This Rare Achievement Proves Avowed Understands How Players Think

Published Mar 19, 2025

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Custom image by Katarina Cimbaljevic

I recently earned a rare achievement in Avowed, and while I'm not exactly proud of how it was still a fun reminder of just how much the game understands its audience. In a massive action RPG like Avowed, with many branching choices, developers have the difficult task of deciding what sorts of decisions players want to make. Though this is hard to get right, Avowed manages to predict players' moves to an impressive degree, down to roasting me for a poor choice with a perfectly timed achievement.

When I interviewed Avowed Game Director Carrie Patel, she mentioned that some players liked to see "what levers [they] can pull" in this style of game. At the time, I had no way of knowing how prophetic this statement would be for my playthrough, but I now suspect Patel's use of the word "lever" was more than a simple turn of phrase. This is because a certain lever-based choice in Avowed led to the game roasting me for my poor choices.

This Avowed Achievement Mocked My Mistake With Perfect Timing

Avowed Gives You An Achievement For Not Following Directions

There are plenty of important choices in Avowed, but even the smaller ones can have immediate consequences. While exploring the Sand Sea Ruins in Shatterscarp, I came across a lever with a note telling me in no uncertain that I shouldn't pull it. Suddenly burdened by curiosity and misplaced rebelliousness, I decided to ignore the note and pull the lever, which promptly triggered a trap.

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No sooner had I sprung the trap on myself than I earned an achievement that - at the time of writing - only 18.1% of Steam s had been stubborn enough to achieve: "That Sign Can't Stop Me, Because I Can't Read." Seeing these words pop up at the bottom of my screen got one of the biggest laughs out of me in the entire game. It also proved to me that Avowed's developers knew exactly the type of choices players like me would make, and they were prepared to make fun of us for them.

Avowed Proves It Understands How Players Think

Avowed's Choices Prove It Knows What Players Want To Do

The Envoy meeting Captain Bardatto in Avowed

A silly achievement like this may seem inconsequential, but it is a microcosm of the important work Avowed's team put into considering the types of choices players would make. This attention to detail and understanding of its players is part of what makes Avowed such a satisfying game to play. Perhaps one of the best examples of how the game understands its players is through its many dialogue trees.

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RPGs can be a mixed bag when it comes to dialogue choices. When playing a game like Mass Effect, I often have to compromise and pick the option that skews closest to what I want, but it rarely has exactly what I'd like to say. Avowed is in a rare class of games alongside games like Baldur's Gate 3, where the developers put in the effort to ensure every conversation has a wide range of choices beyond "good" and "bad." This is because the game understands how players think and the choices we want to make.