Summary
Avowed’s creative director, Carrie Patel, has revealed that romances were once considered for the game early on in development, before being removed so the team could focus on platonic relationships.
Even thoughit might not be the rival to Skyrim that many of us were hoping for, Obsidian’s Avowed is shaping up to be one of the most exciting games of 2024,especially now that we know it’s taking a lot of cues from The Outer Worlds. As excited as most RPG fans are for the game, there is one thing that has seen a bit more of a mixed reception -the lack of romantic relationships.
Romances are generally considered to be a core part of RPGs, so it came as a bit of a surprise whenObsidianconfirmed that Avowed wouldn’t include them and was steering away from traditional companion approval mechanics. It wasn’t really explained at the time, but the game’s creative director has recently gone into a bit more detail about the decision.
Following its latest trailer at Xbox’s Summer showcase,Windows Central had the chance to talk to some of the key developers working on Avowed, including its creative director Carrie Patel. Towards the end of the interview, Patel is asked about the decision to not have romances in Avowed, a question that the team has surely become very familiar with.
Before explaining why romances aren’t in the game, Patel acknowledges that they’re a big part of RPGs and a fan-favourite mechanic that was “seriously talked about” in the early stages of Avowed’s development. Patel says that if the team was going to include romances, it wanted to have an equally meaningful non-romantic path, which would have required a lot of time and investment.
“Given how much we were investing in our companions as characters who are really tied to the central story in a way that they haven’t been in many of our previous games, we wanted to ensure that if we were going to do romance, we were going to really, really, really do it right - or not at all. For Avowed, we decided to focus on other aspects of our companions.”
Patel concludes by noting that the team has put so much into its companions and tied them into the central story in such big ways that if they were going to allow them to be romantic options, they would have had to “really, really, really do it right - or not at all”. As we know now, the team decided to do the latter and instead focus on “other aspects” of companions and focus in on platonic relationships.
