How the Creators of ‘Avowed’ Mastered the Art of Sequels
Across the vast history of role-playing games, few studios have managed to be as influential as Obsidian Entertainment. Their work on beloved games like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords (2004), Fallout: New Vegas (2010), and Pillars of Eternity (2015) has made them a fan-favorite studio for two decades now — just seeing their name attached to a project will ignite cheers of the faithful — but its background runs much further than you think. Although Obsidian opened shop in 2003, its founders consisted of former developers from Black Isle Studios, many of whom worked on a little game called Fallout (1997).
Beginning with the early Black Isle releases, including Fallout 2 (1998) and continuing all the way through to the present with their new game, Avowed (out Feb 18), Obsidian has honed its successful formula for development, cementing systems and in-house design styles that have become synonymous with their voice. Their calling card is an unparalleled knack for heady storytelling; whether it’s the exploration of how greed leads to ruin in Tyranny (2016), or the investigation of how history is controlled by those who write it in Pentiment (2022) — fans can always expect to be challenged by the studio’s narratives just as much as are by the gameplay.
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And while there are some clear throughlines in each of Obsidian’s projects that show how they’ve evolved or iterated on their own ideas and interests, there’s also an essential secret to the studio’s success: they’ve mastered the art of sequels.
From early on, Obsidian made their mark not by creating big new IP, but by making fantastic sequels to already-established hits from other studios. Games like Knights of the Old Republic II, Neverwinter Nights 2 (2006), and Fallout: New Vegas — all sequels to acclaimed games from other developers — weren’t just met warmly, but are considered by many fans to be better than their predecessors. While one might assume picking up on someone else’s success and replicating (or improving) it sounds like an undesirable task, Obsidian co-founder and studio head, Feargus Urquhart, thinks that it was actually a boon.
“For me personally, going all the way back even to Black Isle, working on Fallout 1 and 2, and working with BioWare on Baldur’s Gate II, I think there was just a long history of getting to work on sequels and look at what you want to do better, and what people actually want,” Urquhart tells Rolling Stone. “It’s just this constant building and constantly saying, ‘Okay, this worked. This didn’t work; this is. We just build and build.”
Ahead of the release of the Avowed, Rolling Stone recently spoke with Urquhart, as well as the game’s director Carrie Patel, about Obsidian’s legacy and how all those years of playing in other people’s worlds allowed them to create (and perfect) their own.
Step By Step
While Obsidian hasn’t garnered the same level of brand recognition or cultural clout as big names like Bethesda (the studio behind Fallout 3 and The Elder Scrolls), its reputation for improving on strong foundations with their sequels made them a cult favorite for those in the know. New Vegas is hailed by many as the best Fallout entry because of its fresh perspective on the series’ setting and writing, taking the franchise into a previously unseen slice of the game’s world and more deeply exploring the consequences of moral choices. KOTOR 2 provided one of the most high-concept looks at the Light and Dark sides of the Force ever seen, depicting The Force itself as a kind of sentient entity, rather than just an energy source space mystics can tap into.
While those games have become emblematic of what makes Obsidian’s work shine, Urquhart notes that there’s one work in particular that he thinks might highlight the studio’s style best. “If you made me put my head on the table, and say I had to answer, from a standpoint of where we learned an incredible amount, I’d say Alpha Protocol (2010),” he says. “It’s unique, which is one of our core focuses, even from things that are out today.”
The 2010 espionage RPG bears the hallmarks of Obsidian’s DNA, focusing on robust choices that mold the story around the player, dynamic writing that lets you lean into the kind of spy you’d like to be, and complex game systems that inform that narrative as the experience goes on. Even in 2025, Alpha Protocol stands as the only game of its kind — it’s a bit like Mass Effect meets James Bond, featuring a protagonist that has a pre-established personality, but with a lot of wiggle room in how the player interprets them. The flexibility in how players can develop a character is novel, allowing them to morph actions and consequences that would otherwise be more linear if the hero’s personality were more set in stone.
