Avowed Development Issues

[Sanjid099]

Link: https://www.resetera.com/threads/xbox-game-studios-bethesda-softworks-otxix-twenty-five-years-in-the-making.589791/page-198#post-88203396

Screenshot 1: 

 

Screenshot 2: 

 

Recently, Jason Schreier (notable games journalist) stated the quote in screenshot 1 claiming Avowed's development is going through some rough patches. He also posted the tweet on screenshot 2, but recently deleted his post. it seems he was correct in his claims regarding Avowed not showcasing in this year's Xbox Games Showcase. What are your thoughts on this?

Edited June 12, 2022 by Sanjid099

[Theonlygarby]

I should have got a Playstation

[Wormerine]

As someone who cares for this project not only because it might be a game I like, but an extention of an IP that I like - I am worried of course. I hoped that Obsidian had a pretty good idea of what they want to do with IP, though honestly reasons for reboots could be many. It is disappointed after constantly hearing reports that Avowed is progressing well. I am mostly disappointed because I genuilly expected to see Avowed today on the showcase.

At the same time, like with delays, it is better to do a course correction, then release something fundamentally not fun. Good luck and my best wishes to the dev team. I shall be waiting for the news.

If you want to scrap Avowed and do proper Pillars of Eternity3 I won't complain

[Theonlygarby]

Maybe Josh took over now that he's free?

[Ordo!]

No I don't think so, the reboot happened at the end of 2020, when Carrie Pattel became Game Director.

[Theonlygarby]

13 minutes ago, Ordo! said:

No I don't think so, the reboot happened at the end of 2020, when Carrie Pattel became Game Director.

Weird.  I thought they had said it was moving along smoothly last year... which would be after the reboot.  Although who knows where I even heard that

[Ordo!]

16 hours ago, Theonlygarby said:

Weird.  I thought they had said it was moving along smoothly last year... which would be after the reboot.  Although who knows where I even heard that

Maybe it isn't a big reboot, we don't know because we don't have any infos about this game.

[kanisatha]

17 hours ago, Theonlygarby said:

Weird.  I thought they had said it was moving along smoothly last year... which would be after the reboot.  Although who knows where I even heard that

This was exactly what I was going to say too. Even as recently as this April the big Xbox head guy said multiple times Avowed was coming along great and he was looking forward to revealing more about the game. So what happened since April?

[kanisatha]

Here's the latest I've been able to gather:

https://wccftech.com/avowed-has-had-a-reboot-of-sorts-and-may-be-further-away-than-anticipated-rumor/

https://www.aroged.com/2022/06/13/what-happened-to-obsidians-avowed/

[Ordo!]

The absence of communication also let a lot of room for rumors/leaks like this, we still don't know the precise setting of the game.

Edited June 13, 2022 by Ordo!

[Wormerine]

1 hour ago, kanisatha said:

This was exactly what I was going to say too. Even as recently as this April the big Xbox head guy said multiple times Avowed was coming along great and he was looking forward to revealing more about the game. So what happened since April?

It is still possible we will see something on a later date - like Game Awards.

[Theonlygarby]

I remember avalone saying that the original director (forget his name now) when working on alpha protocol was a nightmare to work with.  Changing and adding things constantly.  So maybe that was why they decided to change to Carrie. That being said, Chris seems to talk a lot of crap about ex coworkers so who knows.

[Keyrock]

[Boeroer]

5 hours ago, kanisatha said:

This was exactly what I was going to say too. Even as recently as this April the big Xbox head guy said multiple times Avowed was coming along great and he was looking forward to revealing more about the game. So what happened since April?

Maybe nothing bad. That it wasn't on the show only means it's not going to be finished in the next 12 months.
Maybe they hit a wall again...
Maybe switching to Unreal 5 took more work than they thought.

Kate Dollarhyde was the Narrative Lead on Avowed and she also worked on Pentiment.
Unfortunately she left Obsidian, too - a month ago or so.
I think the main bulk of P's narrative part is done by now so I guess her departure didn't hurt P.
But for Avowed...? It could mean they have to find a new narrative lead
Or it could mean the narrative part of Avowed's development is mostly done like with Pentiment.

Who knows?

