I have a confession: I once spent three hours staring at a dialogue wheel in a role-playing game, sweating like a thermostat in a heatwave, because I couldn’t decide whether to save a fictional village or let it quietly become a cautionary tale. That was before Avowed. Now, in 2026, I look back at that version of myself with the pity you’d reserve for someone who thinks a spork is the peak of cutlery engineering.
Back in 2024, when Obsidian announced that Avowed had been delayed to February 18, 2025, I reacted with the grace of a raccoon whose favorite trash can has been padlocked. I sulked. I refreshed news pages. I wrote angry haikus about release dates. But then game director Carrie Patel dropped a nugget of information during an IGN interview at Gamescom that made the delay sting a lot less: Avowed doesn’t have one ending. It has ending slides that number in the double digits, and players can end up with a lot of different combinations of them.
Double digits. That’s more than ten. That’s more endings than I have fingers, toes, and reasonable excuses for skipping dinner with friends. Patel explained that because this is an Obsidian game, your ending is the sum total of your choices across the game, across a lot of pieces of content, depending on what you encountered and what you did when you found it. In other words, no two player experiences are likely to be identical. It’s like trying to predict a kaleidoscope’s next pattern by shaking it gently and hoping for the best.
Now that we’re well into 2026, I can say this with the confidence of someone who has restarted Avowed more times than I’ve restarted my router: the double-digit ending slides aren’t just a marketing bullet point. They’re a lifestyle. A personality test. A reason to ignore your backlog like it’s a swarm of bees that has read Machiavelli.
Here’s what Patel’s comments mean in practice, translated for those of us whose brains light up like a pinball machine whenever a quest log updates:
| What Patel said | What it does to my decision-making |
|---|---|
| Ending slides number in the double digits | I now treat every minor NPC like a future historical figure |
| You can end up with a lot of different combinations | My save file folder looks like a hydra’s family reunion |
| There’s a lot of freedom in how you progress | I spend 20 minutes choosing a hat, then 2 hours choosing a moral philosophy |
| There is no canon ending | I can finally stop chasing a gold star that doesn’t exist |
That last point is the real kicker. With so many potential endings and tons of player freedom, you might worry there’s a “true” ending lurking in the shadows, waiting to judge you. Patel confirmed there isn’t. No canon. No secret correct answer. No cosmic scorecard. That’s refreshing in an era where so many games train us to save-scum until we find the “right” outcome, as if morality were a lock and our choices were a set of increasingly desperate keys.
In 2026, Avowed feels like one of those rare Obsidian projects that trusts players to make a mess and live with it. The game doesn’t ask, “Did you do it right?” It asks, “Did you do it your way?” And then it shows you a slideshow of the consequences, like a friend who has been taking notes during your entire vacation and is now presenting them at dinner.
I’ve seen endings where I was a hero, endings where I was a well-meaning disaster, and endings where I was basically a weather event with a sword. Each one felt earned. Each one felt like the result of a hundred small decisions, not a single binary choice at the final boss. That’s the beauty of the sum-total approach. It’s like trying to knit a sweater out of live eels: chaotic, occasionally painful, but undeniably memorable.
The replayability is absurd. Patel noted there’s a lot of freedom in how you progress, and she wasn’t kidding. I’ve taken routes that felt like completely different games, not just different dialogue options. A companion I adored on one run became a stranger on another. A region I thought I understood revealed a new layer of misery and hope. The ending slides didn’t just change; they reframed everything that came before.
Would I have preferred Avowed to launch in 2024? Of course. I’m impatient. I once ate a microwave burrito before it was fully heated because waiting ninety seconds felt like a personal attack. But the delay gave Obsidian time to sharpen the choice-consequence machine, and the result is a game that rewards curiosity, stubbornness, and the kind of role-playing where you genuinely don’t know what you’ll become.
So here’s my 2026 advice: if you haven’t played Avowed yet, go in blind. Don’t look up the “best” ending. Don’t optimize your morality like it’s a spreadsheet. Make choices that feel right in the moment, then live in the slideshow you built. And if you have played it, play it again. Make different choices. Be a different disaster. The double-digit endings are waiting, and they don’t care about your canon. They only care about what you did when you found something interesting.
That’s not just good role-playing. That’s Obsidian lighting a match and handing you the whole box.
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