Many of Obsidian’s games embrace that idea of novelty, with story setting or even gameplay mechanics that are different from anything it’s tried before in previous works. This has enabled the studio to continuously learn something new with each game, and carry it forward into the next one. All of those lessons the studio has found over the years, like the pre-established hero of Alpha Protocol, have prepared it for Avowed, which ironically feels like the kind of sequel that the studio used to make years ago — but this time for its own IP. Similarly to New Vegas, Avowed exists in an established world but implements a fresh perspective and tone.
Avowed takes place in the world of Eora, the same high-fantasy setting used in Obsidian’s own Pillars of Eternity (2015), and its sequel Deadfire (2018). Both Pillars games were developed entirely through crowd-funding, and are complex isometric RPGs in the style of the first two Baldur’s Gate games, produced by BioWare in 1998 and 2000. And while Avowed carries on the narrative and world of Eora, it’s a drastic leap into a completely different style of game.
“If you make RPGs, you probably want to make a big fantasy opus, right?” Urquhart says. “It’s something we’d always talked about, and we’d worked on fantasy stuff before — like Neverwinter Nights 2 (2006).”
Despite the fact that they’ve developed epics before, most of Obsidian’s fantasy experience had been in those highly complex isometric RPGs — the kinds of text-heavy, point and click adventures that were popular in the era of early Fallout and Baldur’s Gate — not something that appeals to a more casual audience. That was the next step; Obsidian wanted to follow in the footsteps of Bethesda, who’d reinvented the Fallout franchise by turning it from a more rigid, hardcore experience into something more accessible with an immersive first-person POV.
“After crowdfunding, we had the idea of taking that isometric style and going to Fallout 3 [a first-person game]. That’s what we wanted, and we were talking to a lot of publishers in 2018. It was the pitch that actually led to the acquisition conversations [by Microsoft],” Urquhart explains.
While the acquisition certainly opened new doors and resources for Obsidian, the studio’s vision remained the same — providing complex RPGs with worlds that are easy to get lost in.
Continuing the Thread
Each Obsidian game needs to have something that separates it from their competitors, some kind of fingerprint that can be definitive. For the studio’s last game, 2022’s Pentiment, it was a gorgeous aesthetic that mimicked the illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages, meaning intricate hand-illustrated works of literature often adorned with gold, silver, and other valuable materials. With that in mind, Pentiment looks like an animated Medieval book. But the approach with Avowed is taking the absurdly labyrinthine web of lore and party dynamics of Pillars of Eternity and translating them into a more easily digestible introduction for new players.
Shifting the perspective of the fantasy world into a first-person action RPG wasn’t a small task, but according to game director Carrie Patel, part of the fun is in the challenge. “Pillars 1 had a much darker aesthetic, and while Pillars 2 still had existential threats, the world is very colorful,” Patel says. “That’s something that influenced a lot of us, especially those who worked on one or both games. There’s a lot more tonal variety. For us as devs, we want to make sure this is something that feels fresh to us. If it feels fresh to us, it’s easier to make something that feels fresh for players.”
For Avowed, that sense of a new spark manifested in three key ways; through player choice, intentionally designed locations, and companions that feel real. Each of these tenets have been the focus of past Obsidian games, and all come together in confluence through Avowed, starting with choice.
“Good player choice and role-play is about a tapestry of big choices that lead to really big consequences, as well as small and intimate, but very meaningful choices,” Patels says, “One thing that’s very useful to think about, in any game, is to give the player a starting premise. You’re not a completely blank slate, there’s this starting mission where you’re sent to investigate and represent the Empire. Then roleplaying becomes determining how you’re going to fulfill those roles, and if you might try to rebel or subvert them.”
Urquhart says that each decision then must have a defining moment where it feels truly unique to each and every player, which he refers to as the “punchline.” This includes decisions big and small — from burning a city to the ground or keeping it intact, or choosing to bring an item back to a shop, only for the owner to name it after you in gratitude. These kinds of choices mold the world around the players themselves. That’s where the second piece comes in: making sure that there’s a riveting world that can actualize and support those choices.
