Avowed launched earlier this year to a warm but measured reception, and since then Obsidian has gone almost completely quiet on what comes next. No DLC roadmap, no expansion tease, no season pass announcement. That silence is doing something unexpected: it’s sending players back to the Pillars of Eternity games.
The Waiting Game Nobody Signed Up For
Avowed occupies an interesting position in Obsidian’s catalog. It shares a world with the Pillars of Eternity series – the Living Lands exist within Eora, the same fictional universe where the two isometric RPGs are set – but it plays entirely differently. First-person, action-focused, shorter. For players who came to Avowed without Pillars of Eternity baggage, the connection was mostly flavor. For longtime fans, it was a chance to walk through lore they’d read about for years. Either way, finishing Avowed leaves a specific kind of itch that the game itself doesn’t scratch again.
When a game ends and there’s nothing announced to follow it, players tend to go one of two directions: they move on entirely, or they dig deeper into the existing library. With Avowed, a growing number are choosing the second option. Forum activity on both Reddit and the Obsidian community boards shows a consistent uptick in players posting about starting or restarting Pillars of Eternity 1 and 2 in the weeks following Avowed’s release window. The threads read like travelogues – “finally understanding why Eothas matters,” “just hit Twin Elms for the first time,” “Deadfire is the better game and I’ll die on this hill.”
The Pillars games are dense. Pillars of Eternity runs roughly 60 to 80 hours for a thorough playthrough, and Deadfire adds another 50 on top if you count DLC and the ship exploration loop. These aren’t games you casually squeeze in. The fact that players are committing to them now, after playing a comparatively streamlined RPG like Avowed, says something about how much the world-building resonated. Avowed gave people a reason to care about Eora without necessarily giving them the full picture – and the full picture is in those older games.
Obsidian hasn’t made any public statement about Avowed DLC since launch. No developer diary, no “we hear you” post about fan requests, nothing. For a studio that was fairly communicative during Avowed’s development cycle, the post-launch quiet is conspicuous. Whether that silence means DLC is deep in production and unannounced, or that it simply isn’t coming, nobody outside the studio knows. That ambiguity is doing the Pillars catalog a real favor.
Why Avowed Points Backward Instead of Forward
The design of Avowed itself creates a natural referral pipeline to Pillars of Eternity. The game drops names, factions, gods, and historical events constantly – the Engwithans, Waidwen’s Legacy, the Hollowborn crisis, Eothas as a figure of catastrophe and then as something more complicated. None of it is explained at length because it doesn’t need to be for Avowed’s story to work. But for players who want to understand rather than just encounter these references, the only place to go is the older games.
Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire is actually the more direct companion piece to Avowed thematically. Deadfire deals with Eothas in ways that Avowed quietly inherits, and playing it makes certain character attitudes and world states in Avowed click into place. Some players are discovering this in reverse – finishing Avowed, reading a forum post, then booting up Deadfire and realizing halfway through why the Living Lands missionaries talk about certain gods the way they do. It’s not necessary context, but it makes everything richer.
This pattern isn’t unique to Obsidian’s catalog. The same thing happened with Halo when 343 went quiet about new entries – fans cycled back to earlier installments to fill the gap, and in doing so rediscovered what made the series worth caring about. With Avowed, the pipeline is more thematic than mechanical, since the gameplay between Avowed and Pillars is radically different. But the emotional draw is identical: more world, more story, same universe.
The Pillars games also benefit from being genuinely good in ways that haven’t aged out. The writing holds up. Deadfire in particular has companion dialogue that sits comfortably next to anything Obsidian has made since. New players coming from Avowed are encountering these games without the baggage of 2015 or 2018 expectations, and several are expressing surprise at how well they play. The tactical isometric combat has a learning curve, but the writing carries people through it. The genre barrier that once kept Pillars of Eternity niche feels lower now, possibly because Avowed lowered it on purpose.
There’s also a completionist dimension to this. Avowed shipped with import-style decisions that acknowledged the existence of prior Pillars playthroughs, even if the actual mechanical import system was simplified. Knowing that your choices in Pillars of Eternity can color how certain NPCs reference past events – even obliquely – gives dedicated players a reason to go back and actually make those choices intentionally. It’s a light system, but it works as motivation.
What This Means for the Series Going Forward
The revived interest in Pillars of Eternity is good for Obsidian regardless of what happens with Avowed DLC. A larger active player base familiar with Eora’s history means a more invested audience for whatever comes next, whether that’s an Avowed expansion, a Pillars 3, or something else entirely set in the same world. The lore gap between Avowed’s audience and the older games is closing organically, which is exactly the kind of groundwork that makes a franchise sustainable rather than one-title-deep.
The real question is whether Obsidian recognizes what’s happening and responds to it – or whether the DLC silence continues long enough that players finish their Pillars runs and simply move on to something else entirely. The window where returning fans are warm and engaged doesn’t stay open indefinitely, and right now, Deadfire’s ending still has people asking what happens to Eora next.
