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Update: Part 4, Chapter 38 is now published. Bye Bye, Castle Greyhawk. Hope you enjoy it!

BG3.5 - Hellraisers (Fanfiction)
Baldur's Gate 3.5: Hellraisers - an original fanfic story that is a sequel to Baldur's Gate 3 Fanfic: The Afflicted. It picks up immediately after the events of Baldur's Gate 3 as characters from the previous fanfic - Fiovay, Kai, Aelun, Vlyn, and the other members of their party - travel to Avernus. Their quest is to save Karlach but also to hopefully find and rescue Darson, Aelun's father, from the clutches of Demogorgon.

Here is the link to the blog site: https://baldursgate3hellraisers.blogspot.com/2025/10/baldurs-gate-35-hellraisers.html

I saw a comment somewhere that it was funny to give him a giant weapon looted (well, weapon-dropped) from an ogre or minotaur, so that's what I was trying to do. Evidently he's perfectly capable of picking up things like that, forbidden from PCs by code.

The problem was it's apparently too big to toss to him through the bars. You keep getting a no path warning. This is a change from one other time I did it long ago.

I don't know if this was just a side effect of design, or they wanted to disallow him from ever holding that weapon, which would be bad, because it's funny. He'll hold a full-sized maul no problem, and whack the walls down in one go.


Anyway, for that special case, he will take it in barter mode, after you approve the warning he ain't paying you squat for it.

My favorite was the line in the old INT table that said something like 5 -- Here or lower, character can only be a fighter.


Then there's this fun with Google.

The greater topic is player expectations. If you're playing a heroic fantasy game, developers will generally assume you want to play some sort of fantasy hero along the known tropes. Since we're talking about good vs. evil stories, I'm coming from the assumption that the described scenario isn't a random encounter, but the beginning of a campaign written without a specific group of individual players in mind, like a game company would have to produce. This is what makes it tricky. Of course, if both heroes and villains are only passing through, you need to come up with some adventure hook to involve them. I'm assuming some generally benevolent force is in power, not able to protect the farms on the border. After getting the players involved, the usual way of narrating a 'good' campaign would be investigating where the goblins came from, why they attacked and how to stop it from happening again. This doesn't mean there can't be plot twists, but it's a classical backdrop that would work for both hack'n'slay and political drama. Especially when playing with alignments, hero players in heroic fantasy are much more likely to work with the existing good or neutral-aligned structures (in 2e, paladins would risk forever losing their class abilites and become regular fighters if they didn't), like the local noble who hired them, while evil will be forced into either a submissive or a disruptive role. If you don't keep this in mind, these disruptions will lead to interruptions, because you hadn't planned for an unexpected outcome of a scenario. At a gaming table this will, in the best case, lead to improvisation and lots of documenting and re-planning work afterwards. In the worst case, the game has to be stopped. As a player in video games you would either hit brick walls with your actions or suffer from a lack of immersion because the system can't cope with them and has weird NPC reactions or triggers not working. Yes, the player of a good-aligned character can surprise you as well, but their goals will still resonate with the good outcome, instead of a number of potential individual "evil" goals.

In a broader context, it's also not really a question of harsh good vs. evil morale. It's about preparing for disruptive players. In Shadowrun, you essentially play throwaway agents working for corporations against other corporations. You break in, steal, betray, kill the guards and hopefully escape with the loot. But still, most players will follow the middle of the road = meet the guy, accept the job, break in, get double-crossed, survive against all odds, escape with the booty and get the Karma points. If you sell it to the guy who double-crossed you, or kill him to sell it to the competitor, or blackmail the company you stole it from - those are variants of the same playthrough. A player toxic shaman, however, would just use the stolen key cards to get onto the compound, but would then abandon the run to sabotage the waste processing of the compound which causes an environmental catastrophe in the area, drastically increasing the player shaman's powers, but laying waste to your carefully designed setting. Instead of worrying about police response times in case of PCs triggering the alarm, you now have an ecological disaster scenario at hand, with many NPCs rushing home to save loved ones or being evacuated. And you can't move on to adventure two, because the players never stole the loot.

...and that's what I'm reading from a lot of the negative feedback for evil playthroughs. Players expecting they could commit a very specific sort of evil, like burning the mill with Barcus attached, or whatever, and then get disappointed because the game wouldn't have it. I wanted to blow up the loos for grease mephits and extra-loot, but not even smokepowder barrels did any damage. There are complaints about cutscenes or NPC feedback not acknowledging certain deeds or said deeds not having the expected repercussions. There are similar gaps for the Githyanki playthrough where you're sometimes treated like a human Tav, since being a second full Githyanki would have required an entire additional variant story arc with cutscenes, NPCs reacting differently, and potentially even more endings. You won't hear the player of Joey Tav complaining, because they got their heroic tale.

