What a difference a few weeks make. It wasn’t that long ago that question marks were still hanging over Obsidian’s coral-coloured role-playing game Avowed. Promotional trailers had left people unconvinced, showing an adventure that looked old-fashioned and lacking in originality. Yet weeks later, Avowed has wide acclaim. “It’s one of this year’s most pleasant surprises,” I wrote in our Avowed review. It’s a game that went from being under suspicion to an unlikely Xbox star. Obsidian has proven three times in a row now, with Grounded, Pentiment and Avowed, that it can produce the goods consistently for Microsoft, and do it in a way that’s less risky than betting everything on each project it makes. In stormy seas, Obsidian’s boat seems, blessedly, buoyant.
“At Obsidian, we’ve always been very upfront that we make very ambitious games but we don’t have 400-person teams; we are working off a budget,” Avowed game director Carrie Patel tells me in a video call. It’s a limitation I think it took many people, myself included, a while to understand about Avowed. Some had assumed that as the studio’s first game bankrolled by owner Microsoft, after years of independence, it would have significantly more resources available to it. But that wasn’t the case.
“Avowed very intentionally has a focused scope,” Patel says. “This isn’t a game where we’re trying to create an endless playground that players can sink hundreds of hours into. This is something where we had a very clear experience in mind. We had a story to tell, we had several corners of this very beautiful world that we wanted to take players through, and we wanted to make sure that experience was dense, entertaining and varied, and then players are going to roll credits and maybe they’ll start a new game.” It’s a retro approach that she says players responded really warmly to. I was one of them.
But there’s no pleasing everyone. Obsidian has a long history: founded in 2003, it’s made all kinds of role-playing games in those 20-plus years, from South Park games to Fallout and Star Wars games (and it has pitched ideas for many more). That legacy has a weight to it, especially when people perhaps preferred what you made in the past. “There’s a degree to which you can’t ever fully escape the expectations that come from your own history,” says Patel.
There are those who compare Avowed to “maximalist” RPGs that try to offer everything, as she calls them, and wonder why her game doesn’t have, say, lockpicking, or kill-everyone-style full world interactivity (though there are decisions you can make in the game that affect hundreds and possibly thousands of lives). I have personally wondered, for similar reasons, why Avowed doesn’t have companion romance – a feature so commonplace in RPGs nowadays it feels conspicuous by its absence. Well, according to Patel, “Doing romance and doing romance well are two very different propositions.”
“There were earlier visions and designs where this was going to be a larger game, a full open world, and multiplayer was going to be a part of it”
Doing romance well means a few things, she explains. One part is ensuring characters retain their integrity when you romance them, and don’t drop everything – their sense of self, their beliefs – the moment you show an interest in them. “It’s always a bit of a letdown when you see a character who has a clear personality, and goals and interests, and suddenly, in the service of this romance that the player has embarked on with them, they now become the player’s yes-person,” Patel says.
Secondly, if you’re offering a romantic path with a companion, you should also offer an equally compelling platonic path, “because it’s a shame if romance is the only right way to really get to that full level of depth with a character”. Finally, Patel adds, “a thing that I see a lot as a developer and also a player, is the more you introduce romance as a mechanic, and the more that you build systems around it, and metrics, and ways for players to to bolster and measure their affinity and affection level with with other characters, the more it becomes something people engage with as a system rather than as a relationship.”
Avowed does have the option of a companion romance, however, it’s just not signposted in ways we’re used to. It will naturally arise if you talk consistently with the character in question – I wouldn’t want to spoil who it is – but the point is that it will do so unexpectedly; you won’t play for it. “It should feel natural, organic, and surprising,” Patel says.
But managing expectations is something Obsidian has been doing with Avowed ever since it was first revealed in the summer of 2020. Its first cinematic trailer teased a dark fantasy world that looked closer in tone to Elder Scrolls than the extravagant pink and purple and orange world we eventually got, with confrontations inspired by the Balrog in Mines of Moria. Watching the teaser now, it seems like it’s for a different game entirely, and there’s a reason for that: it was.
The original idea for Avowed was quite different to the game we have now. Originally, it was going to be a tonally darker game and play like Destiny meets Skyrim, Patel told Bloomberg in a recent interview. This co-operative multiplayer idea was a key part of Obsidian’s pitch to Microsoft when it was acquired in 2018, so when that deal went through, that’s what it tried to make. “There were earlier visions and designs where this was going to be a larger game, a full open world, and multiplayer was going to be a part of it,” Patel tells me now.
