Avowed has recently made its debut, captivating players with Obsidian’s latest role-playing adventure. With its stunning visuals and engaging narrative, this semi-open-world game is packed with all the delightful elements fans have come to love in fantasy RPGs.
However, what if I told you that Avowed could have been quite different? According to a recent report by Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, Carrie Patel, the game’s director, revealed that it originally started as an MMO called ‘multiplayer Skyrim’. A fascinating concept indeed!
The MMO landscape is so crowded these days; it’s hard not to feel relieved that Avowed‘s journey took a different turn after a significant reboot. In his report, Schreier details how the shift happened due to various factors surrounding its development.
Back in 2021, just as production was gearing up, Microsoft acquired Obsidian, prompting a major re-evaluation of the project’s direction. Carrie Patel elaborated on this pivot:
“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.”
“A lot of lessons we learned as we were building this game; ideally we would’ve learned on a small scale with a true preproduction.”
This bold change also brought about an interesting alteration in the gameplay structure. The original open-world model was replaced with a ‘zone-based’ approach reminiscent of 2019’s The Outer Worlds. The development team has openly discussed their reasons for this choice.
Patel wrapped up her thoughts with an optimistic glance towards the future:
“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.”
This leads me to wonder, are you enjoying Avowed‘s single-player format or do you wish it had ventured into MMO territory?
