Obsidian Entertainment’s once-delayed but soon-to-be-released RPG: Avowed hasn’t left the open world behind just to make things easier for developers.
Xbox Wire has published an in-depth interview with Kate Dollarhyde (narrative designer) and Carrie Patel (director of Avowed). According to Dollarhyde, they didn’t really want to clash fantasy character types in a way that would advance the story. Rather, Obsidian focused on how context affects consequences. According to Patel, choice and consequence are about how everything plausibly reacts to them. There are differences in the magnitude of the effect and the time frame in which we experience it.
“The material reality of the people living in the setting informs the actual stories that are told. What does it look like when a colonial empire comes to your backwater island and says, ‘Hi, we’re here and this is ours. When we design characters and quests and content, we don’t look at it and say, “What kind of character is this?” or “What’s the trope of this person?” It’s more about what they believe in. Pacing is really hard in open world games. You never know where the player is and what they’re doing. So having these zones that happen in sequence means that we always know what content you’ve just come from on the critical path. As a designer, I love making things that I know people aren’t going to see, that a handful of players are going to encounter. I know that within that handful of players, there’s going to be one or two that are going to really love it and be amazed by it,” Dollarhyde said.
By opting for self-contained, explorable areas instead of a completely open world (which can be traversed in order), Obsidian is trying to get the best of both worlds. The studio can better design the missions we’ve already seen and done in the game, while still providing spaces and stories for us to explore at our leisure – and ideally, the result will be a unique experience.
Avowed will be released on February 18th for Xbox Series and PC. It will also be available on Xbox Game Pass.
