I’m having a lovely time in Avowed, a game about bonking little lizard men on the head, skipping through classic, florid fantasy countryside, and walking up to NPCs to receive vast dumps of expository dialogue. It’s a game that’s less interested in doing something radical with the structure – this is a pretty straight-ahead, sword-n-spells, skill-and-dialogue-tree action adventure – than it is the sheer vividity of its delivery.
Avowed is vibrant and alive, a game made with a kind of committed, full-hearted dedication to a simple, clear idea, and to then just doing it right. As evidenced by all the small, playful or just downright sensible twists on the basics – from a function that lets you pause mid-conversation to look up who or what exactly the latest proper noun is, to just a well worded explanation of shader compilation before the game itself starts. In fact the only thing that’s been nicer than playing a bit of Avowed, over the past week, was hearing what its developers at Obsidian had to say about making more games like it.
Get a load of this: the studio just wants to make games on the assumption they will be a “mild success”; it wants to do that at a pace of releases that is “not rushed, but often”; it wants to maintain its team’s institutional knowledge by having “the lowest turnover rate in the industry”; and it is “not trying to grow aggressively, expand our team size, or make super profitable games”.
This is all from a somewhat scantly reported PC Gamer article, based on Obsidian bosses Marcus Morgan and Justin Britch’s talk at the DICE Summit last week, which Eurogamer didn’t attend – so fair warning we are missing some wider context here. Morgan might’ve said all that and then immediately taken it back, after, say, locking eyes with a lurking Satya Nadella. Who could, for all we know, have been standing at the back of the room miming a big “snip, snip” motion with a pair of comedy-sized scissors.
But taken at face value, this kind of chatter is incredibly refreshing, if for no other reason than the sheer sensibleness of it. Releasing games of broadly the same scope and ambition, at a reasonable pace, with reasonable expectations for their success, and in doing so hoping to retain and build your staff’s expertise so you can maintain that reasonable success over time, is a philosophy at odds with almost the entirety of this industry (or at least with its leadership). We know that because we’re still in the middle of two years and counting’s worth of brutal, relentless layoffs, even at the studios behind games that have done incredibly well.
In actuality, this kind of sentiment has been voiced before. More or less any developer you speak to in person will tell you as much, but you also just have to look at Larian, Obsidian’s cousins in developing excellent, writerly RPGs, as an example. This time last year its boss, Swen Vincke, was on stage collecting one of many, many awards for Baldur’s Gate 3 when he railed against the exact same short-termism. “Greed has been fucking this whole thing up for so long, since I started,” he said. “I’ve been fighting publishers my entire life and I keep on seeing the same, same, same mistakes over, and over and over.
“It’s always the quarterly profits,” he continued, “the only thing that matters are the numbers, and then you fire everybody and then next year you say ‘shit I’m out of developers’ and then you start hiring people again, and then you do acquisitions, and then you put them in the same loop again, and it’s just broken…”
He echoed that in an interview with Eurogamer, a few days later: “I know it’s being looked at in an Excel file, right, and the person that makes a decision with that Excel file does not understand what they just lost. And it’s going to cost them way more, long term – they just don’t realise it yet. But it will cost them a lot. I’ll give you an example: I heard of a group of technical artists being fired. I can tell you, I’m a developer: if you fire your Technical Artist, you’re an idiot… anyway, we’re hiring them to come work for us.”
Perhaps the most relevant point here is the one about Vincke saying all this while collecting yet another award. This way lies success! And Xbox, proud owner of Obsidian, is in dire need of a few development success stories. Really, Avowed is just the ticket. In business terms for one – a game of moderate scope, that can be turned around in moderate time (depending on your definition of “moderate” – Avowed was first teased way back in the summer of 2020), and be mildly successful for a catalogue offering that depends on exactly that. And a game that comes from a stable developer that has room to flex its creative muscles, to tinker and noodle on the side with such wonderful results as Pentiment, as well as chipping away at Avowed and another The Outer Worlds game at once.
It’s also just what Xbox needs because it is a good first-party video game, and not one from an ailing franchise of the 360 era. It’s a game with personality and soul, with a beating heart of invention and storytelling behind it. With, in other words, a team that has clearly worked together before, which knows what it wants, what works, or how they really ought to work by now. It’s a game defined by attention to little details – how its secrets are hidden and breadcrumbed, how its world feels bright and beating with positive energy, how your mace lands with a tasty little hit-pause or spells crackle and snap like a whip from the end of your wand. The closest analogy I have for it, of all games, is really Helldivers 2. Not because its mechanics are even remotely similar, but because that was another game defined by the kind of medium scope and expert, long-running development team that gives lie to this kind of incredible luxury – clear ideas, distinct personality, craft.
The question now is whether Xbox, or really Microsoft, can tolerate this kind of sensible thinking. Just yesterday we got another baffling announcement from the company about generative AI, this time in the form of Muse, which may or may not be remotely useful to actual development – and may or may not be another announcement, after a near equivalent from Google in its Genie tool last year, designed purely to appease that great stock ticker in the sky.
But there are, actually, some quite promising signs. Grim as it may be to chalk this one up as a win, it’s worth noting that many expected a rough ride for Xbox studios such as Ninja Theory after the release of another mid-sized entry in Hellblade 2. Likewise, the other day Phil Spencer came out and made some very encouraging noises about Everwild, another long-dormant venture – and perhaps folly – from another studio of British veterans. “It has been [a while],” he said, referring to its nearly six years and counting since the first reveal. “And we’ve been able to give those teams time in what they’re doing, which is good, and still have a portfolio like we have… It’s like a dream that Matt [Booty] and I have had for a long time, so it’s finally good to be there. We can give those teams time.”
The problem of course is that Xbox’s bosses have made lots of encouraging noises before – as we’ve already argued before as well. There’s a good chance the cuts and the short-termism are out of their hands anyway, a symptom of the publicly-traded system at large, in which video games continue to have no real place. “Are we serious? … Yes,” Obsidian’s Marcus Morgan reportedly said in that talk, of its stated 100-year goal for longevity. And, cor. Imagine this. Imagine a world where their ultimate owners were just as serious too.