Are you sitting down? Good. Avowed is reportedly being delayed until early 2025, but if it’s any consolation, the primary reason for the apparent resistance is a desire to give the RPG more “breathing room” in terms of release by pushing it out of the tight Xbox Game Pass window.
This is according to Edgewho writes that Obsidian’s gigantic fantasy is “in good shape.” So why would it be delayed? Well, a contributing factor seems to be another recent delay for a game that was supposed to hit Microsoft’s subscription service.
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In the newsletter mentioning this apparent delay, Tom Warren quotes Xbox as saying that it believes the Game Pass lineup for the holiday season that will see 2024 turn into 2025 is already pretty much done, without the need to add Avowed to it and risk limiting its potential to be a huge hit.
Stalker 2, which was recently pushed back to November 20, is the game that was expected to contribute to the change in plans, as it will release around the same time that Avowed was originally planned to release, if the November 12 date that Obsidian gave in a blog post about the game back in April (but quickly deleted) turns out to be exact.
As of right now, Avowed is still scheduled to release sometime in 2024, rather than a specific date like it had been for a while. Stalker isn’t the only game slated for a delayed October/early November release, with Call of Duty Black Ops 6 — which Xbox is certainly counting on to do well on Game Pass — coming on October 25, and Assassin’s Creed Shadows arriving on November 15, but making its way to those who pre-order its premium add-ons on November 12.
We asked game director Carrie Patel in a recent interview why Avowed is so focused on appealing to Game Pass players, and she revealed that Obsidian spent a lot of time crafting the game’s prologue to draw players in.
“We had a lot of help from internal playtesters,” she said, “from external playtesters that we brought in from Microsoft’s user research lab, and all of that gave us a lot of really good insight into what players were noticing, what they were really engaging with, and what was confusing them and what we needed to smooth out.”
