If you're willing to pay a premium, the release of Avowed is now just a few days away. An early access launch designed to coincide with Valentine's Day, leaving fans of Obsidian RPGs with a choice between an expensive night out on the town, arguing over lost table reservations, or an expensive night in on the couch, arguing over decisions made during character creation.
Whether you choose to pay $90 to access Avowed on February 14 or hold out until its wide release on PC, Xbox Series X, and Game Pass on February 18, it's destined to be a monumental few days for Microsoft Gaming. The launching point for what is undoubtedly the most important year for Xbox in a generation. And let's be honest here, it kind of has to be.
There were times over the past 12 months where you could almost hear it, the death knell ringing. The tolling bell echoing amongst news of mass layoffs and studio closures, game delays and Game Pass price hikes. Another tumultuous period for a company who can't surely manage many more of them, with Xbox under increasing scrutiny as it struggles to sell the potential of its burgeoning multiplatform release strategy, appropriately scale membership to its subscription service, and quell concerns around the Series S' impact on developer ambitions.
- Avowed is an RPG that's both the culmination of everything Obsidian has done before, and also an evolution of it: "There's really not a whole lot of our regions that's off limits to the players"
- After playing 2 hours of South of Midnight, I'm convinced that it has the sort of off-kilter energy that can define Xbox's 2025
For a while there, it really did feel as if Microsoft Gaming was genuinely at risk of collapsing under all of the weight it is shouldering. Perhaps that's why Xbox is going all in on 2025. The upcoming Xbox games in the spring release window alone is electrifying, a reminder of why so many of us migrated to the platform to begin with. What we're looking at here is Xbox reinvesting in the core – the Xbox Game Studios group delivering expressive RPG, FPS, and action-adventure titles, the lineup bolstered by ambitious experiments from talented third-party publishers.
Xbox's 2025 in brief
The release of Obsidian's Avowed in February is followed by Compulsion Games' South of Midnight on April 8 and Doom: The Dark Ages on May 15 from id Software. Three ambitious, beautiful, and decadently-crafted experiences that are shouldering the burden of building momentum for Xbox in a challenging landscape. Sprinkled throughout the spring are other excellent additions to the Game Pass library; Rebellion's Atomfall on March 27 and Sandfall Interactive's Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 on April 24 undoubtedly the standouts.
Looking beyond the summer, Playground Games' Fable and Obsidian's The Outer Worlds 2 have tentative 2025 windows, while The Coalition's Gears of War: E-Day and The Initiative's Perfect Dark reboot are also rumored to launch within the financial year. It really does feel like this is the moment every Xbox owner has been waiting years for – the true result of Microsoft's big studio acquisition spree, which started in earnest all the way back in 2018. I don't know about you, but this massive investment in key genres (across both new IP and legacy franchise revivals) is starting to rekindle fond memories of the original Xbox and Xbox 360 eras.
Now, with that all said, I am trying to temper my own expectations. We need only look at the quality gulf between Redfall and Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2, Starfield and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, to be reminded that Xbox Game Studios has a tendency to be wildly inconsistent in a way that output from the PlayStation Studios group isn't (Concord notwithstanding). There's even less room for error in that respect now, with so many of Xbox's first-party releases primed for release on PlayStation – Series X/S sales are reportedly less than half of the PS5, so key would-be exclusives are about to get unprecedented exposure.
Doom: The Dark Ages is confirmed to be a simultaneous release across both platforms, and it's expected that a great many of these other Xbox games will eventually land on PS5 before the year is up. I'd suspect that any success for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle and Forza Horizon 5 (two crown jewels in the Series X lineup) within the PlayStation ecosystem later this year will only expedite Xbox's drive for platform ubiquity. Could Halo or Gears really make the jump to PS5? It's not out of the realms of possibility.
Whether Xbox's drive onto rival platforms is ultimately judged as a success or failure is a story that will unfold gradually all throughout 2025. For now the focus should be on Avowed. As the first major release from Xbox Game Studios this year, it's bound to set the tone for the year to come. If Obsidian has a winner on its hands (and we've certainly been left impressed by what we've played of it so far), then momentum will only begin to build. If it lands with a thud, pressure will begin to build around South of Midnight and Doom: The Dark Ages to demonstrate that Xbox is able to rise to meet the moment.
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