Obsidian Entertainment Reveals Early Plans For Avowed Included Multiplayer Before Being A Traditonal RPG

Over the course of its time since the initial Microsoft acquisition back in 2018, Obsidian Entertainment has been slowly churning away at new projects for the platform. Already, we saw this with the release of Grounded. Additionally, Pentiment more recently offered the same just this past fall. Other projects are still awaiting release from the developer.

For starters, Obsidian Entertainment confirmed a second The Outer Worlds game is in development. Little is known about the game aside from the game’s adoption for Unreal Engine 5. Additionally, Avowed is another project under its belt fans are awaiting to see. In June, Microsoft shared the game is prepared to release later on in 2024 next year.

From the finale of the Obsidian Entertainment ’20th Anniversary Documentary’, the developer confirms that Avowed was originally planned to feature a multiplayer aspect to the core gameplay. You can watch the segment in the video below:

“When I look back at 20 years, there’s decisions that of mine that I feel really good about and there’s decisions I feel not so good about, “founder Feargus Urquhart explained. “One of the things where I really pushed was that Avowed was going to be multiplayer and I kept on that for a long time and I think in the end that was not- I think I know it in the end it was the wrong decision to keep on pushing it.

“Now I had done it, it was where we were still independent and we were selling it, it was a more interesting game to publishers and when you’re asking for 50, 60, 70, 80 million you got to have something interesting to talk about and multiplayer made it interesting. It was this sort of idea of it’s almost like, you know, peanut butter and chocolate putting it together and like “wow, it must be something that’s good.”

Justin Britch, head of development added: “We were too focused on co-op and we were to focused on changing the ways our pipelines work and the types of way that we write conversations and the way we do quests and everything else. After working on it for a little bit, we realized that we weren’t focused on the things we were best at and so we did make […] a pivot on the game basically to refocus really and make sure that it was at the end of the day an Obsidian game and not something different.”

What is your opinion on Obsidian Entertainment scrapping multiplayer from Avowed?

Avowed is listed for Xbox Series X|S & PC.