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Avowed - Obsidian's new game, like Pillars of Eternity meets Elder Scrolls
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Every week, Feargus Urquhart, the head of Obsidian Entertainment, meets for breakfast with his management team at a diner near their office to scarf down cinnamon rolls and make decisions about the video game studio’s future. They’ve had a lot to discuss in recent gatherings. Last year the developer released three games—a rare and impressive achievement for a studio of its size—but two of them failed to meet sales forecasts set by Obsidian’s parent company, Microsoft Corp. “They’re not disasters,” Urquhart says. “I’m not going to say this was a kick in the teeth. It was more like: ‘That sucks. What are we learning?’”
A day after one of these breakfast gatherings, Urquhart is sitting with a Bloomberg Businessweek reporter in a conference room in Obsidian’s offices in Irvine, California, a pleasant but humdrum Orange County suburb. After more than two decades as chief executive officer of the studio, Urquhart, 55, speaks with a level of candor that’s unusual among the industry’s leaders, who’d rather talk only of successes. The company is trying to navigate a shaky games market as well as turmoil in its corner of Microsoft, whose Xbox game division has been buckling under pressure from its ambitious profitability goals.
Since it was acquired in 2018, Obsidian has been prolific, releasing a half-dozen titles, including last year’s trio: the trippy fantasy role-playing game Avowed, the survival game Grounded 2 and the dystopian sci-fi RPG The Outer Worlds 2. (Some other studios within Microsoft haven’t released a single game in that period.) While Grounded 2 was a big hit, the disappointing results from the other two have led Obsidian to “think a lot about how much we put into the games, how much we spend on them, how long they take,” Urquhart says. Both Avowed and The Outer Worlds 2 were in development for more than six years, inflating their production costs and the company’s financial expectations. One of Urquhart’s missions is to cut down development timelines to three or four years per title.
Something in the games industry needs to change. Expenses are swelling, growth is stalling, and almost every game maker is facing questions about how to survive. Tens of thousands of workers have lost their jobs since 2023, including thousands at Xbox, which has been closing studios and canceling projects at a rapid clip. In the 1990s, when Urquhart was a producer at the former publishing giant Interplay Entertainment, games were so cheap to build that a single hit could make up for a half-dozen flops. But since then the average cost of a project has ballooned from seven figures to nine, so missing a target can be fatal.
Obsidian appears to be on relatively firm ground. For divisions of Xbox, sales are just one part of the equation, and RPGs tend to gain sales momentum over time. Obsidian’s games get respectable reviews from critics and sometimes win awards, helping to sell Xbox hardware, and they’re offered on Xbox Game Pass, the company’s Netflix-like subscription service. “Obsidian develops games that are central to our vision of reaching more players than ever before,” Mary McGuane, a general manager at Xbox Game Studios, wrote in an emailed statement, adding that the developer “demonstrates the creative excellence and range that continues to strengthen Xbox’s portfolio.”
Besides, Urquhart is accustomed to operating under precarious circumstances. He founded Obsidian in 2003 with a handful of colleagues from Interplay, which had just been delisted from the Nasdaq and was on the verge of going bankrupt. Obsidian was privately held for many years, juggling contracts from large publishers to develop games for Star Wars, Fallout, South Park and other franchises. It found a devoted fan base for its complicated (though sometimes glitchy) RPGs with deep storylines that would change on the basis of the player’s decisions. But the studio was always one or two bad contracts away from going under. In 2012, when Microsoft canceled one of its big projects—a fantasy multiplayer game called Stormlands—Obsidian had to lay off staff and almost collapsed before turning to a Kickstarter campaign to keep afloat.
A few successes later, Urquhart and his co-founders were in talks to sell the business to the company that had almost killed it. During the negotiations with Microsoft, Obsidian’s executives assembled a slideshow presentation for the concept that would become Avowed, 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 impressive if unlikely proposition. “My thought when I first saw it was, ‘I don’t think there’s a team on the planet that could execute on this,’” says Josh Sawyer, Obsidian’s studio design director. Two years later, Obsidian stripped out the multiplayer feature, and a year after that it assigned a new director to the project. By the time Avowed came out, it had been in the works for nearly seven years.
