Avowed was initially a multiplayer game as it was imagined that this aspect would make it a “more interesting game” to potential publishers.
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These comments came out of the fifth and final part of Obsidian Entertainment‘s 20th-anniversary documentary which was sequentially uploaded on YouTube. “When I look back at 20 years, there’s decisions that of mine that I feel really good about, and there’s decisions that I feel not so good about,” explained studio head Feargus Urquhart in the latest video. Check it out below:
“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,” he continued. “I think in the end – not I think, I know – in the end it was the wrong decision to keep on pushing on it.”
At this point, Obsidian Entertainment had not been bought by Microsoft, so the studio was seeking investment from a range of potential partners. Multiplayer features might have swayed publishers to perceive Avowed as a “more interesting game” than others.
“When you’re asking for 50, 60, 70, 80 million [dollars] you’ve got to have something interesting to talk about – and multiplayer made it interesting,” rationalised Urquhart.
Head of development Justin Britch also added that the multiplayer angle began to break down the work that was already done on the Avowed. “We were too focused on co-op and we were too focused on changing the way our pipelines work and the way that we write conversations and the way we do quests and everything else,” he said.
“After working on it for a little bit, we realized that we weren’t focused on the things that we’re best at,” explained Britch. “So we made a pivot on the game basically, to refocus really and make sure that it was, at the end of the day, an Obsidian game and not something different.”