Edited June 13, 2022 by Boeroer

[kanisatha]

40 minutes ago, Boeroer said:

Maybe nothing bad. That it wasn't on the show only means it's not going to be finished in the next 12 months.
Maybe they hit a wall again...
Maybe switching to Unreal 5 took more work than they thought.

Kate Dollarhyde was the Narrative Lead on Avowed and she also worked on Pentiment.
Unfortunately she left Obsidian, too - a month ago or so.
I think the main bulk of P's narrative part is done by now so I guess her departure didn't hurt P.
But for Avowed...? It could mean they have to find a new narrative lead
Or it could mean the narrative part of Avowed's development is mostly done like with Pentiment.

Who knows?

Fair enough. I also did know about the switch to UE5, and Dollarhyde's departure (the job posting for a replacement is still up so I'm guessing the position's not yet been filled).

Maybe I can be mollified if part of the development delays involves adding in third-person perspective into the game.

[TheOuterDUrls]

Im surprised this game even has issues now that they have infinite microsoft money. Worst case reuse the story and setting of Pillars 1 but in first person like Skyrim, or third person like Dragon Age.

[Boeroer]

You never know what happens behind the scenes, money or not.

[darkling.lithely]

So, how long would Obsidian keep the Avowed forums open if the game were dead? Wouldn't that be some indication that things were still moving along, even if extremely slowly?

[Wormerine]

Nothing was said about Avowed getting canned - but that's it has gone through potential reboot and won't be released anytime soon, as many of us hoped.

[Boeroer]

This is Matt Hansen's Twitter:

He is the (very nice) art director of Obsidian and only recently changed his profile name to the one you can see above. Since I guess that there's no other Eora related project in the works atm I assume that this means Awoved is not dead. 

 

Edited August 27, 2022 by Boeroer

[Arhel]

Can not Imagine micro will pass this chance of an pc and xbox only title. Beside I thought a new poe3 without Internet and with offline lan like the good old baldurs gate and the new baldurs gate 3 would be far more fill a wish for fans. Poe3 should be no next elder scrolls online, instead build on its dirty character of discriminative, sklavery and mystery world of crime or freedom.

[Gorth]

Sounds a bit like a game without a plan, other than we would like to make a game in our own setting, that isn't an isometric game, but not much decided after that... i.e. no "vision" that the team is eager to implement.

Would it be better to release in a state like Alpha Protocol (lots of individual ideas that just doesn't mesh to make a whole game) or rather drop it entirely?

[UrbaNebula]

This is the problem I have with pre-rendered announcement trailers. They announced the game with no gameplay and no real indication of what the game is besides "First person RPG set in the world of Eora." Until they had a vertical slice and knew exactly what they were building, they should have kept everything under wraps. Moving team members around and rebooting the project after the announcement suggests that things weren't working out. Had the game not been announced it may have been cancelled outright. Having announced the game, it may be that they feel obligated to produce something to avoid canning it publicly.

We pushed back an announcement AND reveal trailer an entire year because things weren't quite ready to be shown off. In those 12 months we scrapped/introduced a lot of new features that were/were not shown in the initial trailer plans respectively.

[Wormerine]

20 hours ago, UrbaNebula said:

This is the problem I have with pre-rendered announcement trailers.

At the same time wouldn't it be frustrating for Microsoft to purchase so many studios and seemingly do nothing with them? For not we haven't seen a single Microsoft heavy hitter, be it Avowed, Hellblade2 or Bethesda-space-game whatever it is called.

I treated Avowed CGI, like recent new Deux Ex confirmation - that's what they are working right now, it's very early and anything could happen. Avowed trailer reveled little to nothing about the actual game, so there are no false promises... unless of course, someone bought XBOX console hoping to play Avowed in near future. As a PC gamer and PoE fan, I am glad that the IP is at least being worked on. I will hopefully still be here when/if it's ready.

[UrbaNebula]

On 11/3/2022 at 12:07 PM, Wormerine said:

At the same time wouldn't it be frustrating for Microsoft to purchase so many studios and seemingly do nothing with them?

Yeah, OK. In that respect, I agree that a pre-rendered trailer inspires a lot more confidence than say: "Hey! We're working on a AAA RPG... More news soon!" and then two years of radio silence.