Avowed went through a lot of changes, both in the narrative style as well as the leadership behind it during the early development period.

Obsidian’s recently released game Avowed, directed by Carrie Patel, has opened up to a great response from players all over the world. It is having a smooth sailing experience in the market at the moment, unlike the chaos that had ensued behind the scenes during the game’s production period.

Avowed had to go through multiple changes to find its true identity. Image Credit: Obsidian Entertainment

Avowed had been in the making for a long time. It was announced in 2020 a couple of years after Obsidian was acquired by Microsoft. The announcement acted like a ticking time bomb over the director and her team’s heads as they raced towards the finish line.

Avowed went through a metamorphosis during the early days of production

Focusing on just offering a single-player helped the game in many ways. Image Credit: Obsidian Entertainment

Avowed was once envisioned as a Destiny x Skyrim hybrid with a lot of cool multiplayer elements, which changed after a couple of years into production as the CEO of Obsidian, Feargus Urquhart felt that it was a mistake and then eventually decided to turn the team’s attention towards making a narrative-driven single-player game.

Obsidian is known for making great single-player RPG titles, including Fallout: New Vegas and Pillars of Eternity. Similarly, it decided to move ahead with the same model for Avowed, under the leadership of Carrie Patel, who was taking over responsibilities as a director for such a large game for the first time.

After the game was announced in 2020, the game was developed in two vertical slices, after dropping the multiplayer mode. However, the game was still faltering and the studio decided to change the top leadership team and created another, third, vertical slide which meant that a lot of the employees would need to work from scratch all over again and there was already a huge team. This was one of the most difficult times for the director. Reflecting on the same, she said (via Bloomberg):

Normally if you’re stepping back and reevaluating your creative direction, putting together a new vertical slice and revised production plans, you would do that with a very small team, we did not have a very small team at that point.

The entire experience felt as if they were building tracks while the train was moving forward. She felt that the highs were really high and the lows were really low, but once the game was finished, the entire team rejoiced at the response, and turning it into a single player worked in its favor.

Ditching multiplayer did work in the game’s favor

Avowed is filled with rich elements. Image Credit: Obsidian Entertainment

Avowed found its own identity through multiple transformations and changes during the development period and in the end, all of the bad times and the hard work in retrospection seemed worth it. By ditching Skyrim and Destiny-like elements Avowed truly found its own identity.

Ditching multiplayer enabled the team to focus on what Obsidian does best, crafting rich, narrative-driven single-player RPGs. It gave the team space to work towards building good characters, enhancing storytelling, and creating a detailed world.

Set in the world of Eora, Avowed offers a great blend of melee, ranged, and magic combat. The quest designs are elaborate and compelling. The graphical representation of the world is good and side quests contribute a lot to how the story progresses. What do you think about it? Let us know in the comments below.