Ah, the turducken, that mythic dish. Made by stuffing a chicken inside of a duck inside of a turkey, this boneless matryoshka doll is the stuff of legend. I know that you can actually make one in real modern life, but for me, it will always be the centerpiece of a fantastical medieval feast. It’s the kind of dish you would help prepare in a side quest in The Witcher.
So, maybe it’s fitting that, when I think about my ideal RPG, my mind turns to the three-bird roast as a metaphor. At the Xbox Games Showcase last month, Microsoft presented some of its biggest upcoming games. The ones that most caught my attention were two of its marquee role-playing games: Starfield and Avowed. I’m stoked to play both the new spacefaring game from Bethesda and the new fantasy game from Obsidian, but I can’t help thinking that these two studios would be stronger together, with their open-world RPGs baked into one delicious dish.
Despite operating in the same genre space, the things Obsidian and Bethesda do well are completely different. Bethesda is great at scale and systems. Its worlds have gotten bigger and bigger over the years, but it remains skilled at filling those spaces with interesting landmarks to discover and robust tools so that you can make the space your own. Starfield looks huge, and Bethesda promises that there will be cool stuff to find throughout its expansive galaxy, plenty of planets where you can build a base and hunker down, and plenty of space to fly through with your crew on a fully customizable ship.
Obsidian’s games are smaller. In fact, one of its most recent releases shrunk the player down to the size of a dust mite. Grounded aside, Obsidian’s worlds tend to be more contained than Bethesda’s. That was the case with The Outer Worlds, which represented the vast expanse of space separating the planets with a JPEG map that only had a few planets you could choose from. The studio is taking the same zone-based approach with Avowed, and I’m all for it because Obsidian populates its worlds with interesting characters to meet and plenty of quests with compelling choices. Bethesda’s quests and characters are fine, but I’ve never had to make a choice in a Bethesda game with as much impact as having to decide whether to route the power to Edgewater or to Adelaide McDevitt’s commune. Bethesda doesn’t make that kind of game.
I won’t say that I wish it would, because if Bethesda focused more on filling its worlds with interesting narrative choices, it would likely mean less time and resources being devoted to the systems that define its games. But I would love to have both — the scale and reactivity of a Bethesda RPG, and the density and choice of an Obsidian RPG. I can only hope that some intrepid modder finds a way to smash Avowed and Starfield together. I even have a dish they can name it after.