Highlights
- Avowed, Obsidian Entertainment's upcoming fantasy RPG, was initially intended to be a co-op game but was later changed to a single-player experience.
- The game is set in the same universe as Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity series, taking place in the culturally diverse nation of the Living Lands.
- The decision to pivot from multiplayer to single-player was made in just eight months, requiring a complete overhaul of the game's design philosophy to align with Obsidian's strengths.
Obsidian Entertainment’s upcoming fantasy RPG Avowed was originally designed to be a co-op RPG before the studio made the decision to pivot to single-player. Avowed is Obsidian’s answer to Bethesda’s long-running The Elder Scrolls series, a first-person action game with a deep RPG system that explores an original fantasy world. Obsidian has plenty of experience with the first-person RPG genre as some of its previous games include 2010’s Fallout: New Vegas and more recently 2019’s The Outer Worlds.
Avowed is set within the same universe as Obsidian’s Pillars of Eternity CRPG series. Players will explore the planet of Eora. Each of the first two entries in the Pillars of Eternity takes place within different landmasses of Eora, namely Drywood and the Deadfire Archipelago. Avowed will take place in the Living Lands, an area to the far north of Eora. It’s a culturally diverse nation where several of Eora’s races have settled, particularly dwarves.
Avowed is being pitched as a single-player narrative RPG experience, but that wasn’t always the case. Obsidian just wrapped up the release of a five-part documentary series celebrating the studio’s 20th anniversary. The series is filled with interviews with various members of the Obsidian team who have been instrumental in the studio’s success throughout the years. The recently released fifth and final episode examines Obsidian’s present, including some fascinating insight into its acquisition by Microsoft, it also includes a look ahead to its future. In the series’ closing minutes, Obsidian founder and studio head Feargus Urquhart reveals that he initially “pushed” for Avowed to be a co-op RPG.
Obsidian eventually scrapped the idea and, instead, focused its efforts on making Avowed strictly a narrative-heavy single-player experience. Urquhart says that his push for multiplayer was borne from the need to secure funding from potential publishers, who, he figured, would be more inclined to provide Obsidian with the tens of millions of dollars required to make the game if Avowed had a multiplayer element.
The pivot from multiplayer to single-player happened in only eight months, a period in which the studio, already deep into production on Avowed, had to rethink the game’s entire design philosophy, from how conversations flowed to how quests were structured. Or, as the head of development at Obsidian Justin Britch put it in the documentary, “we realized that we weren't focused on the things that we're best at.” In the end, as Britch goes on to suggest, the team needed to make a classic Obsidian RPG experience and not create something so far out of the studio’s comfort zone.
Avowed releases in 2024 for PC and Xbox Series X/S.