One major Obsidian project is actually already accessible. Grounded went into early access in July 2020 , and Obsidian has been supporting it aggressively ever since. Grounded is a new take on a familiar premise: the player characters are children who've mysteriously been shrunken down, and now have to fight insects much larger than them to survive. Although Grounded looked strong from the beginning, Obsidian consistently comes up with good additions to the game, like new buildings for players to create and a koi pond offering a tense and beautiful new way to engage with the microscopic wo
Azathoth is an unimaginably powerful being who exists outside the Lovecraft universe and dreams reality while "lulled by the thin monotonous piping of a demoniac flute." While the Dragonborn DLC dived deeper into the broader The Elder Scrolls -Lovecraft connections than most other entries in the series, the Lovecraftian connections to the world of Avowed are far more expli
Obsidian has had a rocky history, sometimes needing to crowdfund its games to get their development started. Now it's in a very different place with Microsoft's help. Frankly, it's great to see someone as influential in the game industry as Microsoft acknowledging what Obsidian is capable of and giving it a much greater level of stability to help develop its ga
Obsidian's status recently underwent a pretty major change. Although it was once an independent studio, Microsoft acquired it in 2018 , right in the middle of the development of The Outer Worlds. Obsidian hasn't lost any momentum thanks to this change of ownership, though; if anything, it seems like Obsidian is ramping up development. Fans of the studio have a lot to look forward to over the next couple years, between Avowed and Grounded. Based on how many projects Obsidian is stacking up, it's also possible that it's planning even more new games with the help of its new parent comp
Either way, the fact that Avowed 's gods were inventions of mortals and there is no true higher power that created the universe taps in to a Lovecraftian sense of dread. That dread will likely be infused into Avowed 's plot in a way that the Godhead and CHIM are unlikely to ever play a central role in an Elder Scrolls games. How exactly Avowed plans to handle its story remains to be seen, but the creeping existential unease that hangs over Avowed 's universe will almost certainly be felt, and could be one of the key ways the game's tone distinguishes itself from The Elder Scrolls seri
This is particularly noticeable in the second game, Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire . The sequel let players get behind the wheel of a galleon and fire cannons, though the first game also had a clear early-modern slant to its technology. In the original Pillars of Eternity , players witnessed the creation of a powerful weapon known as the Godhammer Bomb which combined magical know-how with the expertise of artillery specialists to make an explosive powerful enough to kill a god's ava
Although Grounded is a solid game, people are excited for Avowed because it's much closer to the genre of game that people know Obsidian is best at. Fallout: New Vegas is frequently held up as one of the best entries in the Fallout franchise, but the RPG wasn't developed internally at Bethesda -- Obsidian made it. That's only the most famous of Obsidian's credits, too. Microsoft is poised to talk a lot about its internally developed games over the summer, so it's getting likelier and likelier that Avowed won't be such a mystery for l
There's been much speculation that Obsidian hopes to use Avowed to target The Elder Scrolls ' top spot in the first-person fantasy RPG market. The studio made a similar move with The Outer Worlds , a satirical sci-fi RPG directed by the original creators of the Fallout franchise. Like Skyrim , Avowed is set in a world with a cosmology deeply influenced by Lovecraftian myt
Woedica appears in both Pillars of Eternity games, but there are reasons to think that the focus on her in the trailer may also indicate the time period in which Avowed is set. Woedica was once the queen of the gods of Eora , but she was eventually overthrown by the other deities in the pantheon. As such she is also known as the Exiled Queen or the Burned Queen, having been burned by Magran, the goddess of fire and
There’s an argument to be made that Obsidian’s follower design comes with risks in an open-world RPG. While character-driven games like BioWare’s Mass Effect series are able to make the most out of well-developed companion characters thanks to the clearer characterization of their protagonists, the followers in games like The Outer Worlds can highlight just how much of a blank slate the player character is to the detriment of immers
The second smart thing about this page intro is that it leaves the player character's motivations entirely up to the player. The plot with the Platinum Chip is certainly intriguing, and some players may be driven to find Benny and exact revenge. It's also completely reasonable, however, for players to avoid the man who once shot them and left them for dead, count themselves lucky, and head out the opposite way through the Mojave Wasteland. In contrast the Bethesda RPGs Fallout 3 and 4 make it extremely hard to justify ignoring the main quest, particularly in Fallout 4 where the Lone Survivor believes their infant son has been kidnap