In 2019, just after the Xbox purchase, Obsidian released The Outer Worlds, a sci-fi game by the creators of Fallout that attempted to capture the spirit of their old games’ jagged satire. It was a surprise hit, selling 5 million copies, and Obsidian went to work on a sequel. Hampered by the pandemic and technological challenges, the second game took longer than expected. “I don’t think anybody really likes five-, six-, seven-year dev cycles,” says Brandon Adler, director of The Outer Worlds 2. “We’ve kind of grown into that.”
Grounded 2 came together the quickest. Despite the popularity of the original, which the studio released during the pandemic gaming boom of 2020, Obsidian hadn’t planned on greenlighting a sequel until it got a pitch in early 2023 from Eidos Interactive, a studio in Montreal that was looking for outsourcing work.
That the three games were all ready in 2025 was mostly a coincidence. Releasing them all in one calendar year made for a slick marketing beat—the “Year of Obsidian,” as Xbox called it—but it also taxed the studio’s resources. The group has around 280 employees, far fewer than peers such as Baldur’s Gate maker Larian Studios (more than 500) or Cyberpunk 2077 maker CD Projekt SA (more than 1,300). Obsidian’s support teams were stretched thin, with frazzled staff leaping frantically from one game to the next. “Spacing those releases helps the company manage its resources and not burn everybody out,” Sawyer says. “It’s not good to release three games in the same year. It’s the result of things going wrong.”
Grounded 2 offers some lessons for a better way forward. Obsidian assigned a few senior staff to orchestrate the production in Montreal from 3,000 miles away, rather than develop the whole thing in-house. Chris Parker, an Obsidian co-founder who supervised development, says the distance was empowering because he could make hard calls more swiftly. One of the game’s vehicles—rideable insects called “buggies”—had originally been designed to be shared by multiple players until Parker and his crew realized the functionality wasn’t coming together, leading them to pivot. “I was like, ‘If this was one of our internal teams, we would work on this for another two or three months,’” Parker recalls. “We made this call because we could tell them what to do. It feels like we still run around with our kid gloves on internally.”
Quicker decisions could help Obsidian shorten development times, as could more outsourcing, which the company is already embracing. Another shortcut, according to Urquhart: The team plans to more frequently reuse technology on projects instead of, say, building a new animation system for each game. For 2010’s Fallout: New Vegas, Obsidian used art and technology from its predecessor, Fallout 3. New Vegas ended up costing about $8 million—a relative bargain—and took less than two years to make. “We don’t need to change everything every time,” Urquhart says. “We’ve had this debate internally: Do people really care that we spent an extra hundred person-months on the inventory screen?”
In recent years, Urquhart has been grooming two lieutenants, Justin Britch and Marcus Morgan, to take over the business when he retires. Last year, Britch, 33, and Morgan, 36, gave a talk at the D.I.C.E. Summit in Las Vegas called “Obsidian’s 100-Year Plan” that detailed their philosophy: retaining as many staff members as possible, avoiding unchecked head-count growth, pursuing moderate successes and not chasing trends. Rather than focusing the entire studio on a single game, they like to juggle multiple projects at once, a skill that’s eluded many other developers but that Obsidian has mastered. “You need to keep having at-bats, because at some point, if you can consistently make good stuff, you’ll get those breakout hits,” Morgan says.
Britch recently found a book in Urquhart’s office about what to do in retirement—“I didn’t buy it,” Urquhart insists with a laugh—but the CEO says he’s not ready to pass the crown just yet. “They’re still babies,” he jokes. “As Justin and Marcus become more ready, they’ll just start doing more and more stuff.”
