Eora's dragons also come to reflect the environment around them in a way that could inspire far more interesting lair encounters than the Word Wall dragons found in Skyrim . Their coloration and even their body structure morphs to reflect the environment in which they choose to live. The player character of Avowed could find themselves scaling a mountain, for example, before part of it appear to break away, revealing itself to be a recently-dormant dra

However, this also comes with a cost. Avowed will need to go above and beyond Skyrim if it's going to set a new standard for the genre on the new generation of consoles . Avowed will also need to include the small details that help bring the worlds of The Elder Scrolls games to l

Skyrim 's system also has another key upside for Obsidian Entertainment — accessibility. Part of Skyrim 's massive financial success was no doubt in part to its accessibility to players new to the RPG genre, doing away with complicated and interwoven class and stat systems that could be alienating or confus

There are few known details about the game, but the reveal trailer did show it's going to be a first-person action-RPG where players will be able to wield traditional weapons in addition to magic. With the title being set in the world of Eora, there's a wide variety of locations it can be, set in and conflicts for players to resolve. Avowed is reportedly set in The Living Lands , a frontier rife with lawlessness and petty warring, so it should be interesting for players to see where their protagonist fits into the equation in this troubled pl

In both The Elder Scrolls and Lovecraft , the idea of an immensely powerful being simply dreaming the universe plays on the existential dread that the universe, despite containing consciousness, doesn't have any real direction or agency, and is chaotically amoral. However, Avowed 's world imagines a very different kind of existential dread - discovering that there are no gods at

While Avowed is undoubtedly a huge undertaking, Obsidian Entertainment somehow has another project in the works that could be equal to the scale of Avowed, if not greater. Josh Sawyer, design director at Obsidian Entertainment, took to Twitter in August 2020 and noted in no uncertain terms that he's directing his own project and that the project isn't Avowed Secrets. Josh Sawyer worked on the Icewind Dale and Neverwinter Nights series early in his career. More recently, he was responsible for pitching Pillars of Eternity which saw the company get out of a tight financial spot, and went on to direct the two games in that series. He's perhaps most well-known for directing Fallout: New Vegas, a fan-favorite entry in the post-apocalyptic RPG ser

Skyrim is packed full of references to the works of H.P. Lovecraft. Its last DLC, Dragonborn, saw the inhabitants of the isolated town of Raven Rock fall under a mysterious trance-like state that was leading them to build strange obelisks, with only the faintest memory of doing so. While some The Elder Scrolls quests are full of surface-level Lovecraft allusions like this, the series' metaphysical lore makes the connection explicit. The same can be said for Obsidian's upcoming first-person fantasy RPG, Avow

Although these features mostly add extra opportunities for immersion, sometimes the lack of them directly detracts from player immersion in the game. In Skyrim a player can kill an enemy then drag their corpse out of sight to prevent another enemy from going on the alert. This doesn't come with any special animation like players will find in Dishonored or recent Far Cry games. In fact, the bodies in Skyrim will ragdoll, making them look more than a little silly. Nonetheless, there is an underlying logic, and players are given the ability to engage with their environment in less traditional ways than just combat or dialo

Obsidian has become an extremely productive developer with several projects in the pipeline at the moment. While some of these games are unlikely to be released for a few years, many fans are excited about what the studio has in store for the gaming industry. Since Microsoft bought Obsidian , it seems that the team has been ramping up development, and with Microsft behind them, it seems as though it has more resources accessible to them than ever bef

In Skyrim , players could manipulate items to decorate their homes in extreme detail. They could sit in any chair at any inn and listen to a bard play music, and they could zoom out and see themselves as part of a scene. They could even famously put buckets over the heads of shopkeeper NPCs in order to break the character's line of sight, letting them steal as many items from the store as they could ca

Obsidian Entertainment has proven to be a productive developer in the past number of years, with an increasing ability to juggle several projects at once. Obsidian has a long history of making RPG games , and its current projects prove there isn't any slowing down the Microsoft Games Studios developer. Most of the company's current projects are public knowledge, with one secret project and another large game that has been shrouded in myst