When I learned that Abowed-Obsidian's upcoming first-person fantasy RPG would be set in Eora, the world of Pillars of Eternity, I was really happy. If there's one thing I've always been a little pissed off about, it's that the "Pillars" game didn't do much, much better than that one (if there's a second, it's that "Tyranny" somehow managed to do even worse). In my eyes, "Avowed" looks like a second chance for the series to succeed in the mainstream.

But Avowed's return to the Pillarsverse™ doesn't simply mean that the isometric CRPG can be enjoyed from a first-person perspective; in a recent chat with PC Gamer's Ted Litchfield, Avowed game director Carrie Patel and gameplay director Gabe Paramo said that the new game is like Skyrim, ditching the class system of the Pillars games and allowing players to choose their ability tree as they level up.

"There are multiple ability trees," Paramo told PCG, "and it's a classless game. Players can choose abilities and respec as they level up and progress. While there are different background archetypes to choose from at the start of the game, they "don't bind the player to a specific choice or build," Patel said, but instead "provide a starting point for building a character, a head canon of sorts." [This is a dramatic but completely unexpected shift from the crunchy salad of paladins, cyphers, mages, and chanters of Pillars of Eternity. Many will be sad to see them go, but for a first-person RPG that aims to be as accessible as recent Bethesda productions, it's probably the right choice. Then again, I've heard that "Baldur's Gate 3" is also quite popular for its classes, status and number crunching. Perhaps a "Pillars"-style class system would get a fairer reception if released today.

Furthermore, not all traces of the classes you know and love would be removed from Eora. Somewhere in the capability tree lurks a cool capability that "makes sense to convert from a CRPG-like top-down perspective to a first-person perspective."