Some of that stuff will involve dealing with their corporate overlords. For the past decade, after struggling to put out games on par with those of Sony Group Corp. and Nintendo Co., Microsoft went on a spending spree, culminating with the $69 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard in 2023. But with revenue growth flat, console sales declining and Microsoft’s priorities shifting to artificial intelligence, the company has put Xbox under new financial scrutiny, enacting an ambitious 30% profit-margin target for many studios, Bloomberg News has reported. The pressure has led the Xbox team to publish many of its games on Sony’s PlayStation—an unthinkable prospect just a few years ago—and cut costs in other ways.
For Obsidian the targets don’t seem unfeasible, as long as it can continue experimenting. Pentiment, the studio’s 2022 adventure game, was cheap to make, critically acclaimed and niche but still profitable. The hope, Urquhart says, is that Xbox continues to fund riskier projects and values achievements besides strong sales, even if it means accepting that “maybe where we are going to be from a profitability standpoint isn’t going to be 30%.”
During recent breakfast meetings, Urquhart and his deputies discussed some things they could’ve done better with last year’s releases. Perhaps Avowed players needed the option to, say, commit crimes and get arrested to make the world feel more alive. Maybe The Outer Worlds 2 needed stronger virtual companions. It’s hard to imagine a game would sell more copies if it had pickpocketing, but Obsidian’s leaders say seemingly minor ingredients can make a big difference. “Our job, all of us here, is to go make games that people want to play and buy, and if we continue to do that, then we have a solid business,” Urquhart says.
Obsidian’s plan for the next few years is to work on projects big and small—completely new games and added content for The Outer Worlds 2 and Grounded 2—and space out their releases. It isn’t working on a third Outer Worlds game but does plan to keep making games in the Avowed universe. Although the studio remains proud of what it accomplished in 2025, it’s safe to say Urquhart and his team hope to never repeat the Year of Obsidian.
A day after one of these breakfast gatherings, Urquhart is sitting with a Bloomberg Businessweek reporter in a conference room in Obsidian’s offices in Irvine, California, a pleasant but humdrum Orange County suburb. After more than two decades as chief executive officer of the studio, Urquhart, 55, speaks with a level of candor that’s unusual among the industry’s leaders, who’d rather talk only of successes. The company is trying to navigate a shaky games market as well as turmoil in its corner of Microsoft, whose Xbox game division has been buckling under pressure from its ambitious profitability goals.
Since it was acquired in 2018, Obsidian has been prolific, releasing a half-dozen titles, including last year’s trio: the trippy fantasy role-playing game Avowed, the survival game Grounded 2 and the dystopian sci-fi RPG The Outer Worlds 2. (Some other studios within Microsoft haven’t released a single game in that period.) While Grounded 2 was a big hit, the disappointing results from the other two have led Obsidian to “think a lot about how much we put into the games, how much we spend on them, how long they take,” Urquhart says. Both Avowed and The Outer Worlds 2 were in development for more than six years, inflating their production costs and the company’s financial expectations. One of Urquhart’s missions is to cut down development timelines to three or four years per title.
Something in the games industry needs to change. Expenses are swelling, growth is stalling, and almost every game maker is facing questions about how to survive. Tens of thousands of workers have lost their jobs since 2023, including thousands at Xbox, which has been closing studios and canceling projects at a rapid clip. In the 1990s, when Urquhart was a producer at the former publishing giant Interplay Entertainment, games were so cheap to build that a single hit could make up for a half-dozen flops. But since then the average cost of a project has ballooned from seven figures to nine, so missing a target can be fatal.
Obsidian appears to be on relatively firm ground. For divisions of Xbox, sales are just one part of the equation, and RPGs tend to gain sales momentum over time. Obsidian’s games get respectable reviews from critics and sometimes win awards, helping to sell Xbox hardware, and they’re offered on Xbox Game Pass, the company’s Netflix-like subscription service. “Obsidian develops games that are central to our vision of reaching more players than ever before,” Mary McGuane, a general manager at Xbox Game Studios, wrote in an emailed statement, adding that the developer “demonstrates the creative excellence and range that continues to strengthen Xbox’s portfolio.”
