Originally announced back in the initial Xbox Series X/S Showcase for July 2020, Obsidian Entertainment’s Avowed took a long while before finally making it to market around this time a year ago. While it didn’t set the world on fire critically compared to other high profile games from 2025 (including Obsidian’s other big RPG that year that had a rosier reception) the game was relatively well received, with our reviewer saying: “I absolutely loved Avowed. It is almost a sensational game but, in the end, is held back from that status by a slew of technical issues. Even still, Avowed is superb, with true RPG goodness, real choices, deep systems, fun combat, and a true understanding and reverence of Eora.”
At the very least, Obsidian promised they were going to stick with this game for a little bit, which leads us to their big year anniversary update and, as expected with many games from Xbox Game Studio’s portfolio, the migration of the game from its initial Xbox Series X/S & PC release to now releasing on PlayStation 5 with “support” for PlayStation 5 Pro. While the multi-platform release coincides with the anniversary update, the new content wasn’t available to test pre-release, so this article is just going to focus on the visual experience on PS5 and PS5 Pro compared to how the game looked on Xbox Series X when I played that version last year.
For the uninitiated, Avowed is a semi-open world RPG that divides its focus on smaller, more focused environments instead of the giant sprawling worlds seen in similar games in this genre from Bethesda Games Studios. The game was built using Epic’s Unreal Engine 5, which lately has had a mixed reception with how the engine has worked in modern consoles and PC’s (insert shader stutter jokes). While the game had some bugs typical of this kind of game, it certainly worked better as a cleaner kind of production for Obsidian than some of their earlier, buggier efforts (a trend that continued for the better with their other 2025 release, The Outer Worlds 2).
On Xbox Series X, the game shipped with a quality mode and a performance mode as well as a 40fps balanced mode for those with a 120fps display capable of VRR (with the option to unlock the framerate if you so pleased). In the quality mode, the game would run at 30fps at a dynamic 1440p rendering resolution before being upscaled to 4K, while the performance mode would run at a dynamic 1080p resolution that definitely looked blurrier as a result of Obsidian using a lot of UE5’s bells and whistles. If you had the setup for it, the game was best played in the 40fps balanced mode as image quality looked relatively closer to the sharpness of the quality mode and ran mostly rock solid at 40fps, whereas the performance mode sacrificed a lot of the game’s beauty and wasn’t a solid performer unless you had a VRR display.
Moving now to the PS5 version of the game, Avowed continues Xbox Game Studio’s trend where they mostly deliver visual parity on the base Sony platform. It still has the same modes between both systems, and flipping back and forth between both the Xbox version and the PS5 version, they were hardly indistinguishable from each other to the naked eye. If anything, the performance of the base PS5 version in the quality mode did feel slightly more inconsistent than it did on Xbox and it also looked a tad blurrier in certain spots in both the quality and performance mode, but the PS5 version did perform slightly better on the performance mode. But the only way to really notice was seeing them side by side. It’s a rock solid performer between the two, and the recommended way to play remains the same: balanced mode all the way.
Now, what about the PS5 Pro support? The game states that it is enhanced for Sony’s mid gen console upgrade, but testing it on both PS5 and PS5 Pro, unfortunately Avowed joins the list of games that are listed as enhanced for PS5 Pro whose enhancements are the absolute bare minimum. The game doesn’t utilize many of the PS5 Pro’s capabilities like PSSR or enhanced ray tracing, instead feeling like a game that instead just runs the console in boost mode and gives the higher end of the dynamic resolution and performance numbers. During the initial tutorial area, the game looked virtually the same on all systems to the point I thought the game was simply not patched at all for PS5 Pro.
It wasn’t until I reached the first open world area where the PS5 Pro version started to slightly come out ahead, as the world appeared sharper in the bigger area and the performance that was inconsistent on other platforms seemed more stable here. However, it’s not a massive difference where the PS5 Pro version becomes the definitive way to play the game (beyond the better hardware topping up the numbers as one would expect).
While it would have been great for Avowed to more fully utilize the PS5 Pro’s hardware capabilities, the double edged sword comes from the way some of those capabilities have clashed with recent games that utilize Unreal Engine 5. PSSR has had some trouble with games that use the engine, where the A.I. upscaler creates a constant shimmer in things like foliage that makes the games look slightly uglier than their base console counterpart. So in a way, the bare minimum effort put on the PS5 Pro version of Avowed is disappointing on paper, but on execution, considering some of the issues the console has faced with official support to games that utilize this engine, Obsidian probably did the right thing here.
So yes, Avowed continues to fit the Xbox Game Studios multi-platform mold: deliver relative visual parity between the two base machines where depending on the game, one comes out on top of the other, with a Pro implementation that gives you the barebones niceties so as to not make their core audience feel like the very best experience is somewhere else.
From all their multi-platform releases, it feels like Indiana Jones and The Great Circle has come the closest in delivering a PS5 Pro experience that feels tangentially better than the base machines, as that version delivered the best performance, resolution and ray tracing. Other notable Xbox games like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered, Doom: The Dark Ages, and The Outer Worlds 2 leveraged the Pro console for higher resolutions, but the best performance was on Xbox Series X. Avowed feels like it theoretically fits the category of Indiana Jones where it’s technically better on PS5 Pro, but the differences are so minimal so as to not be notable.
Regardless of platform, Avowed remains an interesting time capsule for Obsidian as they tried to leverage their own created universe to deliver the kind of game people love them for, despite the transformations it had to go through along the way. While it quite didn’t hit the high marks expected from them, it’s still an interesting WRPG with some fun combat and a cursorily interesting angle to learn about their Pillars of Eternity universe. With the recent anniversary update that added New Game+, a photo mode, new playable races and more, now it’s certainly the best time to experience this game if you are still curious about it, and it’s still the same very good, not quite great game on its original platform alongside PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 5 Pro.
The PS5 Pro was a game-changer for me. I used to have all my games on the X1 and it was terrible. The PS5 Pro gave me the ability to play my favorite games at full resolution and with excellent graphics. It also allowed me to enjoy more immersive experiences in my favorite games, such as Resident Evil 7 and Black Ops Cold War. I can’t wait for the next generation of consoles and what they will bring to the gaming world.
Love that and yeah, I wish Xbox would have released an upgraded console as well. Either way, it’s nice to have options!