Avowed Game Director Carrie Patel has left Obsidian after over 11 years to join Netflix, specifically the Night School Studio responsible for the Oxenfree franchise. Patel herself provided the announcement on her LinkedIn page.

The news is rather unexpected, to be honest. Following the successful launch of Avowed, Patel shared her interest in doing more in the same world now that the team had found its groove, so to speak:

Now that we’ve built this wonderful world, and also built this team strength and muscle memory around the content and gameplay in this world, I’d love to see us do more with it.

There didn’t seem to be any issues between Patel and Obsidian. It’s possible she simply got a better job offer and decided to take it.

Interestingly, Night School Studio suffered an unknown number of layoffs just three months ago. Following the 2023 debut of Oxenfree II: Lost Signals, the Californian studio has just released the mobile life simulation game Thronglets, based on the Black Mirror IP. However, given Patel’s long-standing expertise in the RPG genre (she also worked on the two Pillars of Eternity games and The Outer Worlds), it seems likely that Night School Studio could be heading toward that kind of game for their next project.

As for Avowed, the excellent action roleplaying game has just received a detailed roadmap of updates. The Summer patch will add new NPC abilities and behaviors, new active and passive abilities, new Unique armor and weapons, cooking and crafting improvements, and custom map markers. The Fall update will introduce the highly requested Photo Mode and New Game Plus, a new weapon type, the ability for players to change their character’s appearance while out in the world, new character presets in the creation tool, and more Godlike feature character presets.