When Silence Becomes a Marketing Strategy
Avowed launched in February 2025 to a reception that was warm but not euphoric. Obsidian’s first-person RPG set in the Eora universe drew solid reviews, found a decent player base, and then – as tends to happen with mid-tier releases that don’t dominate the cultural conversation – the discourse around it went quiet. What nobody at Obsidian likely planned was what that quiet would do to the rest of their catalog.
Players who finished Avowed and wanted more of that world, more of that lore, more of Eora’s particular brand of dense political worldbuilding, had somewhere obvious to go. And a meaningful portion of them went there. Steam charts and community forum activity in the months following Avowed’s release showed a noticeable uptick in engagement with Pillars of Eternity and its sequel, Deadfire – games that had been out for nearly a decade in the first case, and several years in the second. Obsidian didn’t announce a sale. They didn’t run a campaign. Players just went back.
What Avowed Left Players Wanting
Avowed is a deliberately accessible game. It simplifies many of the systems that made Pillars of Eternity a daunting proposition for mainstream RPG players – the isometric perspective, the dense ability trees, the encyclopedic lore dumps that required reading in-game codex entries just to understand character motivations. Obsidian built Avowed to be a gateway, not a deep dive. That design choice worked exactly as intended, and then created an appetite it couldn’t fully satisfy.
The Living Lands, where Avowed is set, are an interesting location, but they occupy a narrow slice of the broader Eora world. Players who became curious about the Dyrwood, about Defiance Bay, about the god Eothas and what he actually did before the events of Deadfire, found that Avowed didn’t have those answers. The game tells a self-contained story while sitting inside a much larger fiction. For players who respond to lore depth, that’s less a limitation than an invitation.
Pillars of Eternity rewards the kind of attention Avowed builds in players. The original game – released in 2015 – is built on the premise that this world has genuine history, that factions have genuine reasons for their positions, that the gods are not symbols but actors with agendas. That framework was already there when Avowed players arrived, and it landed differently for them than it did for players who tried Pillars cold in 2015 with no prior attachment to Eora.
The Quiet Return of Classic CRPGs
Pillars of Eternity has never entirely left. Its community has stayed active, modding continues, and the game appears in nearly every serious CRPG recommendation list. But activity around a game existing steadily and activity spiking because of an external catalyst are different things, and Avowed functioned as that catalyst.
This pattern – a newer, more accessible release in a series pulling players toward older, deeper entries – isn’t unique to Obsidian. It happened when Capcom’s Resident Evil silence sent fans back to Village, and it surfaces wherever a franchise makes a recent impression without fully releasing its grip on the player. The appeal isn’t nostalgia exactly – it’s the sense that there’s more world to find if you’re willing to work for it.
Why Older Pillars Players Are Returning Too
It’s not only Avowed converts making the trip back. A segment of the renewed Pillars activity comes from lapsed players – people who started Pillars of Eternity at launch, got twenty hours in, got overwhelmed, and shelved it. Avowed gave them a reason to try again. They now understand the gods, they recognize faction names, they have emotional investment in Eora as a setting rather than a cold start into a system-heavy RPG they’d heard was punishing.
Pillars of Eternity is punishing, at least by contemporary standards. Character creation alone involves decisions that new players struggle to evaluate without prior knowledge. Its combat is slower and more deliberate than Avowed’s real-time approach. Dialogues run long, and the game expects you to care about things like the theological implications of the Hollowborn crisis before you’ve had any reason to care. None of that changed. What changed is that some players are arriving with context.
That context makes a significant difference. The Hollowborn crisis – in which children are being born without souls, and no one knows why – hits much harder if you already understand Eora’s cosmology from Avowed, already know that the gods are involved in things they claim not to be, already have a disposition toward the world’s cynical attitude toward divine authority. Pillars was always telling a story worth caring about. For a new wave of players, Avowed did the work of making them care first.
None of this was Obsidian’s stated strategy going into Avowed’s development. They built the game to stand alone, with accessibility clearly prioritized over continuity. But the deeper Eora lore stayed intact inside the fiction, referenced rather than explained, and that restraint created exactly the right kind of itch. Avowed withholds enough that players go looking for answers somewhere else, and Pillars of Eternity is where the answers live. The irony is that Obsidian’s most welcoming game in the franchise may end up doing more for the long-term health of its most demanding one than any direct sequel pitch could have.
