Avowed's Roadmap Is Complete — And Obsidian Just Cancelled the Sequel

We last checked in on Avowed back in April, right around patch 1.3. Since then, two things happened that matter for very different reasons: Obsidian shipped the Anniversary Update in February, which they explicitly framed as completing the game's post-launch roadmap — and then in July, Obsidian cancelled Avowed's sequel and laid off roughly a quarter of the studio.

One is genuinely good news for players still in the Living Lands. The other is a real signal about where the studio is headed next.

The Anniversary Update: What Actually Changed

Obsidian's February 17 update added three new playable races — Dwarves, Orlans, and Aumaua — joining Humans and Elves. If you're worried about being locked into a bad choice, a Party Camp mirror lets you re-roll your race at any time without starting a new save, so it's low-risk to experiment.

The bigger mechanical change is to New Game+: attribute progression opens up further than a fresh character's ceiling, which meaningfully changes optimal stat allocation on a second playthrough. If you followed our Builds guide attribute spreads the first time through, NG+ is where you get room to push those numbers further.

There's also a new weapon type, the Quarterstaff — a two-handed bludgeoning weapon with wand-style stun finishers that scales with Might by default and can be built as a hybrid caster/melee weapon via Elemental Infusion. One real trade-off worth knowing: being two-handed, it can't combine a grimoire's and a quarterstaff's rank-up bonuses simultaneously, so it's a genuine build decision rather than a strict upgrade.

We've folded all of this into the Builds guide — the five core archetypes we've recommended since launch are all still valid; race and the Quarterstaff are additive options on top of that same foundation, not a replacement for it.

One honest note from the patch: the three new races reportedly got no unique reactive dialogue. Obsidian's own comment on this was that there weren't dedicated narrative staff available to write race-specific reactions — which, in hindsight, reads a little differently given what happened five months later.

Then, in July: Layoffs and a Cancelled Sequel

Multiple outlets reported in early July that Obsidian laid off roughly a quarter of its Irvine staff — a WARN filing cited 52 employees — and cancelled the planned Avowed 2, redirecting the studio toward a new Fallout title reportedly led by Josh Sawyer. A smaller team is said to remain attached to Avowed 2 in case it gets revived later, but there's no confirmed timeline for that.

To be clear about what this does and doesn't mean: it's a business and staffing story, not a statement about the existing game's quality or support. Obsidian had already called the Anniversary Update the completion of Avowed's roadmap before any of this happened — so from a "will my save get more content" standpoint, the answer was already trending toward "probably not much more" even before the layoffs. What changed in July is the sequel specifically, not live support for the game you can play right now.

What This Means If You're Still Playing

Nothing changes about whether Avowed is worth your time today. The build variety is still there, NG+ gives returning players a real reason to run it back with a new race, and the five archetypes we've recommended since launch remain the right starting point. If you were holding out hope for a sequel announcement, that hope is on ice for now — but the base game isn't going anywhere, and a "roadmap complete" update is a perfectly reasonable place for a single-player RPG's live-service tail to land.

If you haven't touched your build since before February, start with the Builds guide to see what's changed, and the Build Planner if you want to theorycraft a new race into an existing archetype before committing.