Avowed Director Has Left Obsidian After Nearly 12 Years

Summary

Avowed's director, Carrie Patel, has left Obsidian Entertainment for Night School Studio after the game's release.
Avowed impressed with strong writing, combat, and environments despite being smaller in scale than other AAA RPGs.
Night School Studio is known for narrative games such as Oxenfree and Afterparty.

Carrie Patel, the director of Obsidian Entertainment's Avowed, has left the Xbox studio only a few months after the game's release. Set in Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity universe, Avowed was the studio's first crack at a major AAA fantasy RPG. While it turned out to be much smaller and more focused in scope and scale than something like Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, Avowed still impressed gamers with its strong writing, buttery-smooth first-person combat, and beautiful environments, earning the game an 81 on Metacritic.

Over her impressive 12-year career at celebrated RPG studio Obsidian Entertainment, Carrie Patel has mainly worked on Pillars of Eternity, The Outer Worlds, and most recently Avowed. Patel got her start at the studio as a narrative designer on Pillars of Eternity and its two White March DLCs before continuing her narrative work on the game's sequel, Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire. After working on the base game, it was The Outer Worlds' Peril on Gorgon DLC where Patel got her first opportunity as a game director, leading to her director role on Avowed.

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By LB Beistad

It seems that after having shipped her first full game as a director at Obsidian, Carrie Patel has left the studio. As can be seen on her LinkedIn page, her current role is Game Director at Night School Studio, one of the indie teams Netflix picked up to help support its Netflix Gaming effort. Before its acquisition by Netflix, Night School had mostly been known for its 2016 indie darling Oxenfree, and has since gone on to release lesser-known games like Afterparty and Next Stop Nowhere.

Avowed Director Carrie Patel Has Left Obsidian for Netflix's Night School Studio

Strong storytelling is one of Night School Studio's defining characteristics, as both its Oxenfree games and Afterparty have been praised for their compelling characters and writing. As such, it's easy to see why Carrie Patel decided on Night School Studio for this next chapter of her career. None of Night School's games are RPGs, so it'll be interesting to see whether Patel's involvement in the studio's future games will see more RPG-like gameplay elements, as Night School has primarily been a narrative adventure game studio.

Patel's departure from Obsidian could indicate that Avowed DLC may not be coming after all. However, seeing that Obsidian has a history of changing directors for DLCs as they did with The Outer Worlds' expansions, hope for Avowed's immediate future may not be lost. With that said, a full-on Avowed sequel will be tougher to imagine with Patel no longer at the studio, despite Obsidian's seemingly positive attitude toward Avowed's critical and commercial success.

For now, Obsidian has a second major RPG due to release before the end of 2025 in its Outer Worlds sequel. Plenty of info and gameplay footage has already been released by Obsidian, and it'll be the star of Xbox's upcoming June showcase, as the Outer Worlds 2 Direct is set to immediately follow the Xbox livestream on June 8. As for Carrie Patel and Night School, the studio just released a Black Mirror mobile game named Thronglets last month, but little is known about the team's next project, of which Patel is likely to now be a part of.

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