Besides, Urquhart is accustomed to operating under precarious circumstances. He founded Obsidian in 2003 with a handful of colleagues from Interplay, which had just been delisted from the Nasdaq and was on the verge of going bankrupt. Obsidian was privately held for many years, juggling contracts from large publishers to develop games for Star Wars, Fallout, South Park and other franchises. It found a devoted fan base for its complicated (though sometimes glitchy) RPGs with deep storylines that would change on the basis of the player’s decisions. But the studio was always one or two bad contracts away from going under. In 2012, when Microsoft canceled one of its big projects—a fantasy multiplayer game called Stormlands—Obsidian had to lay off staff and almost collapsed before turning to a Kickstarter campaign to keep afloat.
A few successes later, Urquhart and his co-founders were in talks to sell the business to the company that had almost killed it. During the negotiations with Microsoft, Obsidian’s executives assembled a slideshow presentation for the concept that would become Avowed, 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 impressive if unlikely proposition. “My thought when I first saw it was, ‘I don’t think there’s a team on the planet that could execute on this,’” says Josh Sawyer, Obsidian’s studio design director. Two years later, Obsidian stripped out the multiplayer feature, and a year after that it assigned a new director to the project. By the time Avowed came out, it had been in the works for nearly seven years.
In 2019, just after the Xbox purchase, Obsidian released The Outer Worlds, a sci-fi game by the creators of Fallout that attempted to capture the spirit of their old games’ jagged satire. It was a surprise hit, selling 5 million copies, and Obsidian went to work on a sequel. Hampered by the pandemic and technological challenges, the second game took longer than expected. “I don’t think anybody really likes five-, six-, seven-year dev cycles,” says Brandon Adler, director of The Outer Worlds 2. “We’ve kind of grown into that.”
Grounded 2 came together the quickest. Despite the popularity of the original, which the studio released during the pandemic gaming boom of 2020, Obsidian hadn’t planned on greenlighting a sequel until it got a pitch in early 2023 from Eidos Interactive, a studio in Montreal that was looking for outsourcing work.
That the three games were all ready in 2025 was mostly a coincidence. Releasing them all in one calendar year made for a slick marketing beat—the “Year of Obsidian,” as Xbox called it—but it also taxed the studio’s resources. The group has around 280 employees, far fewer than peers such as Baldur’s Gate maker Larian Studios (more than 500) or Cyberpunk 2077 maker CD Projekt SA (more than 1,300). Obsidian’s support teams were stretched thin, with frazzled staff leaping frantically from one game to the next. “Spacing those releases helps the company manage its resources and not burn everybody out,” Sawyer says. “It’s not good to release three games in the same year. It’s the result of things going wrong.”
Grounded 2 offers some lessons for a better way forward. Obsidian assigned a few senior staff to orchestrate the production in Montreal from 3,000 miles away, rather than develop the whole thing in-house. Chris Parker, an Obsidian co-founder who supervised development, says the distance was empowering because he could make hard calls more swiftly. One of the game’s vehicles—rideable insects called “buggies”—had originally been designed to be shared by multiple players until Parker and his crew realized the functionality wasn’t coming together, leading them to pivot. “I was like, ‘If this was one of our internal teams, we would work on this for another two or three months,’” Parker recalls. “We made this call because we could tell them what to do. It feels like we still run around with our kid gloves on internally.”
Quicker decisions could help Obsidian shorten development times, as could more outsourcing, which the company is already embracing. Another shortcut, according to Urquhart: The team plans to more frequently reuse technology on projects instead of, say, building a new animation system for each game. For 2010’s Fallout: New Vegas, Obsidian used art and technology from its predecessor, Fallout 3. New Vegas ended up costing about $8 million—a relative bargain—and took less than two years to make. “We don’t need to change everything every time,” Urquhart says. “We’ve had this debate internally: Do people really care that we spent an extra hundred person-months on the inventory screen?”
