Obsidian Entertainment has gained a lot of fan faith as a company over the last few years. With new releases from Bethesda likeFallout 76floundering and failing to gain the commercial or critical success ofSkyrim, many fans have been turning to Obsidian’sAvowedin hopes that it will be provide the first-person fantasy RPG experience they’ve been craving.
However,Avowedisn’t the only big project that Obsidian is currently working on. The developer is pulling no punches as gaming enters the next generation of console hardware, and the fact that Obsidian is working on another huge project alongsideAvowedisn’t just mind-blowing, but has interesting implications for the studio’s development process.
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The Secret Project
Obsidian Entertainment’sstudio design director, Josh Sawyerhas stated that, he is directing his “own project” at the studio at the same time as the stuio is working onAvowed. Obsidian has already found success this year with smaller teams working on their own projects; for example,Groundedhit one million players within 48 hours of its release, despite having a team of just 12 developers.
Allowing developers to form small teams to work on passion projects not only allows them more freedom within those projects as the studio focuses primarily on games likeAvowed, but the smaller scale of games likeGroundedhas proven to be more successful than games like Fallout 76 which felt spread thin.
Studio head Feargus Urquhart has joked that the studio has more than one game currently in development and less than forty. More definitive proof that the secret project is making progress comes fromGrounded’s Adam Brennecke, who has stated thatObsidian currently has several “big RPGs”in the pipeline.
This could mean that the secret project is another big RPG. It is possible that the team is able to work on a large secondary project because it is a sequel to an already established IP, possiblyThe Outer Worlds 2. However,Groundeddemonstrates the studio’s willingness to let these smaller teams work on entirely new IPs, which means the possibilities for this secret Obsidian project are fascinatingly broad.
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What This Could Mean for Obsidian’s Future
The fact that the studio is working onAvowed, which is rumored to have a game world farlarger thanSkyrim’s, as well as working on multiple large side-projects is very interesting. RPG developers like BioWare have suffered from games likeMass Effect: Andromedabeing handled by its Montreal Studio rather than its main Edmonton team, and yetGroundedshows that Obsidian has figured out how to make its secondary projects a great creative and learning opportunity for developers working on new IPs rather than just handing off sequels to secondary groups.
Obsidian’s success over the next few years will show whether or not this approach is ultimately able to work in the long-term or whether the developer risks becoming overwhelmed. If the success ofGroundedandThe Outer Worldsare anything to go by, however, then Obsidian Entertainment might have one of the most interesting work processes of all the major game developers.
Fans will likely be very curious to know what world the secret project is set in if it is an RPG. Obsidian has worked on some major IPs in the past, includingFallout, and many of its developers also originally worked atBlack Isle Studioswhich helped develop groundbreaking series likeBaldur’s Gate. Whatever Obsidian has in store, the studio is clearly more ambitious than ever before, and its continued critical success could see a significant shift in power in the Western RPG industry.
Avowedis in development for PC and Xbox Series X.
