Avowed is Obsidian's next big effort, a first-person RPG spinoff in the Pillars of Eternity setting's Living Lands. We also happen to know it's coming in the fall of this year, and for a moment we thought we knew when, until the information was scrubbed clean from the Obsidian website.
As spotted by Wario64 on Twitter, a post on the Obsidian website about the Avowed story trailer that dropped during the Xbox Games Showcase yesterday mentioned that the game was slated to arrive November 12. That detail was swiftly removed, though IGN managed to capture and share a screenshot of it, as seen below.
In an interview with PC Gamer amid the LA gaming showcase bustle this week (from before we spotted the redacted release date), Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart said that he's confident the studio will get the RPG out in 2024 as planned.
"It's that feeling of, yeah, we can get this done," said Urquhart. "It may take some work, but it's just work. That's probably the best way to say it at this point in time. We're not figuring anything out, we've now worked with Unreal Engine 5 enough, we've made these types of games before. We're basically building on top of a lot of the Outer Worlds stuff that already existed.
"When you look into my eyes, [you can see] I know that there's a lot of work ahead in the next while, but it's not, like, 'Oh crap.'"
Whether or not the plan is to get Avowed out specifically on November 12, 2024 is unknown. In the original post, game director Carrie Patel said: "The last few months at Obsidian Entertainment have been fast-paced and exciting. Since we saw you at the Xbox Developer Direct this past January, we've been busy with Avowed getting it ready for release on November 12, 2024."
This has since been amended to simply read: "We've been busy with Avowed."
("We will have a date soon," Urquhart told us in our interview.)
It's a slip, to be sure, but by no means a concrete date. Release windows for games shift all the time even when they have been announced to the public, let alone while they're still internal—and while November puts Avowed squarely in "fall" territory, it also brings it directly into conflict with Assassins Creed Shadows which releases November 15. I can imagine Obsidian will want to dodge that particular mammoth.
Another point in favour of this release date not being final is the fact that, well, it probably would've been a part of that big shiny story trailer that debuted during the showcase yesterday. My money's on this simply being an old date overlooked in a press release before someone hit publish, but nonetheless, Urquhart has confirmed that 2024 is still the plan.
This article was updated after publishing to include Urquhart's comments.
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