As part of its 20th anniversary celebrations, Obsidian Entertainment has been airing a documentary series digging into the studio’s history, and the newly aired final episode has a little to say about its future too, sharing a few details on the upcoming Avowed, including the revelation it started life as a co-op experience before pivoting to a single-player RPG.
“When I look back at 20 years, there’s decisions of mine that I feel really good about, there’s decisions that I feel not so good about”, studio head Feargus Urquhart admits at one point in the documentary. “One of the things where I really pushed was that Avowed was going to be multiplayer, and I kept on that for a long time.”
Urquhart says his insistence on multiplayer came from the belief it would make Avowed more interesting to publishers. At the time, the studio was independent – its since been acquired by Microsoft – and Urquhart reasoned, “When you’re asking for 50, 60, 70, 80 million, you’ve got to have something interesting to talk about and multiplayer made it interesting.”
“I know, in the end, it was the wrong decision to keep on pushing on it,” Urquhart admits, at which points Obsidian head of development Justin Britch takes over the story, shedding more light on the tangle Avowed’s early multiplayer focus was getting the studio in.
“We were too focused on co-op, we were too focused on changing the way our pipelines work, and the way that we write conversations, the way we do quests, and everything else,” Britch explains. “After working on it for a little bit we realised that we weren’t focused on the things that we’re best at, and so we made a pivot on the game, basically to refocus really, and make sure that it was at the end of the day, an Obsidian game and not something different.”
Ultimately, Obisidian’s decision to return to more familiar single-player territory created a “very hectic” period for the studio, according to game director Carrie Patel, who reveals that “defining that [new] direction, and building a vertical slice, and then preparing for production” all happened over the course of “about eight months”.
The now decidedly single-player Avowed was initially announced back in 2020, and the game finally resurfaced – alongside a first gameplay trailer – this June as part of Microsoft’s Xbox Games Showcase. Avowed doesn’t yet have a release date, but it’s expected to launch for Xbox Series X/S and PC in 2024.
