Are you sitting down? Good. Avowed is reportedly being delayed until early 2025, but if it’s any consolation, the main reason for the delay is a desire to launch the RPG during a busy period for Xbox Game Pass, giving it more “breathing room.”
That’s according to The Verge, which writes that Obsidian’s big fantasy game is “progressing nicely.” So why was it delayed? Well, a contributing factor appears to be the recent delay of another game that was slated to arrive on Microsoft’s subscription service.
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In the newsletter mentioning this apparent delay, Tom Warren cited Xbox’s view that its Game Pass product will launch in the 2024-2025 holiday season without Avowed being included in the mix, which would seem to limit its potential to be a hit.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 was recently delayed to November 20th, with the game believed to have contributed to the change in plans, as it is now scheduled to release around the same time as Avowed, if the November 12th date mentioned in Obsidian’s April blog post about the game – which was quickly deleted – is accurate.
As of now, Avowed’s release date remains undecided, with it expected to be sometime in 2024 rather than a set date as it has previously been. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. isn’t the only game scheduled for a late October/early November release, with Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 – which Xbox will surely hope does well on Game Pass – set to launch on October 25, and Assassin’s Creed: Shadow of the Tomb Raider on November 15, but will become available on November 12 for those who pre-order its premium add-on content.
In a recent interview, we asked game director Carrie Patel about the fact that Avowed wants to grab the attention of Game Pass players, and she revealed that Obsidian spent a lot of time crafting the game’s prologue to attract players.
“We had a lot of help from internal playtesters,” she said, “and external playtesters that we brought in from the Microsoft User Research Lab, all of which gave us a really deep understanding of what players cared about, what they were really invested in, and what puzzles they needed solved.”
