In a candid interview with Jason Schreier of Bloomberg, Feargus Urquhart – the top of Obsidian Leisure – has mentioned the lower than nice gross sales of each Avowed and The Outer Worlds 2. Within the interview, the studio head commented on the way forward for each franchises.
Let’s simply reduce to the necessary half first, as Schreier closes out his interview by saying Obsidian “…isn’t engaged on a 3rd Outer Worlds recreation however does plan to maintain making video games within the Avowed universe.”
That is one thing of a shock as, of the 2 video games, The Outer Worlds 2 reviewed stronger and appeared to do higher with followers total. Nevertheless, of the 2 franchises, it’s Avowed that’s shifting ahead, though it’s clear that Obsidian isn’t saying a 3rd The Outer Worlds title received’t ever occur, even when the sequence’ future is up within the air.
So, how did we find yourself right here? Nicely, in line with Urquhart, neither recreation actually met expectations, though concrete numbers weren’t given for both of them.
“They’re not disasters,” Urquhart advised Schreier. “I’m not going to say this was a kick within the tooth. It was extra like: ‘That sucks. What are we studying?’”
Apparently, what they’ve discovered is that they wish to rethink how they make video games, as each titles took over 6-years to develop. That’s changing into a reasonably widespread factor in at present’s business, as triple-A dev occasions seemingly develop longer and longer. And dearer.
Urquhart needs to carry improvement time down to three or 4 years per title, that means lacking gross sales targets received’t be such an enormous blow.
It additionally transpires that Obsidian didn’t plan on having three video games launch in a single yr, that’s simply how issues turned out. It proved to be an issue, as a result of whereas Microsoft have been fortunately declaring it the “12 months of Obsidian”, behind the scenes Obsidian’s help workforce was struggling to leap from recreation to recreation.
“Spacing these releases helps the corporate handle its sources and never burn all people out,” Josh Sawyer, Obsidian’s studio design director, advised Schreier. “It’s not good to launch three video games in the identical yr. It’s the results of issues going improper.”
Avowed is because of land on PlayStation within the coming weeks, an opportunity to probably decide up some new gross sales.
Personally, I discovered Avowed to be…okay. Nothing particular. I’d give it one other whirl on PlayStation. I loved The Outer Worlds 2 much more and think about it a a lot stronger recreation, however Microsoft wounded it earlier than it ever got here out by making an attempt to make it their first $80 recreation earlier than backpedalling. By then, the sport’s status had already taken an enormous hit as a result of folks simply didn’t think about The Outer Worlds 2 to be value that sort of cash.
