Avowed could have been Obsidian's Redfall, with a Destiny plus Skyrim co-op multiplayer vision scrapped early in a grueling 6-year development

In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Avowed director Carrie Patel shed some more light on what seems to have been a challenging development cycle for the venerable RPG studio. Not only was Avowed initially supposed to be a seamless open world, it was going to have a co-op or even live service multiplayer component, and had to be rebooted after two years of preproduction. The end result is pretty fantastic though, and DLCs or even a full sequel already seem to be on the table.

According to Bloomberg, development on Avowed began in 2018, before Obsidian was acquired by Microsoft, and an initial multiplayer-centric pitch for the game was shopped around to potential buyers. We'd previously heard that Avowed was at one point supposed to be Obsidian's Skyrim, but this is the first we've heard of a co-op multiplayer angle on the RPG, which Bloomberg compared to Destiny.

That seems to have been cut by the time of Avowed's summer 2020 cinematic teaser, but development was still a quagmire. At the start of 2021, Avowed's leadership team was replaced, with Pillars of Eternity and Outer Worlds veteran Patel taking over as director. Under Patel's leadership, Avowed was further rescoped to its final "open zone" design instead of a single seamless open world. Even with Avowed's reboot in 2021, the game still struggled with having to sustain a full team's production duties without having outlined its new direction in a full preproduction period, a process Patel likened to "building the tracks while the train was moving forward." A similar jump into full production with no preproduction phase was one of the largest hurdles faced by Disco Elysium's canceled expansion pack codenamed X7.

But even after all of that, Avowed released to critical praise and initial sales figures Obsidian is reportedly satisfied with. Patel hinted that more is likely on the way in the interview: "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." Patel expressed a similarly positive outlook on DLC in a pre-launch interview with MinnMax.

I'm struck by how many parallels there are between Avowed and Redfall, which similarly came from a beloved singleplayer studio and started a troubled development prior to its company's acquisition by Microsoft. In Bloomberg's Redfall post-mortem, Arkane Austin employees alleged that they hoped Microsoft would step in to cancel or reboot Redfall's development⁠—that never happened, and in Obsidian's case with Avowed, the intervention came from the studio's internal leadership.

Obsidian was in a better position to make a tough call like that, though: Arkane Austin seems to have bet the farm on Redfall, with nothing else in active development and Microsoft treating the similarly venerable Lyon branch as a separate concern. Obsidian, meanwhile, has become a uniquely prolific multi-project studio which also had Pentiment, Grounded, and The Outer Worlds 2 cooking at the same time⁠—that's going to be a grand total of four releases in five years by the end of 2025, practically unheard of in today's environment of ballooning development times. That lessened the need for Avowed to make it to market come hell or high water and be a smash hit for the studio to survive. Obsidian could afford to reassess and reboot the project, an example of the studio's ambitious "100-year plan" in action.

And I've personally been overjoyed with the result as a longtime RPG fan. Avowed is a game with great combat and genuinely meaningful reactivity to player choice that also nails the Pillars of Eternity vibe⁠—another victory Bloomberg attributes to Patel's leadership of the project, which saw a recommitment to Pillars' lore and prior stories. I appreciate this RPG even more now, knowing it was an uphill battle that could have gone the way of so many failed live service games from singleplayer developers.