It’s hardly breaking news that the gaming scene is awash with multiplayer titles. You can’t watch a games showcase these days without bumping up against a couple of them, and most of the time, they look like they’re belatedly trying to capture the magic of earlier, more successful attempts at capturing mainstream interest.
Multiplayer games like Overwatch, Destiny 2, Apex Legends, and Fortnite have been wildly profitable for the companies who make them, and now everybody wants a piece of the pie. Esteemed developers of well-reviewed, excellent single-player games are now turning their eyes towards the realm of multiplayer games, despite not having any experience or really that much interest in making them. That’s allegedly how we ended up with Redfall, a huge multiplayer flop from an otherwise very successful developer of several modern classics.
Surprisingly, it looks like Obsidian Entertainment’s Avowed could easily have gone the same way as Arkane’s Redfall. In part five of Obsidian’s 20th-anniversary documentary (as first spotted by GamesRadar+), studio head Feargus Urquhart said that in his 20 years in the position, “There's decisions of mine that I feel really good about, and there's decisions that I feel not so good about.” He then revealed that he had “really pushed” that Avowed should be a multiplayer game, and that he continued pushing it for a long time until he finally realised that would be the wrong decision. At this point, Obsidian hadn’t been bought by Microsoft, and the studio believed that pitching the game with a multiplayer element would make it more appealing to publishers. “When you're asking for 50, 60, 70, 80 million you've got to have something interesting to talk about,” said Urquhart, “and multiplayer made it interesting.”
I shudder to imagine what would have resulted from that. Obsidian is good at making smaller but highly detailed and complex RPGs, and creating a typical Obsidian game in a multiplayer context would force the studio to compromise on aspects that usually work very well in single-player. Obsidian realised this, too. "After working on it for a little bit we realized that we weren't focused on the things that we're best at," said Justin Britch, head of development at Obsidian, "and so we made a pivot on the game basically, to refocus really and make sure that it was, at the end of the day, an Obsidian game and not something different."
Obsidian has said the quiet part out loud – it didn’t particularly want to do a multiplayer game, and making one would have meant compromising on what it truly wanted to do. But it still pursued the idea, because it felt that it would be more marketable to publishers. I found it concerning when Arkane made Redfall, and I am even more concerned now that it’s been revealed Obsidian almost made Avowed a multiplayer game. The more publishers focus on extracting every bit of capital and profit out of their player base, the more the industry is going to pivot towards multiplayer games, and the more we are going to see games that should’ve stayed single-player get multiplayer elements forcibly grafted into them. Enough live-service multiplayer games are failing at the outset that it’s possible we’ll see this trend die soon, but publishers might not be able to catch up in time. I hate to see millions of dollars wasted chasing dead trends when we could have perfectly good single-player games instead. Thank god Obsidian changed its mind, or we could have had yet another flop on our hands.