Highlights
- Avowed, the highly anticipated RPG from Obsidian Entertainment, is receiving assistance from Devoted Studios to ensure its successful release.
- Obsidian has a strong reputation in the RPG industry, having developed popular games like Fallout: New Vegas and Pillars of Eternity.
- Bringing in a support studio like Devoted is a common practice in AAA game development to help speed up the process and offload lower-priority tasks.
Obsidian Entertainment’s highly anticipated game Avowed is getting a little help from the Los Angeles-based Devoted Studios to help push the game over the finish line. Avowed is a first-person fantasy RPG set within the same world as Obsidian’s Pillars of Eternity CRPG series.
Obsidian has built itself a reputation of being one of the best RPG creators in the industry having made such legendary games as Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2, Fallout: New Vegas, South Park: The Stick of Truth, Pillars of Eternity, and 2022’s Pentiment. According to Obsidian founder and studio head Feargus Urquhart in a recently released five-part documentary series detailing Obsidian’s long history in game development, Avowed was originally slated to be a co-op RPG. The idea was scrapped and within eight months the entire game was shifted to a narrative-driven single-player experience.
Avowed is slated to release sometime in 2024. To help with some of the work still left to do, Obsidian has acquired the services of a support studio called Devoted to help create “stunning 3D assets” for the game. Devoted has worked with several different studios on a number of games, both big and small, and in a variety of ways to help shoulder some of the burdens of game development. Devoted ported Five Nights At Freddy’s to the Nintendo Switch, provided level art for the Radiohead VR experience Kid A Mnesia Exhibition, and most recently co-developed and provided some of the engineering work on the cozy MMO life simulator Palia.
This, of course, does not mean Avowed is in any sort of trouble or that gamers eagerly anticipating its release should have anything to worry about. A big developer bringing in a support studio to help with the development process is a common practice in AAA game development. Modern games are massive undertakings that require tons of work from dozens, sometimes hundreds of developers who work countless hours to get a game shipped on time. Sometimes, studios need to seek the help of an external studio to help speed things up so its in-house team members can focus on larger projects.
Devoted is another support studio in a thriving niche sector of the gaming industry. It is made up of developers who occasionally dabble in original games, but mostly offer their services to studios making large, complex AAA games that need to offload some of their long list of lower-priority tasks. Studios like Devoted exist all around the world and have provided aid on some of the biggest games released every year. Its involvement in the development of Avowed simply means some of its graphical assets will be in good hands as Obsidian ensures the game reaches its goal on time.
Avowed releases in 2024 for PC and Xbox Series X/S.