“One thing that is very consistent for us as a studio, and certainly between The Outer Worlds (2019) and Avowed, is that all the content we’re placing is very intentional,” Patels says. “We’re trying to [build] intentionally created environments with great places to explore, where we can breadcrumb characters from one experience to the next. Our goal is never to just fill a world with stuff to keep players busy, because we all have plenty to do. “
Avowed makes sure you have a reason to visit every area of its world. A new bounty system encourages players to head to the far-flung corners of the map, and side quests frequently end up feeding back into the main narrative of each region. But the final piece of the puzzle was innovating on what Obsidian has always done best, characters.
Whether it’s helping the grim soldier Boone solve the mystery of his wife’s kidnapping in New Vegas, or helping the awkward and asexual Parvati figure out how to take someone on a date in The Outer Worlds — Obsidian’s games are built on the bedrock of compelling character writing, and companions that truly end up feeling like friends, or sometimes unfortunate enemies.
Just like in The Outer Worlds, Obsidian has chosen to not implement a romance system for the player character in Avowed, and that’s intended to give the player more meaningful platonic relationships. There are still romantic elements in Avowed, but the player can’t actively pursue or court any of their NPC party. Instead, the relationships that are built can more deeply explore how characters fit into the world and culture, how they live their everyday lives, and what friendship and camaraderie can mean at important moments.
To Urquhart, omitting romance options allows NPCs to be more fully fleshed out within the story rather than be relegated to an object in the eyes of players. “They maintain their autonomy, and sense of personhood,” he says. “In particular, one of the conflicts is about understanding what these characters are leaving behind and stepping away from to join the player, and what they might come back to. That is only a story we can tell if this person does not have to be ready to leave it all behind at the drop of the hat, just because the player is interested in them.”
From there, companions are developed even further by the relationships they have with each other, and how they interact at camp. For example, lizard-like Kai and dwarf Marius have a long history together, and they constantly talk about the hijinks they used to get up to. Surprisingly, though, there are only four companions in Avowed, far fewer than most other RPGs — including Pillars of Eternity, which had eleven.
“Whenever you enter camp, it’s night and there’s this warm crackling fire. Your companions are all hanging around doing their own thing, bantering. In having a smaller party, there’s a sense of intimacy,” Patel says, “You’re a small group of people who have to rely on each other, and that also allowed us to bake each of these characters into the critical path more intentionally than in previous games — where they’re entirely missable, but very big side content.”
In many ways, Avowed feels like the culmination of disparate ideas from across Obsidian’s catalog: the expressive visual style of Pentiment, the world-building of New Vegas, and the way the narrative reacts to the player like in Alpha Protocol. But if all those lessons are being put into place here, it begs the question, “What comes next?”
Back to the Beginning
Obsidian has gotten to its current position because of the way they’ve expanded universes created by someone else. The games they’ve made aren’t just imitating their predecessors, but trying to find a way to understand and evolve them. New Vegas gave Fallout an intoxicating new location to explore, a post-apocalyptic take on a city that values greed and power more than anything — letting the series explore the human condition in ways it never could before. KOTOR 2 dissected the very foundations of the Star Wars universe at large, not just in video games, and how The Force relates to real world ideas of fate and destiny. For these games, Obsidian was never content to just do the same thing again and again.
Similarly, Avowed marks a chance for Obsidian to swing for the fences with their definitive take on fantasy RPGs that can rival the likes of even monumental series like The Elder Scrolls. It’s also a critically important game for the studio, as it’s their first release under the Xbox Game Studios banner after their acquisition by Microsoft in 2018. But the crucial lessons taken from each game is on full display, with Avowed pulling from bits and pieces of nearly everything the studio has ever done.
This game embodies the spirit of what makes Obsidian games special, and a chance to prove that the studio is one of the most prolific RPG houses in the industry, whose own original creations can stand above even their stellar work making sequels for others. But there’s also a future beyond Avowed, as The Outer Worlds 2 is slated for release sometime later in 2025. Even though the studio is currently focusing on making games in their own IPs, it’s still building on what’s come before, still finding new ways to make established worlds feel new again. And that’s important.
“I think the important thing is being able to look at an IP, whether it’s yours, whether it’s somebody else’s, brand new or established, and understand what it is that is core and foundational to it,” Patel says. It’s about understanding those core philosophies, traits, tones, and flavors, and then being able to find something that excites you enough as a dev team. That you have something new and worth doing in that space.”
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