What a difference a few weeks make. It wasn’t that long ago that question marks were still hanging over Obsidian’s coral-coloured role-playing game Avowed. Promotional trailers had left people unconvinced, showing an adventure that looked old-fashioned and lacking in originality. Yet weeks later, Avowed has wide acclaim. “It’s one of this year’s most pleasant surprises,” I wrote in our Avowed review. It’s a game that went from being under suspicion to an unlikely Xbox star. Obsidian has proven three times in a row now, with Grounded, Pentiment and Avowed, that it can produce the goods consistently for Microsoft, and do it in a way that’s less risky than betting everything on each project it makes. In stormy seas, Obsidian’s boat seems, blessedly, buoyant.
“At Obsidian, we’ve always been very upfront that we make very ambitious games but we don’t have 400-person teams; we are working off a budget,” Avowed game director Carrie Patel tells me in a video call. It’s a limitation I think it took many people, myself included, a while to understand about Avowed. Some had assumed that as the studio’s first game bankrolled by owner Microsoft, after years of independence, it would have significantly more resources available to it. But that wasn’t the case.
“Avowed very intentionally has a focused scope,” Patel says. “This isn’t a game where we’re trying to create an endless playground that players can sink hundreds of hours into. This is something where we had a very clear experience in mind. We had a story to tell, we had several corners of this very beautiful world that we wanted to take players through, and we wanted to make sure that experience was dense, entertaining and varied, and then players are going to roll credits and maybe they’ll start a new game.” It’s a retro approach that she says players responded really warmly to. I was one of them.
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But there’s no pleasing everyone. Obsidian has a long history: founded in 2003, it’s made all kinds of role-playing games in those 20-plus years, from South Park games to Fallout and Star Wars games (and it has pitched ideas for many more). That legacy has a weight to it, especially when people perhaps preferred what you made in the past. “There’s a degree to which you can’t ever fully escape the expectations that come from your own history,” says Patel.