Avowed 2 Cancelled as Xbox Pushes Obsidian Toward a New Fallout
Bloomberg reported yesterday that Avowed 2 has been canceled, and that Xbox has instructed Obsidian Entertainment to shift toward a new Fallout project. In the wake of that news, longtime series contributor Chris Avellone—who previously served as a project designer on the New Vegas expansions—suggested that Bethesda had already rejected an earlier pitch. He claims studio design director Josh Sawyer had proposed a new Fallout game before, but Bethesda ultimately shut the idea down.
Sawyer, meanwhile, was reportedly tied to a different effort separate from Avowed 2. Now, he’s said to be leading the new Fallout initiative. The details of what that other project was haven’t been clarified, but Avellone says he has some context for how it may have changed hands and direction. “From what I heard, that was intended to be a Fallout game, but according to sources, Bethesda put the kibosh on that a while ago so it had to change its direction/tone from Fallout to something ‘similar’ to Fallout,” he said.
Don’t Get Too Excited Yet
It’s understandable to feel a surge of hope at the thought of another Fallout led by Sawyer—especially if, as Avellone claims, there were already concepts being worked on that could be adapted into a proper Fallout pitch. In theory, that kind of prior groundwork could give a team a head start. But the broader picture looks grim for Obsidian. A portion of the studio has already been laid off, an entire project has been canceled, and the company’s autonomy has reportedly been stripped away. On top of that, even after developers publicly expressed excitement about working on their own intellectual property, the end result still appears to be a hard pivot.
Many of the cuts and reshuffles happening across Xbox also seem at odds with the company’s stated ambitions. Take id Software as an example: Xbox plans to keep leveraging the studio’s proprietary id Tech engine and wants to drive more growth from Doom and Quake. Yet the company has also laid off more than 100 employees, including several of the people who helped build the engine in the first place. The same pattern appears with The Elder Scrolls strategy. Xbox leadership reportedly wants to extract more value from the franchise following the long gap between Skyrim and TES6, but it has reportedly cut roughly half of the ESO team—trimming away veteran talent that shaped what the MMO is today and leaving its future uncertain.
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Obsidian has a strong track record with Fallout—including one of the most celebrated entries in the series—and it’s also closely tied to the Prime Video adaptation. The studio is now sitting under the same corporate umbrella as Bethesda, which owns the franchise. That relationship makes it feel odd that Xbox didn’t simply bring the team in earlier to build a new Fallout game, particularly since Fallout 5 is still far off. Still, given the reported layoffs, cancellations, and shifting control, it’s hard to imagine any real sense of stability or enthusiasm inside Obsidian right now, especially when the future of its own projects may depend on decisions being made elsewhere.
