Obsidian "really pushed" Avowed as a co-op RPG, pivoted to single player in eight months

rockpapershotgun.com:

You might already know that first-person fantasy RPG Avowed began life as Obsidian's take on Skyrim, but did you know that it was originally pushed as a multiplayer game, prior to being acquired by Microsoft? That's according to studio head and founder Feargus Urquhart, speaking in the latest and final episode of the Obsidian 20th Anniversary documentary, which is chock-a-block with intriguing factoids from throughout the studio's history.

"One of the things I really pushed was that Avowed was going to be multiplayer," Urquhart said. "And I kept on that for a long time. And I think in the end - not 'I think', I know, in the end, it was the wrong decision to keep on pushing on it. Now [the reason I did it] was when we still independent and we were selling it, it was a more interesting game to publishers. And when you're asking for $50, $60, $70, $80 million, you have to have something interesting to talk about. And multiplayer made it interesting. It was this idea of sort of the peanut butter and chocolate, putting it together - it must be something that's good."

In the end, however, Obsidian worked out that prioritising multiplayer wasn't playing to the studio's strengths. "We were too focused on co-op," head of development Justin Britch observed in the video. "And we were too focused on changing the way our pipelines work, and the way that we write conversations, the way we do quests and everything else.

"After working on it for a little bit we realised that we weren't focused on the things that we're best at, and so we did make a pivot on the game to refocus, basically, and make sure it was at the end of the day an Obsidian game, and not something different."

Said "pivot" took place in what sounds like quite a