“you’re free to’t ever fully escape the expectations that come from your own history.”
What a difference a few weeks make.
It wasn’t that long ago that question marks were still hanging over Obsidian’s coral-coloured role-playing gameAvowed.
Promotional trailers had left people unconvinced, showing an adventure that looked old-fashioned and lacking in originality.
Yet weeks later, Avowed has wide acclaim.
“It’s one of this year’s most pleasant surprises,” I wrote in ourAvowed review.
It’s a game that went from being under suspicion to an unlikely Xbox star.
In stormy seas, Obsidian’s boat seems, blessedly, buoyant.
But that wasn’t the case.
“Avowed very intentionally has a focused scope,” Patel says.
This is something where we had a very clear experience in mind.
It’s a retro approach that she says players responded really warmly to.
I was one of them.
But there’s no pleasing everyone.
That legacy has a weight to it, especially when people perhaps preferred what you made in the past.
Well, according to Patel, “Doing romance and doing romance well are two very different propositions.”
Doing romance well means a few things, she explains.
“It should feel natural, organic, and surprising,” Patel says.
The original idea for Avowed was quite different to the game we have now.
So, multiplayer was cut.
“It was still set in the world of Pillars of Eternity,” Patel clarifies.
By the timeAvowed was re-announced in 2023, it looked like a drastically different game.
People were confused, and in the years following it, this confusion lingered.
Was it still a Skyrim-like game?
Whatever Obsidian showed, it struggled to convince fans about the new direction.
It’s something that you have to be in the game experiencing for yourself."
But how large the Avowed audience is, Patel is slippery about saying.
“I don’t have a really firm metric,” she says.
Nevertheless, Patel is smiling, and it sounds as though Avowed has done well for Microsoft and Obsidian.
What exactly that means, it’s unclear.
“We’ve got a lot of people who are transitioning onto their next projects,” Patel says.
It doesn’t sound as though anything beyond bug fixing is happening on Avowed right now.
But in the future, who knows?
Or perhaps Avowed will be how Obsidian carries the Pillars name on.
But the future seems bright for the game - and hopefully for the series as well, perhaps.
“I know we’re always excited to try new things.”
