to grapple with the consequences. The isolation of the Living Lands of Deadfire and the Dyrwood, meanwhile, frees the team from having to grapple with the specifics of how players left the world, though I’m excited at the prospect of seeing a familiar face or two. We’ll know all about it when Avowed finally launches on February 18.
