Two RPGs Enter, One Dominates the Conversation
Obsidian Entertainment released Avowed earlier this year to solid reviews and genuine enthusiasm from first-person RPG fans. It had the pedigree, the studio reputation, and the Game Pass placement working in its favor. Then Bethesda dropped the Oblivion Remaster with almost no warning, and the conversation around Avowed effectively stopped. Not because Avowed got worse – it didn’t – but because Cyrodiil came back, and a significant portion of the RPG audience dropped everything to go back to it.
The timing was not accidental, but it may not have been fully calculated either. Bethesda and its parent company Microsoft had been sitting on this remaster for long enough that a quiet launch made sense as a surprise move. What they likely did not anticipate was how completely it would dominate the RPG space at a moment when Avowed was still building its audience. Two Microsoft-affiliated studios, two RPGs, one winner in terms of player attention – and the winner was the 2006 game.
Why Oblivion Still Has This Kind of Pull
There is something specific about Oblivion that other open-world RPGs have never fully replicated. The game has an almost absurd sense of scale relative to its era, combined with an NPC dialogue system and environmental storytelling that felt genuinely alive in 2006. The Dark Brotherhood questline, the Thieves Guild arc, the Shivering Isles expansion – these are things players talk about with the kind of fondness usually reserved for formative novels or films. A remaster does not have to be a revelation when the source material already carries that weight.
The remaster itself is built on Unreal Engine 5, developed by Virtuos, the same studio behind several high-profile remasters. The visual upgrade is substantial – lighting, foliage, character models, and water all received serious attention. But the gameplay loop is essentially untouched, which is exactly what returning fans wanted. Nobody who played Oblivion in 2006 or 2007 was asking for a mechanical overhaul. They wanted Cyrodiil to look the way they always imagined it did through the blur of nostalgia, and the remaster largely delivers that.
There is also a generational factor at play. Players who were teenagers when Oblivion launched are now in their thirties, with disposable income and a particular hunger for the games that defined their early years. That demographic does not need to be convinced to buy this remaster – they were already sold the moment it was announced. And they are pulling in younger players who missed the original, who have heard the stories, and who are now playing through content that feels both fresh to them and treated with reverence by everyone around them.
Avowed cannot compete with that kind of cultural momentum, not because it is a lesser game in any objective sense, but because it does not carry twenty years of mythology. It is asking players to invest in something new, which is always a harder sell than asking them to revisit something they already love.
What This Means for Avowed’s Long-Term Audience
Avowed is not failing. It has strong word-of-mouth among players who finished it, and its setting – the Pillars of Eternity universe – has a dedicated fanbase that was always going to show up. The problem is that “not failing” is a different category from “winning the moment,” and right now Oblivion is winning the moment so decisively that Avowed is getting treated as a footnote in a conversation it should be headlining.
The Game Pass factor makes this complicated in a specific way. Because both games are available through the subscription service, players are not making a financial choice between them – they are making an attention choice. And attention is finite. A player who dives into Oblivion and spends forty hours in Cyrodiil is not coming back to start Avowed for another month, maybe longer. By then, the social energy around Avowed – the stream recommendations, the forum discussions, the friend group enthusiasm – may have cooled to the point where starting it feels like an obligation rather than an event.
The Broader Pattern of Nostalgia Displacing New IP
This situation is not unique to these two games. The pattern of a beloved remaster or remake displacing a new title has become familiar enough that publishers should be building around it. A well-timed remaster of a game with deep nostalgia capital will almost always pull more immediate players than a new IP, regardless of quality. This is something open-world publishers have watched play out repeatedly, as delays or major releases push players back toward familiar titles rather than forward into new ones.
The structural challenge for studios building new IP is that they are not just competing with other new releases – they are competing with the entire catalog of games players already love. A remaster lowers the barrier to re-entry on something familiar, and that is almost always an easier ask than entry into something unknown. Avowed is asking players to learn a new world, new characters, and a new system. Oblivion is asking them to come home.
What makes the Oblivion situation particularly sharp is the Microsoft angle. Both Bethesda and Obsidian sit under the Xbox Game Studios umbrella, which means Microsoft essentially watched one of its studios’ releases absorb the oxygen from another’s. Whether that is a scheduling oversight or an accepted trade-off – banking on Oblivion’s ceiling being higher than Avowed’s – is a question the company has not publicly addressed. From the outside, it looks like a left hand that did not fully account for what the right hand was about to do.
Where Avowed Goes From Here
Obsidian has a history of building audiences slowly. Outer Worlds found its footing over months, not weeks, and the studio tends to attract players who finish games rather than those who chase whatever is dominant right now. Avowed may follow the same trajectory – a gradual accumulation of players who arrive after the noise around Oblivion settles, who work through it at their own pace, and who recommend it to others in the quieter months ahead.
That is a reasonable outcome, but it is also a humbling one for a game that deserved to be the main event. The remaster’s success raises a harder question for Obsidian’s next major project: what happens when they need to launch into a market that is not being dominated by a 20-year-old nostalgia hit? Because right now, the answer to “why isn’t anyone talking about Avowed?” is almost entirely about timing and circumstance. Next time, those excuses might not be available.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Oblivion Remaster available on Game Pass?
Yes, the Oblivion Remaster is available through Xbox Game Pass, the same service that carries Avowed, making it a direct competition for player attention rather than dollars.
Did Avowed get bad reviews?
No, Avowed received solid reviews and strong word-of-mouth among players who completed it. Its audience challenge is about timing and competition from the Oblivion Remaster, not quality.
