Avowed could have been Obsidian's Redfall, with a Destiny plus Skyrim co-op multiplayer vision scrapped early in a grueling 6-year development

pcgamer.com:

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. Under Patel's leadership, Avowed was further rescoped to its final «open zone» design instead of a single seamless open world. Even with Avowed's reboot in 2021, the game still struggled with having to sustain a full team's production duties without having outlined its new direction in a full preproduction period, a process Patel likened to «building the tracks while the train was moving forward.» A similar jump into full production with no preproduction phase was one of the largest hurdles faced by Disco Elysium's canceled expansion pack codenamed X7.

But even after all of that, Avowed released to critical praise and initial sales figures Obsidian is reportedly satisfied with. Patel hinted that more is likely on the way in the interview: «Now that we've built this wonderful world, and also built this team strength and muscle memory around the