Avowed: Destiny Meets Classic Skyrim Design

In a recent Bloomberg interview, Avowed's second game director, Carrie Patel, detailed the turbulent development that forced the team to abandon two years of progress. Initially, Obsidian Entertainment conceived Avowed as a hybrid of Destiny and Skyrim, blending cooperative multiplayer with vast open-world exploration.

The project's 2020 teaser trailer sparked fan anticipation but was misleading; the game itself was far from finished. Merely months later, the entire endeavor was canceled and restarted from scratch. That original teaser thus remains a memento of an early prototype starkly different from the final game.

After this reboot, director Carrie Patel reoriented the project. She moved on from the Skyrim and Destiny inspirations, dropping the open-world and multiplayer concepts. Obsidian returned to its strengths, adopting a zone-based design and focusing on a deep, single-player narrative set in the Pillars of Eternity universe.

Starting over mid-cycle presented enormous difficulties, comparable to filming a movie without a script. Developers worked in a state of flux as creative leads worked to unify the project's direction. Overcoming these obstacles took another four years of development before Avowed was ready for launch.