How Avowed Nailed Its Spellcasting After Early Playtest Woes

Even the best game developers don’t get everything right on the first try. For Obsidian Entertainment, the team behind Avowed, creating a smooth, intuitive spellcasting system turned out to be trickier than expected.

What seemed like a simple solution just didn’t click with players during early playtests, prompting a complete rethink.

“We’ve been making extensive use of the Microsoft user research lab to see, like, hey, how is this working?” said Ryan Warden, Avowed’s Production Director.

“We thought we had something pretty intuitive for folks — making use of a radial menu. It’s been used in tons of games, so it should’ve been familiar.”

But when testers got their hands on it, things didn’t go as planned.

“It’s one of those moments where you sort of lean forward, and it’s right there. You’re so close. But it wasn’t clicking for people,” Warden admitted.

The team at Obsidian Entertainment went back to the drawing board.

“We thought we had something intuitive, but people weren’t picking up on it. So we had to ask, ‘Okay, what do we do with that?’”

After some serious tinkering, they came up with a new approach that prioritised muscle memory — making spellcasting feel second nature.

They tested the updated system, and the difference was immediate. “All of a sudden, they just got it,” Warden said.

“It kept that moment-to-moment momentum going in the middle of a fight. People were cracking off spells without even recognising the delay between thinking, ‘I want to fire off a spell,’ and their fingers just doing it. That’s exactly what we wanted.”

This kind of iteration is part of the process, Warden explained. “Sometimes you’ve got to polish things a bit, inspect, adapt, and get it right.”

After recently experiencing Avowed for myself, it’s clear a lot of thought and effort has gone into designing its systems.