Then the last problem is that the official continuity of a franchise will probably canonise the "good" ending if they continue the story, meaning any disruptive actions are erased from memory, leading to more disappointment.

What I'm taking from this is that it's not actually a majority of players preferring darker settings, but a vocal minority of players who like the disruptive style and often get disappointed, because it's hard to prepare for such players if you don't personally know them. It's not about not seeing enough blood and gore, it's about being able to take a lanceboard and playing a different game on it.

Which is reasonable since it is objectively not "Artificial Intelligence"

It's literally just a bot that runs pre-scripted code.

That's all current "AI" is, in its various forms.

It's only being called "AI" because it tricks people (Notably, investors) into thinking it's actual AI, but it's not.

This isn't bad in of itself (Outside the economic concerns of this investor hype, with it massively impacting prices of computer components and causing lots of Data Centres to get built which suck up all the water and use tons of electricity)

The main controversy surrounding "AI" comes from the way that the current fad iterations function. Which is by training a dataset to regurgitate to users.

For LLMs this means that it will often confidently state wrong information making it a terrible source of data. With the worst aspect being its programmed "Agreableness" where it reinforces particularly dangerous ideas (Like pushing someone towards terrorism or self-deletion - Things that have literally happened)

For Gen-AI this means it goes around and steals tons of real artists work in order to copy/paste it into the stuff it "Produces". Thus not only is its usage tied directly to replacing artists, it's also outright plagiarising them to do so.

As one of them 90's kids, the earliest I can remember is a simple DOS based racing game.
A little bit later, mostly settled on RTS as a genre, having spent time with the more classic RTSs (like Dune 2 or Red Alert 2), but ended up spending years with a more obscure game known as Outpost 2. To the point where I had a whole high-school project centered around making a map mod for it where I implemented the board game of monopoly using the in-game chat to hook into to supplement the player input that would need to go into the code in an easy enough format. All with the help of the small community that kept that title alive through the 2000s.
Never was a genre purist, as some other titles of the time caught my attention, like the Descent games, Hellbender, can't deny having played Doom 2 and some other of those early titles where so many more things could fly in terms of games as they do today. BG1 and 2 were also in there somewhere.

So, factually, I can't actually name a title that made me a gamer. It was more the exposure to games as a whole. In fact, to even list my whole repertoire of games played to date would be largely impossible, as I'd have to count the titles from before I had access to legally purchasing games. A short teaser would include stuff like The Incredible Machine (3, maybe), Empire Earth, Fire Emblem titles (5 through 7, really), even the Sims 2 and 3, diablo 1 and 2, emperor: battle for dune, C&C games down to Generals, the aforementioned titles in this post and on and on. Admittedly, my young adult life was vastly spent with an inordinate amount of play time in Path of Exile, but by this point in time, I have a steam history can rely on for a recap. Prior to that is purely memory-based and we all know how reliable that can be.

I'm not sure how much of a stretch it would be to say that if my Steam library consists of some 200 games from about 2010 onwards, there could easily be another 1-2 hundred titles that I've spent *some* time with at some point prior.

To be fair, I do have clinical ADHD and each game can only hold my attention for *so* long, depending on how much of said game there is to learn and toy around with. I will also not hide from the fact that I had ample time to spend on playing games during a decade-long depression cycle where vegetable wasting daylight playing vidja games would not be a stretch to describe my functionality back then.

It's a little difficult to convey that notion that "even the greatest heroes can end up adventuring with mismatched socks", when the socks may be mentioned once, but the focus will remain on the heroic deeds anyway.

Highlighting hubris is indeed a theme we could do more with, especially given nowadays. Grew kind of attached to a simple quote "The road to hell is paved with good intentions", as it is a simple form for many meanings, ranging from faking good intentions to actual good intentions that went too far and still got one to the same destination. It also includes good intentions that were only perceived as being good, when ,in fact, they were kind of destructive. Like overbearing.
I remember Kreia from Kotor 2, who was mostly lecturing on how both good and evil are largely misguided and their intent can end up causing the opposite they set out for. Of course, this does involve the temporization factor.

But overall, actually making a game where a certain decision earlier on in the story actually leads to a cascading effect where the characters will not even end up in the same locations due to the stuff set in motion by said decision presents the conundrum: how do you make alternate routes that reflect something that happened earlier on whilst also somehow guaranteeing the main plot is followed and the character(s) still feel like they had freedom of choice. But it tends to just be that all roads lead to plot (and Rome).

