Redfall Saved Avowed For Xbox, But At A Steep Cost

A few years ago, all the big publishers were chasing after live-service titles. Given the success of Fortnite, Destiny 2, Grand Theft Auto Online, Final Fantasy XIV, and a few more titles ruling the genre for quite some time, publishers like PlayStation, Xbox Game Studios, Warner Bros. Games, and EA all wanted a piece of the pie from this segment. While some publishers failed and shut down ongoing projects, and some are on the verge of shutting down, a few could salvage their projects that were intended to be live-service games.

Although it's strange to think about today, Avowed was originally intended to be a live-service cooperative role-playing game. The approach that Xbox Game Studios ultimately took is quite different from the one they had earlier described. Avowed followed the direction EA took for Dragon Age: The Veilguard; while this change in direction didn't work too well for The Veilguard, some Avowed somehow pulled that out in their favor.

Both of these role-playing games originally intended for multiple players to interact with each other, but the studios eventually concluded that this wouldn't be successful and switched back to a single-player focus. Furthermore, the order of these events isn't coincidental; these studios just made the right decisions at the right time to salvage whatever investment they could save from these high-budget projects.

If you look back, most of these games were teased back in 2017~2018, precisely in the midst of the studio acquisitions era. During that time, studios were attempting to present themselves in the most favorable financial light, showcasing their money-printing live-service games to larger corporations like Sony and Microsoft, and it worked in their favor.

Both of these giants were in a race to buy as many of these studios as they could at that time. That's the period when these acquired studios were driven to create multiplayer-focused games like Redfall, Fallout 76, Concord, Avowed, and The Veilguard—not because they were passionate about making them, but rather because they needed to make themselves appear good to prospective purchasers.

Before Microsoft acquired Obsidian, Avowed was marketed as a multiplayer open-world role-playing game (RPG) with a framework similar to Destiny. However, this multiplayer aspect was later removed. What we see here is really the result of a relaunch in 2021; the game was redesigned to be an open-zone single-player RPG more in keeping with the outer planets. The experience has evolved into something entirely new, while traces of its multiplayer roots are still there.

If you've played the game and seen its camp system, you'd recognize that it was designed as a Matchmaking-Hub where players could find each other and form teams before going on missions, but in the current game, it serves no use whatsoever. More than merely an apparent matter, this was also seen in Dragon Age: The Veilguard.

Problems with The Veilguard also seem to originate from its origins in live service. In all candor, this behavior is rather common in the gaming industry. Once a trend takes off, the industry usually follows suit. The approval of a live-service role-playing game by one studio triggers a chain reaction in which ten others follow suit. They all come to the same realization a few years down the road: perhaps that wasn't the smartest move.

Avowed, in fact, worked out very well for Xbox Game Studios despite all the upheaval and change. The reviews were good, the developers at Obsidian Entertainment were pleased with the game's reception, and plans for DLC and a sequel are in the works, but Microsoft could have weighed in earlier. If they had taken the same direction for correcting Redfall, would Arkane Austin still be working on new games or DLC for Redfall?

Microsoft's strategy at the time was to maintain a low profile and allow the studios to continue operating as if they had never owned them. The issue is that some of these studios, such as Arkane Studios, were engaged in the production of games that they had no interest in making.

Imagine a studio that produced games like Dishonored and Prey no longer exists only because of bad corporate decisions. No matter how much Microsoft tries to justify shutting down Arkane Studios, it clearly shows how their greed killed this studio's potential. Microsoft chose to stand by and let Redfall occur, and of course, everyone witnessed the outcome of that.

However, things were looking up for Obsidian. With other projects in the works, they weren't really banking on Avowed to achieve anything. The Outer Worlds 2 allowed them freedom and put far less pressure on Avowed. Herein is Obsidian's true brilliance. Even though a lot of developers are waiting six, seven, or even ten years between big releases, Obsidian has managed to get four games out in only five years. They have mastered the art of scope management, which allows them to release games at a consistent rate, even if they aren't creating huge AAA bestsellers. More importantly, this is the most pressing issue facing the sector at the moment.

Studios are always interested in pursuing these enormous $300 million projects, even if they take a very long time to produce and maybe never earn a profit. Obsidian has managed to avoid that problem to some extent by developing smaller, more concentrated titles. That being said, they may remain profitable even if not every game is a smashing success.

The more pressing issue is the industry's future. Large publishers are all scrutinizing artificial intelligence as a potential cost-cutting measure, while other companies are discovering ways to reduce costs and concentrate on smaller projects. Xbox CEO Satya Nadella recently announced that the company is training artificial intelligence models to autonomously create and evaluate game material, and they eventually introduced Microsoft Muse AI, which is going to be used for game development.

Already, Activision admitted that Call of Duty titles contain AI content serving materials for the game's microtransactions, which upset the whole community. So, a lot is happening at this moment. Massively successful studios are being shut down, such as Monolith was shut down along with the Wonder Woman game, and projects are being canceled; i.e., several PlayStation studios faced an onslaught from Sony and Microsoft to publish Xbox-exclusive titles on PlayStation.

All these have made the current situation very complex for the video industry. And if the course isn't set right within a short time, we might witness more and more projects being canceled and studios being shut down. Individuals who worked under the umbrellas of these large corporations will eventually move on to making indie titles and then get acquired again in the future. This cycle seems to be inevitable.