Obsidian Entertainment’s Avowed is a wonderful single-player RPG featuring large fantasy zones to explore and chatty companions. But that wasn’t always the plan. In fact, it was originally designed as an online game similar to Destiny.
According to a new Bloomberg article, Avowed—out now on Xbox, PC, and Game Pass—started life back in 2018 as something the then-independent Obsidian could present to prospective buyers. The game was planned to be the Fallout: New Vegas and Pillars of Eternity studio’s magnum opus and was going to be an online fantasy RPG mashing together Destiny and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. The ambitious pitch called for players to adventure together online in a huge open world. Later in 2018, Microsoft bought Obsidian and work continued on Avowed. But the game struggled to come together, and by the time Xbox announced Avowed publicly in 2020, Obsidian had cut the multiplayer out entirely.
Then in January 2021, Obsidian scrapped that version of the game, which had been in development for two years. Carrie Patel took over as director and she implemented two big changes. The first was to focus more on the world and lore of Pillars of Eternity, and the second was to replace the Skyrim-like open world with large “zones.” This was the same approach used in The Outer Worlds, Obsidian’s sci-fi RPG from 2019, and it helped the team build different, varied locales and skip over a ton of technical hurdles.
“With any game you think, ‘OK, we can’t climb every mountain — which ones are really worth the effort for us?’” Patel told Bloomberg.
“We knew from The Outer Worlds that we could build a really great game with ‘open zones,’ and that also adds some advantages in terms of letting you really theme your areas more distinctly and intentionally, and provide a sense of progression as the player’s going from one environment to the next.”
All that hard work and the messy development cycle, including multiple vertical slices and reboots, paid off in the end, as Avowed has received near-universal praise from critics and has proved a hit for Xbox’s Game Pass service.
“I feel like I’ve learned so much over the past four years that I wish I’d known at the start of this process,” admitted Patel. “It’s definitely been a job where the highs are really high and the lows are really low.”
As for what’s next? Patel says she’d “love” to do more with the Avowed team in the Pillars of Eternity world. But for now, Obsidian won’t say what’s next for the Xbox workhorse studio.
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