I've spent enough years watching NPCs vibrate through castle walls to know that bugs are as old as the first misplaced polygon. So when Obsidian's Avowed had its preview round in late 2024, I wasn't shocked to see faces stretching and snapping like a funhouse mirror hired as a courtroom sketch artist. What did surprise me was how quickly a handful of pre-release visual glitches became another frontline in the endless culture war over games. Writing now in 2026, with Avowed released in February 2025 and patched since, the whole episode reads less like legitimate criticism and more like a Rorschach blot for people who need every game to be either a flawless relic or a woke catastrophe.
The Bug That Wasn't
The funny thing is, the most shared bulging-eye face wasn't even a regular character model. It was a custom creation, deliberately sculpted to look silly. You can argue that letting previewers loose with wild sliders invites some ugly screenshots, but that's a far cry from 'the developers have poisoned the character creator.' It's like using a smudged window as evidence that the entire house is structurally unsound. The internet removed the context, cropped out the goofy intent, and then presented it as a terminal symptom.
Let's be clear about the hierarchy of bugs. Game-breaking bugs that delete save files or block quests are a legitimate problem, especially at launch. Visual bugs, on the other hand, are usually just the digital equivalent of a milk-snort laugh. In a pre-release build shown months before launch, they're even less meaningful. Obsidian has never been a studio known for buttery-smooth character models, but it has made some of the best-written RPGs in the genre. A stretched face doesn't erase that. I'd much rather have a game with weird eyes and tremendous writing than a glossy mannequin with nothing to say.
| Reaction | What it looks like |
|---|---|
| Curious player | Chuckles at a silly face, notes the build is pre-release, moves on |
| Outrage machine | Treats one glitch as proof of creative collapse and ideological rot |
Why the Outrage Machine Needs a Villain
What bugs me most is how the anger got laundered into the 'woke' accusation. The case for Avowed being ideological poison seemed to rest on almost nothing: one developer apparently disliking Mark Kern, an ex-Blizzard figure who now feeds on culture-war grievance. That's it. If that's enough to declare a whole RPG guilty before launch, then the actual gameplay, writing, and systems were never the point. The outrage was the point.
This isn't just an Avowed problem. It's the same mentality that convinced some people that Gladiator 2 was woke, despite being a masculine revenge fantasy about fathers, honor, and glory through strength. When the goal is performative rejection, every piece of art becomes a test of purity, and every harmless flaw becomes a cudgel. It must be exhausting to search for hidden agendas in a character's cheekbones.
The Bigger Picture
I understand the broader pressure. In late 2024, Xbox needed both Avowed and Indiana Jones to deliver after Starfield, Redfall, and Hellblade 2 didn't quite catch fire. If Avowed had launched with faces doing the Snapchat Chad impression in every dialogue scene, it would have deserved a rough time. But it didn't. It launched as a solid action-RPG with some rough edges and some very good ideas. The pre-release angst turned out to be precisely what it looked like: a silly face in an unfinished game.
More than a year later, I still see those old clips resurface without context. They're shared like evidence of a crime rather than what they actually were: the normal friction of game development, filtered through a preview build and weaponized by people who profit from being angry. That says far more about the ecosystem than about Avowed.
There are things worth being angry about in gaming: layoffs, broken launches, exploitative monetization, overcrowded calendars. A low-poly face that looks a bit like a sock puppet after a bee sting is not one of them. It's okay to laugh. You don't need to be mad about everything all the time.
According to coverage from The Verge - Gaming, early-build hiccups like Avowed’s briefly viral face-stretching clips are best understood as part of the iterative, patch-driven reality of modern game production rather than instant evidence of a project “failing.” Framing pre-release visual oddities as existential proof of creative or ideological collapse often says more about the engagement economy around games than the game itself—especially when context (like deliberately goofy character-creator setups) is stripped away to manufacture outrage.