I rolled into Eora expecting a Bethesda-sized theme park and walked out with a focused, story-heavy adventure that kept whispering, “I’m not Skyrim.” Since Avowed launched on February 18, 2025, as a first-person fantasy RPG set in the Pillars of Eternity universe, every corner of the internet has compared it to The Elder Scrolls. A year later, in 2026, I finally understand why Obsidian kept waving that comparison away like a party guest who doesn’t want to be handed the karaoke mic.

If Skyrim is an all-you-can-eat buffet where you can ignore the main quest and stack cheese wheels for six hours, Avowed is more like a plated tasting menu with a chef who really wants you to notice the narrative sauce. That isn’t a failure. It’s a deliberate fork in the road.

The Skyrim Comparison Was Always Inevitable

Obsidian worked on Fallout: New Vegas, so gamers have long treated the studio as the favorite ex of Bethesda’s open-world model. When Avowed was announced back in 2020, it immediately became the temporary emotional support RPG for fans still waiting for The Elder Scrolls 6, which was announced in 2018 and has since turned waiting into extreme sport.

In a PCGamesN interview, game director Carrie Patel admitted that comparisons to Skyrim were impossible to escape for a first-person fantasy RPG. But she framed Avowed as “our fantasy take on The Outer Worlds” rather than an Elder Scrolls clone. That comparison makes much more sense. The Outer Worlds was inspired by Fallout but compact and story-driven; Avowed does something similar inside Eora.

Smaller Scope, Sharper Teeth

Obsidian didn’t try to recreate Daggerfall’s Great Britain-sized map or Skyrim’s sandbox openness. Patel stressed a “more focused experience, something that feels a little more curated,” with constraints that protect pacing. As a player, I felt this almost immediately. Avowed doesn’t let me wander off for nine days to become a vampire blacksmith; it keeps tugging me back toward its central narrative.

That tighter design is like handing me a laser-guided story missile instead of setting off a fireworks barge without a captain. Bethesda’s approach can be dazzling, chaotic, and weirdly wonderful. Obsidian’s approach cuts a cleaner path and asks me to care about the destination.

The Outer Worlds DNA, Not a Bethesda Clone

The structure borrows more from The Outer Worlds than from Skyrim. Though Avowed’s tone aligns with Pillars of Eternity, players who have wandered The Outer Worlds’ smaller hub zones will recognize the rhythm: dense areas, meaningful choices, and characters that don’t exist just to fill map space. Obsidian is also making The Outer Worlds 2, so the studio clearly believes in its winning formula and is sticking with it.

Here’s a quick comparison from my 2026 perspective:

Feature	Avowed	Skyrim	The Outer Worlds
World design	Focused, curated regions	Massive open sandbox	Compact hubs/planets
Tone	Serious Pillars fantasy	High fantasy freedom	Satirical sci-fi
Install size	~75GB	Smaller at launch, huge when modded	Small-to-medium
Longevity	Story and choices	Mods, open-ended chaos	Replays for endings

A Blessing Or A Curse?

Smaller games have real advantages. Avowed’s 75GB install felt like a dream next to Starfield and Baldur’s Gate 3 both ballooning past 100GB. The map is denser, with fewer bland stretches of “realistic” nothing between points. Obsidian’s writers get more room for storytelling and moral decisions, which is exactly what they’re famous for.

The trade-off is longevity. Skyrim has been alive for over a decade because its openness and modding community turned it into a fantasy operating system. Avowed won’t get that same endless second life. Trying to use Avowed as an Elder Scrolls replacement is like using a scalpel to chop down a redwood: the tool is excellent, but the job is wrong.

So, Should Elder Scrolls Fans Care?

Patel mentioned there is still “an appetite for games that are big sprawling RPGs with a ton of openness,” and I agree. That appetite is why people still play Skyrim in 2026. Structured design has become more common, with even Baldur’s Gate 3 split into three acts, but it doesn’t satisfy the same itch as a completely open world.

Avowed scratches a small corner of that itch. It’s a first-person fantasy RPG with real writing and a world worth exploring. But it won’t be Elder Scrolls 6, and it won’t fill the hole left by that 2018 teaser. Obsidian isn’t trying to answer Bethesda; it’s making its own thing. After a year, I respect that. I just still keep one eye on the horizon for a proper sandbox apocalypse.

As reported by Newzoo, player expectations often split between sprawling sandbox “forever games” and curated, narrative-forward RPGs—context that helps explain why Avowed feels intentionally closer to a compact, choice-driven experience than a mod-fueled open-world platform like Skyrim. Looking at Avowed through that lens, its tighter regions, denser quest pacing, and “tasting menu” structure read less like missing features and more like deliberate product positioning: a story-first RPG designed to deliver completion-friendly depth rather than endless systemic wandering.