Whether you love Avowed or it isn’t quite your style, it’s worth appreciating how perfectly its early hours are designed. Avowed does one of the best jobs I’ve seen at teaching players how to play through more subtle game design decisions. This helps you get into the meat of the game more quickly without feeling like it’s holding your hand the whole time, but it also continues to guide you through the opening hours so you get a good understanding of how the world works.

Once you arrive in Avowed’s Dawnshore region, it may seem you have finished the game’s tutorial section. In truth, the game still has a few more valuable lessons to teach you, even if they no longer feel like tutorials. I would love to see more games lean into these types of implicit lessons over more explicit tutorials.

Freeing Ilora Shows You The Impact Of Your Choices

Freeing Ilora Illustrates Short And Long-Term Impacts Of Avowed’s Choices

One of the first choices you can make in Avowed is whether to free Ilora from her cell in the Aedyran fort. If you choose to let her out, you get the immediate benefit of having an extra companion, making fighting the game’s first boss a bit easier. This shows that making certain decisions comes with an immediate reward. However, this isn’t the only lesson you’ll learn if you free Ilora.

Once you enter Paradis, you will learn that a couple in the shanty town needs your help. This starts the “Escape Plan” quest, where you will need to bargain with a smuggler to help take the couple out of the city for their initially agreed-upon price. If you chose to help Ilora earlier, she would be present at the smuggler’s camp and vouch for you, making it easier to get a favorable outcome from the quest.

This teaches you that your choices in Avowed matter, not just for immediate rewards, but in the long-term too. The turnaround here is quick enough so that you can learn early on that your choices impact the game, but it’s also spread out just enough for you to realize there will sometimes be a delay in the result of your choice. Illustrating this early on ensures that players will be more deliberate in their choices.

The Bridge Encounter Teaches You The Power Of Speech

A Short Combat Encounter Shows You Everything You Need To Know About Dialogue In Avowed

Another good early example of a lesson Avowed teaches comes from a quick encounter on the bridge to Paradis. When you attempt to enter the city, you will be confronted by two locals who try to intimidate you. One is visibly nervous, which clues you into the fact that you may be able to dissuade them from attacking you.

By choosing the right dialogue options, you can convince the more nervous of the two muggers to flee before combat starts. However, the other Paradisian will still attack you regardless of whether you talked their friend down. This moment teaches you two important lessons about the impact of dialogue choices in Avowed.

First, you learn that you can make certain encounters easier for yourself by choosing the right dialogue options. There are also several attributes and backgrounds that you can use to be successful here, showing that you needn’t worry about spending points on a specific attribute to help with dialogue. The encounter also shows you the limit of speech. While it can make some encounters easier, it isn’t a superpower, and you won’t be able to talk everyone down.

An Early Adra Encounter Shows That Sapadal Has Something To Offer

Getting The First Godlike Power Creates An Interesting Dynamic That Lasts The Rest Of The Game

Throughout Avowed, you will commune with Sapadal through the pillars of Adra. When you do, you can earn new Godlike abilities in Avowed, but you only get the best ones if you agree to help them. This choice becomes a little more difficult to make later on, as you are forced to balance your desire for new powers against your level of trust in the trapped nature god. However, these choices wouldn’t have much tension if you didn’t already know that working with Sapadal meant you would get a reward.

Luckily, Avowed shows you early on that Sapadal has something to offer. Before you even know who they are or have any reason to suspect they might not be entirely trustworthy, Sapadal asks for your help. With no real reason to say no, most players will likely say yes and get Avowed’s first Godlike ability: Dream Touch. This shows you early on the benefits of working with Sapadal, and adds a strong incentive to keep working with them as the game continues, leading to more interesting decisions down the line.

Kai Teaches The Player To Question Their Loyalty To Aedyr’s Customs

Kai’s Strong Input On Certain Choices Shows The Player A Different Perspective

The first companion you’ll meet in the game is Kai. Apart from being a solid tank for Avowed’s Rangers and Wizards, Kai also offers a valuable perspective that cues the player into the complexities of the game’s role-playing. If you haven’t played Pillars of Eternity before Avowed, the only context you have about the world of Eora is that you’re from a place called Aedyr, the emperor trusts you, and you’ve been sent to help the empire’s endeavors in the Living Lands.

Players would be forgiven for not relying on real-world knowledge to inform their decisions in a fictional setting.

While you may immediately have some reservations about Aedyr’s colonialist efforts going into Avowed, the game takes place in a fantasy world. Players would be forgiven for not relying on real-world knowledge to inform their decisions in a fictional setting, especially if they don’t know much about Aedyr and its goals or values. Luckily, Kai is there in the early parts of the game to show the player that following Aedyran laws isn’t always the best course of action in the Living Lands.

During early quests like “A Lady Never Tells,” Kai will remind the player that Aedyran laws don’t apply to the Living Lands. He will also offer some valuable insights into why it may be a better option to go against your countrymen in certain situations. This is a good way to show players that choices in Avowed aren’t as simple as stubbornly sticking with the team you started on.

By including all these elements, Avowed’s designers teach you everything you need to know before making major decisions that impact the game’s ending. However, they do so in an unobtrusive way and simply feel like part of the game and its world. This type of seamless design lets the tutorial section of Avowed feel short while still teaching players valuable lessons once they’ve started the real action.