Avowed started as a multiplayer Skyrim and Destiny cross

Your Xaurip hunt might've been less lonely

Forget Kai, Marius, Giatta, and Yatzli; in another universe, you might've explored Avowed's Living Lands with your real-life friends instead. Although this action RPG from February 2025 took the single-player route, it was initially meant to be a mix between Skyrim and Destiny.

In an interview with Bloomberg, Feargus Urquhart, head of Obsidian Entertainment, said Avowed was pitched as "an ambitious cross between megahits The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Destiny that would allow players to battle monsters together in a massive fantasy world."

It was an ambitious plan. “My thought when I first saw it was, ‘I don’t think there’s a team on the planet that could execute on this,’” said Josh Sawyer, Obsidian’s studio design director.

The multiplayer proposal came at the time when Obsidian was joining Microsoft's Xbox Game Studios in 2018. But whereas the "fantasy" side of Avowed persevered, the multiplayer part was cut after merely two years of development. Obsidian has only produced single-player RPGs and co-op survival games since then.

Although the recent survival game Grounded 2 has been a great success, Obsidian's latest single-player RPGs, Avowed and The Outer Worlds 2, failed to meet sales expectations. Urquhart mentioned several ways in which the games might have been improved, such as the option to commit crimes, but the games' lengthy development time is pinpointed as the greater issue. Both Avowed and The Outer Worlds 2 were in development for over six years, thereby racking up production costs.

Urquhart explained that quicker decisions, outsourcing, and recycling certain technologies might shorten development time. An inventory space, for example, doesn't need to be reinvented for every new game.

Obsidian Entertainment is currently working on new projects, including new content for Grounded 2 and The Outer Worlds 2. While The Outer Worlds 3 is not on the agenda, Obsidian is planning to create more games set within the Avowed universe. Keeping the "more for less" development time in mind, perhaps now is not the best time for another pitch on the scale of "Skyrim meets Destiny," though.