In recent years, Urquhart has been grooming two lieutenants, Justin Britch and Marcus Morgan, to take over the business when he retires. Last year, Britch, 33, and Morgan, 36, gave a talk at the D.I.C.E. Summit in Las Vegas called “Obsidian’s 100-Year Plan” that detailed their philosophy: retaining as many staff members as possible, avoiding unchecked head-count growth, pursuing moderate successes and not chasing trends. Rather than focusing the entire studio on a single game, they like to juggle multiple projects at once, a skill that’s eluded many other developers but that Obsidian has mastered. “You need to keep having at-bats, because at some point, if you can consistently make good stuff, you’ll get those breakout hits,” Morgan says.
Britch recently found a book in Urquhart’s office about what to do in retirement—“I didn’t buy it,” Urquhart insists with a laugh—but the CEO says he’s not ready to pass the crown just yet. “They’re still babies,” he jokes. “As Justin and Marcus become more ready, they’ll just start doing more and more stuff.”
Some of that stuff will involve dealing with their corporate overlords. For the past decade, after struggling to put out games on par with those of Sony Group Corp. and Nintendo Co., Microsoft went on a spending spree, culminating with the $69 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard in 2023. But with revenue growth flat, console sales declining and Microsoft’s priorities shifting to artificial intelligence, the company has put Xbox under new financial scrutiny, enacting an ambitious 30% profit-margin target for many studios, Bloomberg News has reported. The pressure has led the Xbox team to publish many of its games on Sony’s PlayStation—an unthinkable prospect just a few years ago—and cut costs in other ways.
For Obsidian the targets don’t seem unfeasible, as long as it can continue experimenting. Pentiment, the studio’s 2022 adventure game, was cheap to make, critically acclaimed and niche but still profitable. The hope, Urquhart says, is that Xbox continues to fund riskier projects and values achievements besides strong sales, even if it means accepting that “maybe where we are going to be from a profitability standpoint isn’t going to be 30%.”
During recent breakfast meetings, Urquhart and his deputies discussed some things they could’ve done better with last year’s releases. Perhaps Avowed players needed the option to, say, commit crimes and get arrested to make the world feel more alive. Maybe The Outer Worlds 2 needed stronger virtual companions. It’s hard to imagine a game would sell more copies if it had pickpocketing, but Obsidian’s leaders say seemingly minor ingredients can make a big difference. “Our job, all of us here, is to go make games that people want to play and buy, and if we continue to do that, then we have a solid business,” Urquhart says.
Obsidian’s plan for the next few years is to work on projects big and small—completely new games and added content for The Outer Worlds 2 and Grounded 2—and space out their releases. It isn’t working on a third Outer Worlds game but does plan to keep making games in the Avowed universe. Although the studio remains proud of what it accomplished in 2025, it’s safe to say Urquhart and his team hope to never repeat the Year of Obsidian.
Feargus Urquhart should be beaten with a bat.
- Joined
- Dec 20, 2021
I wonder how many people still believes the Obsidian behind FNV and KotOR is still there waiting to make another masterpiece.
- Joined
- Dec 27, 2023
“From the creators of” is borderline false advertising when it comes to AAA games.
- Joined
- Dec 20, 2021
I thought awoved and outer shit were double A.
- Joined
- Dec 27, 2023
I assumed it was AAA because of Microsoft’s involvement with publishing it.
- Joined
- Oct 9, 2024
for the love of god dont let nu obsidian near the fallout or the alpha protocol ips
- Joined
- Aug 17, 2024
Look at that nu obsidian, woke as fuck, no wonder all their games suck ass now days.
- Joined
- Aug 20, 2022
It's AAA because of the price. Remember that they wanted to charge $80 for TOW2.
- Joined
- Dec 27, 2023
I’m getting real tired of everything being written and made by these HR Becky types.
- Joined
- Aug 17, 2024
- Joined
- Dec 20, 2021
I find it quite hilarious how people loves to call FNV a troon-coded game and yet not enough people plays the tranny-made garbage from nu-obsidian nor care about to mention it for the company to farm engagement.
I doubt ow1 was even a good game at this point, I bet people jumped the hype train because New Vegas and then really couldn't give a shit about doing so again when the sequel was announced.
I wonder if companies eventually realizes this shit doesn't works and it's better for the company if these people better spent to make it 42% or even these kind of people aren't enough to break the corporate mindset that forbids to address blunders unless they are of the upmost severity.
