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Obsidian Entertainment’s Avowed is a brilliant RPG that expands upon the Pillars of Eternity universe in some truly awesome ways. While the game has often been compared to Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls—just like every first-person fantasy RPG—the game is very different.
Despite this, Obsidian Entertainment initially looked to Bethesda’s 2001 instant-classic Morrowind to teach players how to use magic in their game. While this scenario was eventually cut from the game, players would have been treated to a hilarious scene that showed the dangers of magic.
Avowed had a huge Morrowind reference
In an interview with PC Gamer, Obsidian region director Berto Ritger explained that early builds of the game lacked the entire prologue section. In this version, players simply started at the Dawnshore docks, similar to waking up at Seyda Neen in Morrowind.
In order to teach players how to use magic in the game, Obsidian also looked to the third Elder Scrolls game. As the team realised that “mechanics being tutorialised weren’t really happening in the rapid, predictable fashion that you want in the early game”, they looked to Morrowind’s intro to tighten things up.
In Morrowind, when leaving Seyda Neen, a Wood Elf named Tarhiel will fall from the sky and die on impact right in front of the players. Players can then loot Tarhiel’s body and read a journal entry detailing their experiments with a flight scroll which ran out and killed him. (You can also take his very fashionable Colovian fur helm.)
In the final build of Avowed, players can find a deceased mage in a similar situation. In western Dawnshore, players can encounter the charred body of a pyromancer who has a spellcasting grimoire and a journal that reveals his fiery experiments. However, in early versions, players could actually encounter him failing his experiments just like Tarhiel.
“The very first version of the Grimoire tutorial and introduction [to magic] was the fellow that blows himself up on the cliff,” Ritger explained. “I implemented that, which was a very fun little thing that I was happy to get into the game.”
Ritger revealed that Tarhiel’s death—and his hilarious “aaaaoooeeeeoeee” scream—was “exactly the touch point” for the Avowed tutorial. It actually makes me kind of upset that we don’t get to see the pyromancer blow himself up now. And he should definitely nab himself a better hat for us to loot.
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