The crux is the scope of the power.

A typical RPG is about you, the protagonist, working to overcome insurmountable odds and become the hero.

While a power trip is you, the protagonist, being a Mary Sue and being literally unstoppable and having complete control over everything.

Essentially, it's like the difference between beating a difficult boss to get some really nice loot and using console commands to just spawn it in your inventory.

Both lead to your character having the powerful loot. But one is earned the other is given.


Having NPC's with their own personalities is great.

The main concern with the original quote is more so the inability to actually differentiate your own personal goals with interactions.

It happens a lot in RPG's where any dialogue option that is in anyway positive is taken to mean "Romance" and the only options to not pursue a romance are "Be a massive jerkface".

So if you are talking to some NPC to find out more information about them or the world... If they're not a romance option then it's fine, you can talk to them all day without issue and develop a friendship. If they are a romance option, you either get locked into a romance with them or you don't get to talk to them at all.

Whereas the ideal would be for there to be options for platonic relationships alongside options for romantic ones. While having the option to turn down advances without being a colossal jerk (As even if you try to be platonic, NPC's can still fall for you due to other actions)


The ever present concern is player freedom vs character building.

Playersexual NPC's provide the most player freedom as someone is free to romance anyone they wish regardless of their character.

However, such a thing can detract from the character's personality.

Of course, one does have to consider how much of a person's personality is their sexuality? Your average Twitter user it's their entire personality, but for sane people it's barely a mention.

All we have thus far is the reveal trailer. All the temporization we have is of the TBD, TBA, whenever time frame.
I would hazard at least a couple of years to release and dev diaries in Larian style were more a near-release kind of thing, IIRC.

Whilst the argument is ongoing, my 2 cents:

Just about any long-lasting game series will suffer from human lifespan, exponential growth and the general lack of discussion withing the frame of time relevant to each entry.
To sum up: Within 30 years, we've gone from CRT monitors to LED-based monitors, pixels that you could see with the naked eye to pixels that you might see with a magnifier glass, etc, etc, since that's just how fast the hardware technology has evolved.
Now speaking of the Divinity series, I have personally played them all. Even if the order was more: Divinity 2: Dragon Knight Saga -> Divine Divinity -> Beyond Divinity -> Divinity: Dragon Commander -> D:OS 1 -> D:OS2. The catch would be that Dragon Commander was not even out yet by the time I went through the first 3 titles. Nowadays, I would find it hard to go back to the originals, even if simply because my eyes can only take so much strain nowadays. But if we're to talk about Divinity (series) as a whole, ignoring the early titles that are still cannon to the universe may be unwise.

But then think of each of the titles within their own time frame. Larian has always gone as far they they could push given the technical limitations (as well as studio size and costs) of the times each of those entries were released.
Casual reminder that both D:OS titles were quite literally all-in bargains for Larian.

What remained consistent throughout was the good old Larian flavor. Talking with an immortal lich you're about to fight? Sneak in a quip or two, get a matching retort from the lich, making the dialogue feel way less stiff. Because the more notable characters, at least, have some dimension to them. Bellegar, the mad mage who speaks only in rhymes? Still shows some method to his madness when he actually helps the player character. Whatever the form their titles took, I could never fail to appreciate the Larian...ness(?) sprinkled here and there.
The other aspect that always drew my attention is the art direction. While I am auditory and typically fail to grasp visuals that easily, the sound design and the music kept stirring me onwards as I played each title. RIP sir Kirill, your work will be remembered, but that is not to belittle sir Borislav's work.

All in all, words alone will hardly do justice to Larian's own legacy and it's that very legacy that keeps me coming back. Now, if only the creature mechanic from Divinity 2 (not D:OS2) would sneak its way back into the series. And on that note, what wizards of the universe will grace us this time? :p

Ah yeah. In addition, taking photo in photo-mode, now takes 3-4 seconds delay before the snap. Previously it was instant.

I’d try lowering the graphics settings and disabling a few expensive effects first. BG3 can be pretty demanding on some Macs, especially in larger areas.

I’d also check that the game is running on the latest version and that there’s enough free storage and memory. If it still freezes like that after lowering settings, then the Mac’s hardware may simply be struggling with it.

Currently, in BG3, Telekinesis is a level 5 spell that requires Hr'a'cknir Bracers (Act 2), Tressym Collar (Act 3) or a level 9 Wizard (Act 2-3), which ruins the fun of collecting all items since the beginning of the game. Besides, Telekinesis only happens once per turn, and that action economy cannot be optimized, which, again, ruins the fun.