A year full of lessons for Obsidian
The first thing we learn in this article concerns Avowed And The Outer Worlds 2whose sales were deemed insufficient by Xbox. No surprise here, both titles struggled to generate much buzz upon release, and even though the team behindAvowed suggested that the launch had been well received at Xbox, we doubted that this would be enough for the company which is ready to sacrifice a Tango Gameworks even with the success of Hi-Fi Rush. We’re not talking about financial disasters either, but these are two out of three ambitious projects that have not achieved the objectives at Obsidian in 2025.
So there are lessons to be learned here, and Feargus Urquhart, who is the head of Obsidian, is well aware of them. First of all, Obsidian wants to reduce development time. Avowed And The Outer Worlds 2 both asked for more than 6 yearswhere Obsidian would now rather limit itself to productions lasting 3 to 4 years of development. This is perhaps one of the recipes for success, since Grounded 2, which works well, took much less time.
It was only with a pitch from Eidos Interactive, who came as reinforcement, that the game was validated at the start of 2023, and even if it was first released in early access (and it is a sequel which takes up many elements of the first game), the title will have required significantly less time than other Obsidian games. To shorten developments, the studio plans to limit the number of frames on a game in order to make decisions more quickly, as it did on Grounded 2while engaging in a little more subcontracting.
The studio, however, found itself somewhat trapped by seeing that its three games were going to be released in 2025. Which was not ideal for properly distributing teams and resources, especially since Obsidian “only” has 280 people. Despite everything, no question of stopping developing several projects in parallel. The studio still wants to produce AAA and titles like Pentiment. He reaffirms that he is not working on a sequel to The Outer Worlds 2while planning to make other games in the universe ofAvowed (and therefore Pillars of Eternity). Provided Xbox gives the green light.