In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Avowed director Carrie Patel shed some more light on what seems to have been a challenging development cycle for the venerable RPG studio.
Not only was Avowed initially supposed to be a seamless open world, it was going to have a co-op or even live service multiplayer component, and had to be rebooted after two years of preproduction.
The end result is pretty fantastic though, and DLCs or even a full sequel already seem to be on the table. According to Bloomberg, development on Avowed began in 2018, before Obsidian was acquired by Microsoft, and an initial multiplayer-centric pitch for the game was shopped around to potential buyers.
We'd previously heard that Avowed was at one point supposed to be Obsidian's Skyrim, but this is the first we've heard of a co-op multiplayer angle on the RPG, which Bloomberg compared to Destiny.
That seems to have been cut by the time of Avowed's summer 2020 cinematic teaser, but development was still a quagmire. At the start of 2021, Avowed's leadership team was replaced, with Pillars of Eternity and Outer Worlds veteran Patel taking over as director.