There are a lot of differences between Pillars of Eternity’s Watcher and the Envoy from Avowed, despite both being protagonists from the same Obsidian fantasy roleplaying game setting. At their core, both are Obsidian protagonists, but each story demands something different from their respective protagonists. One key difference is how defined the Envoy is instead of the more blank-slate Watcher.
Avowed senior narrative designer Kate Dollarhyde talked about the differences between the two characters and what makes those differences important in a recent interview with Game Rant.
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How Avowed’s Character Background Compare to Pillars of Eternity’s
With the protagonist of Avowed being tied to a specific role within the world of Eora, the game’s set of backgrounds have been affected accordingly.
What Makes Avowed’s Envoy Special
From a certain perspective, the Watcher and the Envoy are very similar. Both are fundamentally outsiders, with the Envoy only recently arriving in the Living Lands. Both also have personal stakes as well as metaphysical ones when their fate comes to call. And both wind up making decisions that drastically impact the lives of others. These are fundamental traits of player-driven protagonists, but especially of those written by Obsidian.
Dollarhyde, however, says that where the Watcher and Envoy diverge is far, far more interesting. Driven by the kind of story Avowed wanted to tell, the Envoy had to be more defined as a person. More than being a kith, more than character creation limitations, the Envoy is someone the Emperor of Aedyr has taken interest in and wants to use.
“The Envoy is a political representative of the Aedyran empire, invested with power and responsibility in their role as the emperor’s envoy, while the Watcher is initially a settler who’s arrived in an Aedyran colony to make a new life, and who later becomes a divine bounty hunter for Berath, the god of death. The Envoy was touched by a mysterious god at birth and gifted with a divine connection and unique spiritual powers, while the Watcher suffered a traumatic event that allowed them to speak with the dead, which eventually earned them the attention of the gods … Their stories diverge in the details.”
Those distinctions are important, as they put the Envoy in a position to start with a role that affords them certain privileges, responsibilities, and expectations. In turn, this gives the people of the Living Lands, and the player, a reason to care that they are there.
Players play a major role in defining both the Watcher and Envoy, explained Dollarhyde. Their backgrounds and cultures are open to the player, as well as how the Envoy wound up being noticed by the Emperor. Beyond that, how each feels about their role in their respective narratives and how they wield their power is the same. This is a comfort to people who want to make sure that, despite the narrower options to define the Envoy, player choice and agency still make an important part of Avowed. By contrast, the Watcher is literally fresh off the boat with little definition of their own.
It wasn’t always this way, Dollarhyde explained.
“In the earliest days of Avowed, before we really even had a plot, we knew a few things: we wanted to set the game in the Living Lands, we wanted the story to feel structurally and thematically cohesive with the previous Pillars games, and we wanted to have a blank-slate player character that the players could define for themselves, similar to the Watcher from the first Pillars game. This was how we’d been designing our player characters at Obsidian for years.”
But as the story for Avowed developed, it became harder to use a character with a Watcher-type open background. More than wanting to give the Envoy more narrative gravitas and weight, it was an important decision to make Avowed feel more cohesive. Creating a more defined Envoy made it easier to tie the political and metaphysical narratives of the game together. Turning the Envoy into a central thread to wrap the story strands around provides players with a powerful call to adventure as well.
- Released
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February 18, 2025
- ESRB
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Mature 17+ // Blood and Gore, Strong Language, Violence
- Publisher(s)
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Xbox Game Studios