Avowed was going to be multiplayer till the devs realised they wanted to make 'an Obsidian game and not something different'
Obsidian Entertainment has been celebrating its 20th anniversary, two decades in which the studio has created some of the most beloved and intricate adventure-slash-RPG titles ever made. Its current project is Avowed, a game that's destined to be compared to Skyrim but is going for depth over breadth "where Obsidian really shines" and, in the fifth and final part of an anniversary documentary, the studio's creatives reveal that for quite a while it had a multiplayer element.
«When I look back at 20 years, there's decisions of mine that I feel really good about, and there's decisions that I feel not so good about,» said Feargus Urquhart, Obsidian's studio head (first spotted by GamesRadar+). «One of the things where I really pushed was that Avowed was going to be multiplayer, and I kept on that for a long time, and [I know] in the end it was the wrong decision to keep on pushing on it.»
Urquhart says that, in this stage of development, Obsidian was still independent (it is now owned by Microsoft) so one of its concerns with Avowed was how it would be received by prospective publishers. Publishers like games with a multiplayer element, so having that as part of the Avowed pitch would make it more attractive to the bean-counters. «When you're asking for 50, 60, 70, 80 million you've got to have something interesting to talk about,» said Urquhart, «and multiplayer made it interesting.»
Problem was that multiplayer rubbed the wrong way against what Obsidian is good at, and was forcing the studio to re-think how it would have to handle aspects that worked beautifully in singleplayer but wouldn't translate into a multiplayer context. «After working on it for a little bit we realized that we weren't focused on the things that
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