- Joined
- Dec 14, 2024
Lmao that was fucking fast. Just like a month ago the devs were saying on Twitter OW2 was going to sell 10m copies and the chuds would be so owned.
- Joined
- Oct 2, 2017
Grounded 1 was great, bordering on woke but not enough that it bothers me.
Grounded 2, the kids are older, and somehow instead of growing out of their quirk, the few woke characters doubled down. And it runs like shit. And it's like 90% focused on mounts, even for building. Unless they manage to double the FPS, I ain't got high hopes.
Grounded 2, the kids are older, and somehow instead of growing out of their quirk, the few woke characters doubled down. And it runs like shit. And it's like 90% focused on mounts, even for building. Unless they manage to double the FPS, I ain't got high hopes.
- Joined
- Jan 22, 2024
How can they hope to make an Avowed 2 when they can't even respect their roadmap deadline?
And the fact that there's a fucking official roadmap on a non-service, triple A, finished game is just wtf in itself.
And the fact that there's a fucking official roadmap on a non-service, triple A, finished game is just wtf in itself.
- Joined
- Sep 13, 2018
These studios are owned by Microsoft. MS has fully embraced the DEI agenda, their gaming branch has a set of guidelines that they have to follow. I believe it got leaked a couple of years ago.
They won't change. Look at what 343 or Mojang did for this month.
- Joined
- Dec 20, 2021
Oh boy, I cannot wait to see people lament that fallout 5 features troons and niggers as the good faction while elder scrolls 6 brings back everyone (least) favourite girlboss yas queen delphine as the sole questgiver for the whole fucking game, because people adored killing Paathurnax, the embodiement of toxic masculinity and nazi dogwhistle in order to join the best faction of the game, the blades.
Its funny because everything else they do sucks ass.
Let's recap on microslop;
Nomore exclusives.
The amazon fallout tv show has the only positive of reminding people that Macaulay Culkin is doing fine.
Gamepass got overpriced and poeple jumped ship on it.
Latest meinkampf updates were dogshit.
The meinkhampf movie was fucking vile.
They spent a shiton of money to own call of duty, and yet the newer game sucked ass.
Doom is being turned into slop because of a plot nobody cares about.
Bill gates was on the jew's list.
I refuse to believe bethesda has got any progress for es6 or fallout 5 ready this year, and even then those games automatically sucks since todd the liar and emil the retard are still in charge.
Windows 11 is a pile of shit.
Pushing for ai is also pissing off gamers.
Obsidian devs are so tone deaf they made a second "muh captalism bad" game while being owned by a retard corporation.
I can't even say they are better than sony at this point, because all that company has to do is drop on the diversity shit (common issues all over the industry) and start to push for games that aren't overly cinematic garbage (like god of war/tlou/horizon), they learnt their lesson with Spiderman spinoff movies, now they need to put their shit together and learn from their mistakes with games as well.
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TrainWreckWatcher
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Mar 9, 2023
These are the kind of niggers who played fallout 1 and 2 as a homework assignment for an hour or two instead of out of passion.
If they even did it for a homework assignment to try and understand the roots.
- Joined
- Dec 20, 2021
What, you are delusional enough to think they played the games?
I bet all they did was reading the wiki, getting lost on the ads and playing shitty quizzez because fandom.com is a shit platform.
regalterry
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Sep 17, 2024
Just to illustrate how bad things have gotten - old, predominantly male and White Obsidian managed to develop New Vegas in 18 months. The new, diverse, progressive, feminine Obsidian needed close to 4 years to make Outer Worlds 1, and six fucking years to shit out Avowed.
Neither game has anywhere near the amount of content or quality of writing of New Vegas. Nobody will remember Avowed, OW1 and 2 exist within a year.
To 100% Avowed you need some 60 hours, to do the same with New Vegas you need 130 hours or more.
I must stress again, it took Obsidian SIX FUCKING YEARS to make Avowed. Six. That's perilously close to DNF levels of dev hell.