Phil Spencer says Avowed wasn’t delayed due to quality concerns

Microsoft has said that Avowed’s delay wasn’t the result of quality concerns with the game.

Obsidian’s RPG was once scheduled for release this year, but in August Xbox said it was pushing the title to February 2025.

With Microsoft having a relatively large first-party line-up for late 2024, it said at the time that it wanted to “give players’ backlogs some breathing room”.

Spencer discussed the delay in further detail in a new interview with Game File.

“We can afford it when we have the Diablo expansion, then Black Ops, then Indy [and the Great Circle],” he said.

“We didn’t move it because Obsidian needed the time. They’ll use the time.”

Spencer added: “[Xbox Game Studios head] Matt Booty and I, we plan it out, we talk with the Game Pass team… We said, ‘Okay, let’s make sure we pace this out a little better’.”

Announced in July 2020, Avowed is a first-person fantasy action RPG set in the world of Eora, which was originally introduced in Obsidian’s Pillars of Eternity series.

Game director Patel Carrie Patel has said Avowed will be similar in length to The Outer Worlds and that it has over 10 different endings.

In the same interview, Spencer also expressed his dislike of “manipulative” expansions that don’t offer players “a unique point of view”.

In a separate Bloomberg interview published today, the executive said Xbox is still open to more acquisitions following last year’s $69 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard.

He also said Xbox wouldn’t rule out any first-party game coming to PS5 or Switch, and that Xbox is working on handheld prototypes.