I’ve written on here before about The Emperor as I really love the character, and I think he gets a pretty unfair shake from most people. By far the most pervasive thing I’ve noticed online are people misremembering scenes, dialogue, details, etc. and not fact checking themselves. Often these are easily debunkable, but no one else bothers to fact check either. Beyond that, I think there’s a gross lack of media literacy when it comes to any discussion of this character.
Having said that, I mostly want to talk about something called ludonarrative dissonance. LD is when the game’s narrative and gameplay conflict with one another, and I think a lot of players negatively react to this dissonance, particularly when it comes to The Emperor.
One of the main things I see players complaining about is how pushy, controlling, and, therefore, manipulative he is. I have never been particularly bothered by this because of the severity of the narrative conflict: the players need to stop The Absolute. Literally everything is on the line, which is why when you go places like the Creche, the House of Hope, or Ansur’s lair, The Emperor tells you not to. And, he’s largely right. Vlaakith’s desire to protect her own power makes her and the Githyanki at the Crèche incredibly dangerous for the party, and they do try to kill you multiple times. The House of Hope is also incredibly dangerous, and The Emperor castigating you afterwards is because you risked everything at a time when risks like that could bring about the Grand Design. Even Raphael castigates you for risking everything so close to the end. Ansur’s lair is similar. He’s a powerful undead dragon who could easily wipe out the entire party and all would be lost.
The House of Hope is a particularly interesting one because I’ve seen most people say that they don’t want to doom the Githyanki when talking about this quest in particular. That’s totally understandable (though whether or not you’re actually dooming the Githyanki is up for debate) but coming to this decision through that logic requires meta gaming. There are other reasons a player might choose to get the Orphic Hammer, but the one I see most often is that people know The Emperor will need to eat Orpheus’s brain after you fail to subdue the Netherbrain, so they want to save Orpheus. Unless the player has a vested interest in freeing Orpheus, retrieving the Orphic Hammer risks too much. Also, the Githyanki could do it themselves, but they ask you to do it instead knowing full well that you also carry the Artifact, so failure is even more catastrophic. It’s not that there’s no reasonable role play option here to retrieve the hammer, but from what I’ve seen, it’s largely meta gaming that informs player’s decisions to do this quest. Also, there’s great loot.
And this is where the ludonarrarive dissonance comes into play. Save scumming and meta gaming means the House of Hope, the Creche, and Ansur’s lair are not places where you’re risking everyone’s fate including your own, they’re places with experience, fun boss fights, and powerful items. The Emperor is being pragmatic in the face of apocalyptic odds, while the player feels like they’re being pushed around because they can always reload. The fact that he doesn’t enthrall your party when you do something that stupid, is actually a very interesting element of his character.
I’m not saying that people shouldn’t do these quests, they are a lot of fun, but I wish more people could recognize the motivation of The Emperor in the narrative, and why he at least tries to get you to reconsider your course of action.
This is definitely (maybe?) a side note, but it is rather funny that so many players hate The Emperor using the same tactics of deception, persuasion, intimidation, and even detecting thoughts that the player uses on NPCs and companions throughout the game. Just a side note.
Back to the main point. I think this dissonance is somewhat resolved in honour mode, with the exception of meta gaming, as one save file can drastically change your gameplay with these far higher stakes.
This dissonance exists in other elements of the game, but I notice it a lot with player reactions to The Emperor. Short of honor mode, I think one way in which BG1 and BG2 dealt with this, is you couldn’t save during combat, and auto save and quick save were each one file. Every time you quick saved or auto saved, the game would overwrite the previous file. You could still save scum to an extent, but it required extra steps that became tedious.
I wonder if Larian could adopt settings like this in the future? Ideally, I think if these were the default settings, that could help to resolve some of this dissonance, but that would probably risk angering players who are used to micromanaging so many elements of their gameplay. I want to be clear that I’m not trying to take a moral stand against save scumming or metagaming (I do it myself), but I do try my best to engage with the narrative in a way that has some internal consistency, and I do try to be cognizant of gameplay versus narrative. That may be a personal preference of mine.
