Xbox officially delays Obsidian's Avowed to February "to give players' backlogs some breathing room"

Xbox has announced an Avowed delay that pushes Obsidian's action-RPG to February 18, 2025.

A report from The Verge's Tom Warren surfaced this week claiming Avowed was being delayed to early 2025 to give the game, in Warren's words, some "breathing room" from what Xbox saw as an already busy Game Pass release calendar this Holiday season. Notably, the Xbox announcement uses very similar phrasing.

"So many games coming!" reads a tweet from the official Xbox Twitter account. "As such, we're moving Avowed to Feb 18, 2025 to give players' backlogs some breathing room. Stay tuned for more from our games across Activision, Blizzard, Bethesda & Xbox Game Studios at gamescom, including our Aug 23 livestream for a look at Avowed."

Looking ahead at this year's Game Pass release slate, we've got Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, the first new game in the series to come to Game Pass, hitting the subscription service on release day on October 26. And then there's Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 due out on November 19. Bethesda's Indiana Jones and the Great Circle has also been confirmed as a day one Game Pass drop, even if there's no release date outside of the vague 2024 window. Meanwhile, Stalker 2 is hitting Game Pass when it releases on November 20.

So yeah, it's pretty safe to say Game Pass subscribers are being fed later this year, although that might not fully take the sting off losing Avowed, which will be the first new Obsidian game in more than two years by the time it launches.

In the meantime, here are the best Xbox exclusives you can play right now.