Obsidian reveals why Avowed's co-op mode was cancelled

Back in 2023, Obsidian Entertainment announced it had cancelled co-op in its new RPG, Avowed. Now we know why.

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Avowed was originally billed as a singleplayer-and-co-op adventure RPG that melds Obsidian's traditional choice-and-consequence gameplay with very Skyrim-esque mechanics. But the co-op mode was quickly slashed just 8 months into development. Features are usually cancelled because of costs, whether they be monetary, time-related, or manpower.

In Avowed's case, it came down to big technical and creative investments that would have taken Obsidian's focus away from the core of the game: reactive and emergent interactive storytelling.

In a recent interview with Windows Central, Avowed's creative director Carrie Patel explained the rationale behind scrapping co-op, and it sounds like something that singleplayer aficionados will agree with:

"Building the systems needed to support multiplayer and also designing content, conversations, and everything else that makes that work...

"It was a very big creative and technical challenge to find a way to build multiplayer while also fulfilling the things that we are strong at as a studio.

"What's important to us is making sure we have a really solid campaign and critical path story that puts the player in this meaningful role as the character moving things forward, making impactful decisions, and really shaping the world and the characters around them. Which obviously gets more complicated if you're trying to add a multiplayer component."

"It's not that any of these challenges are unsolvable, the Larian Studios team built an incredible RPG with Baldur's Gate 3, and they've had years of experience with Divinity: Original Sin, working at building multiplayer within a really robust RPG framework," Patel continued.

"It's a very hard thing to do well, and we wanted to make sure that first and foremost [that] we were delivering on the things that players come to an Obsidian Entertainment RPG expecting. Which is a really well-developed story, meaningful choices and consequences, and the ability to be the agent of change in the world."

Avowed is due out November 12, 2024 on Xbox Series X/S and PC.