Topher
Identifies as young
Broken vows
About four years ago, employees of the Irvine, California-based video-game developer Obsidian Entertainment were set to gather on a video call to discuss some unpleasant news. Avowed, the ambitious role-playing game that they had been developing for more than two years, was going to be rebooted.Carrie Patel, who would take over as director on the new version, already had a lot of reasons to be anxious as she waited for the all-hands meeting to start. During her time at Obsidian — her first video-game company — she had been a writer, a lead narrative designer and the director of an expansion. But she had never led development on a game this large, and she knew that the news would result in upheaval and a big hit to the team’s morale.
Then the headlines began popping up. There was violence taking place on the other side of the country, at the US Capitol in Washington, D.C. What was normally a procedural vote to certify the winner of the presidential election had turned into chaos.
It was Jan. 6, 2021, and Obsidian’s big day was being overshadowed by a riot.
Obsidian decided to reschedule the all-hands meeting for later in the week. “It was honestly a challenge on just about every front,” Patel told me during a recent interview.
It was an inauspicious start to Patel’s stewardship of Avowed. But four years later, the end result is impressive. Avowed came out this week to generally positive reviews and strong buzz. It’s a sharp, focused RPG with solid combat and stellar exploration.
Behind the scenes, the creation of the game was anything but straightforward, with multiple false starts and a lot of stress.
“I feel like I’ve learned so much over the past four years that I wish I’d known at the start of this process,” Patel said. “It’s definitely been a job where the highs are really high and the lows are really low.”
Development of Avowed began in 2018, as Obsidian executives were gearing up to sell the company after 15 years of independence. The studio had become beloved for complex role-playing games like Fallout: New Vegas and Pillars of Eternity, but staying solvent was always a challenge. Obsidian presented prospective buyers with a pitch for Avowed, which the company hoped would be its magnum opus: a cross between Destiny and Skyrim that allowed players to adventure together in a massive fantasy world.
Later that year, Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox purchased Obsidian. The new owners announced the game in the summer of 2020. But despite a glossy teaser trailer, Avowed was floundering. The development team had gone through two different vertical slices — chunks of the game designed to demonstrate how it would all function — and cut the multiplayer component. Even so, it was still failing to coalesce. By January, the studio had decided to replace the project’s leadership team and reboot the game.
This came as a shock to the Avowed team, which consisted of 80 people who were preparing to enter production. Now they would have to develop a third vertical slice and essentially start over from scratch.
“Normally if you’re stepping back and reevaluating your creative direction, putting together a new vertical slice and revised production plans, you would do that with a very small team,” Patel said. “We did not have a very small team at that point.”
In the weeks and months that followed, Patel had to simultaneously figure out a new vision for the game, refill key leadership positions and ensure that dozens of writers, designers, programmers and artists had work to do as Avowed found its footing. It was like “building the tracks while the train is moving forward,” Patel said.
“A lot of lessons we learned as we were building this game, ideally we would’ve learned on a small scale with a true preproduction,” she added.
Under Patel, the game made two major pivots. One was to double down on the story and lore from the Pillars of Eternity franchise, which Obsidian had been incubating for more than a decade. The other was to replace the open world with “open zones,” like the company’s 2019 hit The Outer Worlds, which would allow the development team to create distinct, dense spaces.
They’d have to sacrifice the ambitions of building a Skyrim-style map where players could walk for hours and still not see everything. But for both technological and logistical reasons, that was proving to be an impossible quest.
“With any game you think, ‘OK, we can’t climb every mountain — which ones are really worth the effort for us?’” Patel said. “We knew from The Outer Worlds that we could build a really great game with ‘open zones,’ and that also adds some advantages in terms of letting you really theme your areas more distinctly and intentionally, and provide a sense of progression as the player’s going from one environment to the next.”
The Avowed crew stayed quiet for the next few years as Patel worked to rebuild her leadership team, steer everyone in the same direction and learn how to direct a major project for the first time.
Because games are so complex, with countless variables ranging from big (how many companions there are) to small (the main character’s walking speed), even something as seemingly simple as clearly communicating decisions can prove to be a big obstacle — and a big lesson for Patel.
“As an individual contributor, you’re always saying, ‘Well if I were in charge, I’d be doing this, and obviously this would be the right call,’” she said. “Then you get there and you’re like: ‘This is harder than I thought it would be.’”
Faced with the pressure of delivering on one of Obsidian’s biggest bets, Patel spent a lot of time getting to know unfamiliar disciplines, like engineering, while making tough calls about what to prioritize.
Avowed was re-revealed in 2023 and initially set for a fall 2024 release before it slipped to Feb. 2025. It wasn’t until late in development that it all coalesced.
“There’s this interesting thing I’ve seen on every project I’ve worked on or seen during my time at the studio — things are messy, messy, messy, then they start coming together,” Patel said. “How can we find that point a little earlier? Or at least find the things we need to reinforce for ourselves? Yes we will get there, we’re on track. A lot of it is iterative. There’s a lot of work to get there.”
But ultimately it was worth the wait. Players have raved about the game, and the company said it is happy with sales so far.
Obsidian isn’t saying what’s next for the team, but Patel said she wants to keep directing games. The idea of something new is appealing, she said, but it seems more likely she’ll be building on Avowed’s foundation for expansions or sequels.
“Now that we’ve built this wonderful world, and also built this team strength and muscle memory around the content and gameplay in this world, I’d love to see us do more with it,” she said.
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