Update: After early rumblings from The Verge’s Tom Warren, Xbox has officially acknowledged a delay of Obsidian’s Avowed while also firming up its release date, pushing the game back from its tentative 2024 release window to a precise launch of February 18th, 2025.
“So many games coming! As such, we’re moving Avowed to February 18th, 2025 to give players’ backlogs some breathing room,” the company wrote in a tweet.
“Stay tuned for more from our games across Activision, Blizzard, Bethesda and Xbox Game Studios at gamescom, including our August 23rd livestream for a look at Avowed.”
So many games coming! As such, we're moving Avowed to Feb 18, 2025 to give players’ backlogs some breathing room.
Stay tuned for more from our games across Activision, Blizzard, Bethesda & Xbox Game Studios at gamescom, including our Aug 23 livestream for a look at Avowed:… pic.twitter.com/3RnyVwlHRa
— Xbox (@Xbox) August 2, 2024
The news means that the only remaining Xbox console exclusive games planned for the end of 2024 are Age of Mythology Retold (which is out on September 4), Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 (November 19), Towerborne (2024 TBC) and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (2024 TBC).
It sounds like Obsidian’s anticipated, upcoming Microsoft-exclusive RPG, Avowed, may be delayed out of its originally-planned 2024 release into a 2025 date. That’s according to The Verge’s Tom Warren, who wrote in a (paywalled) piece that development is going just fine, but shuffling release dates of other titles in a stacked back quarter of the year could see Microsoft push the game’s launch out a little.
“I’m hearing that Obsidian is about to announce an Avowed delay to early 2025,” Warren writes. “Obsidian accidentally revealed earlier this year that it was targeting a November launch, but with Xbox exclusive S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 delayed to November, things are getting stacked for Xbox games in the all-important holiday season. I understand Avowed is in good shape, this is more a matter of wanting to give the game breathing room outside of a very busy period for Xbox Game Pass.”
Extending out to also include content coming to other platforms, Xbox does have a busy few months ahead beginning with Age of Mythology Retold and Ara: History Untold, and then Diablo IV: Vessel of Hatred, Call of Duty Black Ops 6, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl, and somewhere amongst it all Indiana Jones and the Great Circle and Starfield: Shattered Space, among others. It’s a lot to promote and for Game Pass subscribers to consume, and so giving Avowed some breathing room in the early part of next year might be the right move.
Avowed’s Art Director, Matt Hansen, recently described to us the advantages of having not just a bigger potential audience for the game on Game Pass but also a broader pool of players, saying, “We see the reaction from a much wider swathe of perspectives and people than we normally would and we can respond to for the future and grow that much faster as a result…”
“…We can pick and choose what of those things we want to experiment with, but it’s a really wonderful opportunity and I think it’s unlike anything this industry has had the chance to work within before—that broad of an audience. So it’s been very satisfying. Scary, but satisfying.”
