Obsidian Entertainment was planning something similar to Destiny and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, but in the end, that concept was not to be.

Confessed director Carrie Patel told Bloomberg that it’s been a bumpy six years for Obsidian Entertainment. Originally, the game was going to be an open-world game with no transitions, and it was going to have cooperative or even live service elements. This changed after two years of pre-production development. Development of the game began in 2018, before Obsidian was acquired by Microsoft. An initial concept was multiplayer-centric, and that was what they wanted to present to publishers. That’s why you could hear at the time that Avowed would be similar to Skyrim, but with a co-op, multiplayer angle (Bloomberg compared it to Destiny).

This concept may have changed by 2020, as it didn’t really show up in the cinematic video at the Xbox & Bethesda Games Showcase at the time, and then in early 2021, the game’s leadership was changed, as Patel (who previously worked on Pillars of Eternity and The Outer Worlds) became Avowed’s director. Under her leadership, the design was changed to the final “open zone” model. But even with the reboot, it was still difficult to assemble a full team without outlining the new direction in pre-production. Patel says the track was built as the train moved forward. The canceled Disco Elysium add-on (codenamed X7) made a similar leap into full development.

Redfall followed a similar path, coming from a single-player studio with a cumbersome development process before being acquired by Microsoft. Arkane Austin, the developers of Redfall, had hoped that Microsoft would step in and stop or restart the development of Redfall, but this did not happen, and in the case of Obsidian, the intervention regarding Avowed came from within the studio. Only the studio was in a better position. Arkane Austin bet everything on Redfall, while Obsidian worked on more and more projects (Pentiment, Grounded, The Outer Worlds 2).

Maybe this is how their centennial plan, which we presented earlier…

Source: PCGamer