Avowed Was a Co-op Game Until Obsidian Focused on What It Does Best
The head of Obsidian revealed that Avowed was originally intended to be a co-op game. However, the developers came to their senses in time and eventually settled on a single-player story.
While the upcoming RPG from Obsidian - Avowed - did not share the fate of Redfall from Arkane and debuted as a co-op title, it was a close call.
This information was revealed by Obsidian head Feargus Urquhart in the fifth episode of documentary dedicated to the developer's 20th anniversary (video below).
"I pushed for Avowed to be a multiplayer game, and I stuck to that for a long time."
Urquhart revealed that in this way he wanted to "sell" an interesting game idea to big publishers, who are more willing to finance multiplayer games - probably because of easier opportunities to introduce microtransactions.
"When you ask for 50, 60, 70, 80 million, you have to have something interesting to say - and the multiplayer mode made it interesting," Urquhart continued.
The people behind the Pillars of Eternity series or last year's gem Pentiment recognized at some point, however, that they preferred to focus on what they know best, namely single-player storytelling, rather than experiment with a risky multiplayer formula.
"After working on it for a while, we realized that we weren't focusing on the things we were best at, so we basically made a U-turn to really focus and make sure that in the end it would be an Obsidian game and not something else."
Avowed will thus ultimately be a first-person RPG set in the universe of Pillars of Eternity, which, the developers argue, will offer a balance between proven mechanics from Pillars and new ideas that will be "more accessible to the larger community."
Interestingly, by the way, we learned that Avowed - reminiscent on trailers of the newer The Elder Scrolls games - will not offer as large and open world as Bethesda's productions.
Avowed is scheduled to debut in 2024 on PC and Xbox Series X/S consoles.. The game is expected to be simultaneously available through Xbox Game Pass.
