Is Obsidian Entertainment Taking On More Than It Can Chew

Obsidian's past financial struggles were likely one of the motivations behind taking the setting from Pillars of Eternity and using it for a more mainstream, accessible first-person fantasy RPG like Avowed . While CRPGs remain a relatively niche market, Avowed was almost immediately compared to Skyrim after its announcement trai


Almost every line in the Avowed trailer points to the return of Woedica, a goddess from Pillars of Eternity who is also known as the Burned Queen, the Exiled Queen, the Oathbinder, or the Strangler. Here are all the hints at her return, and what players can expect from Woedica in Avowed 's st


Without these small details The Outer Worlds ends up feeling far more like a shooter with an RPG dialogue system than a fully immersive open-world RPG. While RPGs like Mass Effect and Dragon Age also have far fewer ways to dynamically interact with the world, their more linear stories and more prescriptive player characters create a style of RPG which doesn't rely as heavily on these smaller eleme


Microsoft purchased Obsidian back in 2018, just a few months after the release of Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire , giving the studio some stability. Since then Obsidian has undertaken a surprising number of confirmed projects. This includes Avowed , The Outer Worlds 2 , and continuing work on Grounded , the studio's Honey, I Shrunk The Kid s-inspired survival game. Despite Microsoft's backing, two major first-person RPGs and updates for a survival game seems like a lot to handle considering Obsidian's history. This had led many fans to worry that the studio may have bitten off more than it can c


Although Avowed appears to be set before Pillars of Eternity - where the player discovers that the gods are man-made - it should still take advantage of its artificial gods as one of the most unique parts of its setting. It is revealed in Pillars of Eternity that people have discovered the true nature of Eora's gods multiple times, usually before their burgeoning atheist movements were crushed by Engwithan inquisitions. Games like Skyrim keep their main plots relatively straightforward. In fact, there's so little ambiguity about the nature of the gods of Tamriel that the Dragonborn literally visits and confirms the existence of the afterlife at the end of Skyrim 's main qu


That might be bad news for fans of The Outer Worlds hoping to see the sequel soon, but it could be good news for Obsidian overall. In fact, it seems like Obsidian might be taking its time with its main projects. Avowed was expected by many to make an appearance at E3 2021, and the fact that it didn't could mean that Obsidian is holding off on revealing too much until it's really ready. If the last year has taught RPG developers anything, it's not to build too much hype too early, something Cyberpunk 2077 infamously fell victim to over its prolonged development and controversial, chaotic rele


In contrast, the townsfolk of Solstheim frequently reference their isolation and the small size of their settlement, despite Raven Rock being bigger than some of Skyrim ’s other settlements like Riverwood and Rorisktead. Avowed could create towns which are the same size as Skyrim ’s cities, but seem far more convincing as hastily constructed frontier towns than ancient seats of power no bigger than a f


Although these features mostly add extra opportunities for immersion, sometimes the lack of them directly detracts from player immersion in the game. In Skyrim a player can kill an enemy then drag their corpse out of sight to prevent another enemy from going on the alert. This doesn't come with any special animation like players will find in Dishonored or recent Far Cry games. In fact, the bodies in Skyrim will ragdoll, making them look more than a little silly. Nonetheless, there is an underlying logic, and players are given the ability to engage with their environment in less traditional ways than just combat or dialo


If Avowed takes place during Woedica's reign , the Engwithan machine controlling The Wheel will be in full effect. Pillars of Eternity players will have insight into many of the world's phenomena that may not be discovered at the time of Avowed . If players have the opportunity to play as a Pale Elf, for example, this would be long before they learned that they were always reincarnated as a Pale


In Skyrim , players could manipulate items to decorate their homes in extreme detail. They could sit in any chair at any inn and listen to a bard play music, and they could zoom out and see themselves as part of a scene. They could even famously put buckets over the heads of shopkeeper NPCs in order to break the character's line of sight, letting them steal as many items from the store as they could ca


As a frontier, Solstheim inadvertently overcomes some of Skyrim ’s most common criticisms . While hold capitals like Whiterun in the main game feel suspiciously small for cities, the tiny settlements of Solstheim feel more realistically sized considering how isolated their populations are. It’s immersion-breaking when Nazeem assumes the Dragonborn has never been to Whiterun's Cloud District, which consists of one building usually no less than a hundred feet a