But open worlds and multiplayer take expertise and a lot of resources to make, and a couple of years into development, Avowed was wobbling. Obsidian couldn’t find a way to make the game multiplayer “while still preserving the elements that work very well in a single-player RPG of the kind we typically make”, Patel says – presumably meaning the choice-and-consequence and dialogue that drives Avowed now. So, multiplayer was cut. In fact, the whole game was rebooted in 2021, which is when Carrie Patel – who’d worked her way up at Obsidian through the Pillars of Eternity series and The Outer Worlds – was made director of the game.
The other big changes Patel instigated then were downsizing from one large open-world to a handful of smaller zones, and changing the setting of the game. “It was still set in the world of Pillars of Eternity,” Patel clarifies. “It was just set in a different part of the world, and there was a sense that the direction it had moved in didn’t feel entirely true to the IP any more. There were different characters, it was a different part of the world, it was a very different story. But I probably shouldn’t be too specific in case anyone ever wants to play with some of those ideas in the future,” she says.
By the time Avowed was re-announced in 2023, it looked like a drastically different game. In a “ripping the band-aid off” moment, as Patel puts it, Obsidian showed mid-development footage of a much more colourful-looking game – “something that felt very different from what a lot of audiences were used to and understood very clearly in terms of, like, a very grounded, grim, serious fantasy. It is grounded,” she adds, “it is serious, but it’s also very colourful, it’s also very fantastical.”
“The wonderful thing about the reception Avowed has gotten is it shows that there is certainly an appetite for new fantasy IPs”
People were confused, and in the years following it, this confusion lingered. Was it still a Skyrim-like game?
Whatever Obsidian showed, it struggled to convince fans about the new direction. “We always had a challenge to define exactly what we were going to be and to make that very clear to players,” Patel says. “So much of what works best about Avowed is the exploration and that’s not something that you can really easily tease in a 90-second trailer. It’s something that you have to be in the game experiencing for yourself.” It wasn’t until Obsidian put Avowed in players’ hands, at shows and press events, that the reception began to warm.
Game Pass is an extension of this now, helping the millions of people who subscribe to “dip their toe in” and try Avowed without having to buy it separately, widening the audience potentially significantly. But how large the Avowed audience is, Patel is slippery about saying. “I don’t have a really firm metric,” she says. “I’ve certainly been very happy, and all the folks I’ve talked to, both at the studio level and at the Xbox and Microsoft level, have been very happy with the reception to our game – to the number of people playing it, the amount of time they’re spending in it. But knowing that some people are coming to our game through Game Pass, some of them are purchasing on a variety of platforms, I don’t know that there is one specific metric or number I could give you.”
Nevertheless, Patel is smiling, and it sounds as though Avowed has done well for Microsoft and Obsidian. And where there’s success, there’s often a desire for more. Patel hinted at a future for Avowed in a previous interview, saying, “Now that we’ve built this wonderful world, and also built this team strength and muscle memory around the content and gameplay in this world, I’d love to see us do more with it.”
When I ask her about this, she says: “I couldn’t say anything specific just yet, but I know we’ve got a wonderful team that really knows and loves this world, and has learned an incredible amount over the past four years about how to make a really strong RPG together.”
What exactly that means, it’s unclear. In the near-term future, Obsidian is all hands on deck focusing on getting sci-fi sequel The Outer Worlds 2 finished. “We’ve got a lot of people who are transitioning onto their next projects,” Patel says. It doesn’t sound as though anything beyond bug fixing is happening on Avowed right now. But in the future, who knows?
It’s also unclear what Avowed’s apparent success might mean for the future of the Pillars of Eternity series, for instance – might renewed interest in the world of Eora reawaken it? Pillars game director and Obsidian design director Josh Sawyer still seems to be working on the tabletop version of Pillars of Eternity, and there’s clearly a desire for old-school CRPG experiences now, as proven emphatically by Baldur’s Gate 3.
Or perhaps Avowed will be how Obsidian carries the Pillars name on. Patel considers it a Pillars game, though not a direct sequel to Pillars of Eternity, or Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire. There’s also a PlayStation audience still to be courted by Avowed should Microsoft decide to publish the game there, which I expect it will. (I ask Patel if she’s tested Avowed on PlayStation hardware yet and she diplomatically answers, after a short pause, “I have not.”). But the future seems bright for the game – and hopefully for the series as well, perhaps.
“The wonderful thing about the reception Avowed has gotten is it shows that there is certainly an appetite for new fantasy IPs,” Patel says. “I recognise that some of our players are coming from Pillars and Deadfire, but I think for the majority of people, this is their first time in the world of Eora, so it’s heartening to see that there is appetite for that novelty, that players are interested in jumping into something new. It certainly gives us a lot of enthusiasm and optimism for continuing to be ambitious, continuing to introduce players to new worlds, and bringing them into the games we’re making and the things that are exciting to us.
“I know we’re always excited to try new things.”
