Again, spoilers for all of Act 2 here, including Dark Urge origin spoilers. Also I just hit Act 3, so please refrain from any and all spoilers beyond Act 2.
My player character is Dark Urge. My way of playing is to try and roll with whatever happens in the game, avoiding meta-gaming with very few exceptions. Early on, I made the decision that I would give in to the Urge, but this would happen gradually as my character figured things out, including their relationship with the rest of the party.
After raiding the Grove, I followed the route to Moonrise Towers. After some hanging around there, my origin story very strongly nudged me towards killing Isobel. I had never been to the Last Light Inn before that, and all I had was a rather generic-sounding quest to look for the Selunite resistance there. Shadowheart was really into serving Shar and becoming a Dark Justiciar at that point, so dealing harshly with some Selunites felt very natural.
Upon reaching LLI, things almost got out of hand right at the entrance, but I managed to keep everyone calm. Marcus helped too, thinking I was on his side - I was not, but I did not reveal him. I planned to follow my Urge and kill Isobel, but I wanted to do this covertly if possible (little did I know, lol). My character by that point was a ruthless killer who sometimes experienced certain outbursts, but he was certainly not a walking psycho butcher. This was the time to be tactical. The first step was to find out what that Marcus fellow was about. And that was when things started happening fast.
Note: It was definitely weird that Jaheira did not acknowledge the events at the Grove, or the fact that Minthara herself was in my party. Instead it was brought up that I had helped the druids and the harpers before, which I had. This only made it weirder - they knew about that but not about the raid at the Grove? If this is intended and I didn't unwittingly break any sequence, it is not believable at all. If it is a compromise for the sake of gameplay, I guess wave it off and move on. In any case, wave it off was what I did.
I went to talk to Marcus, he antagonized me (or I him?), and we got into a fight. I noticed that the entire inn stayed neutral rather than go hostile, but then again there were no others in the room. No matter, Marcus almost immediately summoned his winged buddies. The inn's residents, still neutral to me, were all busy fighting for their lives. I Immediately saw my opportunity: Instead of trying to fight Marcus, I rushed for Isobel. Marcus was now an obvious baddie, so if I could kill Isobel at that moment out of everyone's sight, I could probably pin the murder on him. I may be the infected, highly suspect stranger, but he attacked the entire place with demons, so I hope that kinda weighs more with the Harpers. After killing Isobel and then Marcus, there would be no witnesses either. Meta perspective: the NPCs were neutral and no one could see me, so that should work. But I would go with whatever happened.
Things played out slightly different. The moment I killed Isobel, I got the cinematic where Marcus flies away her dead body. Except she didn't really look dead (she showed up later but I don't know whether she was alive or resurrected). That was not what I expected (and it felt a bit forced), but I had little time to process it. With Isobel's shield down, I was now in a mf of a fight against everyone except Jaheira. But here is the good thing: Jaheira had no clue of what really had happened. She fought by my side, and after the fight was over she even joined me to continue the fight against Ketheric.
My character was happy, but I, the player, was not just happy but low-key amazed that this had played out the way I wanted it. I am still not sure if this outcome (murdering Isobel without anyone realizing it and keeping Jaheira on your side) is intended or a case of sequence breaking. It seems that it may be a simple binary thing - maybe if Marcus becomes hostile at you, the Inn won't, no matter what. Or maybe the Inn would have turned hostile if I had taken more than a turn to kill Isobel?
Whatever the case is, that was a highlight moment for the game for me because I believe that what I did was not one of the obvious choices but still everything fell into place perfectly. This wasn't just a case of "you can do anything and the game will still go on" that I have come to expect from Larian, it was a case of "you can do anything and it will even fit into the story". Maybe this is by design, specifically for durge origin. Or maybe the game and writing is just so flexible, at least with the main quests, that no matter how you deal with things it feels like the story was always going to play out that way. The point is I had a great and memorable gaming experience.
I also had the foresight to save all this before hitting the post button, because the forums keep crashing!
