UPDATE: Avowed is reportedly being delayed into 2025, but chill out - it's apparently just to give it a bit of Game Pass "breathing room"

UPDATE (05/08/24, 09:10 AM BST): Xbox has now confirmed that Avowed's release date has been pushed back to February 18, 2025, "to give players’ backlogs some breathing room". This was revealed alongside an infographic which outlines that both Indiana Jones and the Great Circle and Starfield's Shattered Space Expansionare still currently pencilled in to release at some point in 2024.

We're proud of what the Obsidian team have accomplished with Avowed and want to make sure they have the best launch possible," Xbox's Phil Spencer wrote in a tweet of his own, "We look forward to you enjoying it along with the rest of our lineup of games and updates coming this year and beyond."

Are you sitting down? Good. Avowed is reportedly set to be delayed into early 2025, but if it's any consolation, the main reason being cited for the apparent pushback is a desire to give the RPG more "breathing room" release-wise, by pushing it out of a busy window for Xbox Game Pass.

This is according to The Verge, which writes that Obsidian's big fantasy thing is "in good shape". So why would it be delayed? Well, a contributing factor looks to be another recent delay to a game slated to hit Microsoft's subscription service.

In the newsletter which mentions this apparent delay, Tom Warren cites Xbox as feeling that its Game Pass offerings heading into the holidays that'll see 2024 turn to 2025 are pretty set without having to throw Avowed into the mix and seemigly risk limiting its potential to catch on big time.

Stalker 2, which has recently had its release pushed back to November 20, is the game cited as having contributed to the change in plans, since it'll now be coming out around the time Avowed was seemingly scheduled to, if the November 12 date Obsidian included in a blog post about the game back in April - but quickly scrubbed - turns out to be accurate.

As of right now, Avowed's release is still scheduled at some unspecified point in 2024, rather than a set date, as it has been for a while. Stalker isn't the only game slated to drop in the late October/early November window, with Call of Duty Black Ops 6 - which Xbox will definitely be hoping does well on Game Pass - arriving on October 25, and Assassin's Creed Shadows dropping on November 15, but opening up on November 12 for those who pre-order its premium additions.

The fact Avowed is aiming to capture the attention of players on Game Pass is something we asked game director Carrie Patel about in a recent interview, and she revealed that Obsidian has spent a lot of time crafting the game's prologue in order to draw people in.

"We've had a lot of help from internal play testers," she said, "from external play testers we brought in from Microsoft's user research laboratory, and all of that has given us a lot of really good insight about what players are noticing, what they're really getting invested in, and also what's confusing them that we need to smooth out."