Obsidian Has a Big Secret Project That's Not Avowed, and That's Mind-Blowing
Obsidian Entertainment has gained a lot of fan faith as a company over the last few years. With new releases from Bethesda like Fallout 76 floundering and failing to gain the commercial or critical success of Skyrim, many fans have been turning to Obsidian’s Avowed in hopes that it will be provide the first-person fantasy RPG experience they’ve been craving.
However, Avowed isn’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 alongside Avowed isn’t just mind-blowing, but has interesting implications for the studio’s development process.
Obsidian Entertainment’s studio design director, Josh Sawyer has stated that, he is directing his “own project” at the studio at the same time as the stuio is working on Avowed. Obsidian has already found success this year with smaller teams working on their own projects; for example, Grounded hit 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 like Avowed, but the smaller scale of games like Grounded has 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 from Grounded’s Adam Brennecke, who has stated that Obsidian 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, possibly The Outer Worlds 2. However, Grounded demonstrates 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.
The fact that the studio is working on Avowed, which is rumored to have a game world far larger than Skyrim’s, as well as working on multiple large side-projects is very interesting. RPG developers like BioWare have suffered from games like Mass Effect: Andromeda being handled by its Montreal Studio rather than its main Edmonton team, and yet Grounded shows 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 of Grounded and The Outer Worlds are 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, including Fallout, and many of its developers also originally worked at Black Isle Studios which helped develop groundbreaking series like Baldur’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.
Avowed is in development for PC and Xbox Series X.
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