Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback For the evil path, please look at Tyranny

I liked tyranny but i didnt really feel evil in it. I felt like kind of a jerk occasionally, which i suppose is a change of pace from the cartoon villain evil. We somehow have arrived at this situation where good is the single minded selfless optimist and we are all ok with this but the inverse is just blase and needs to be more nuanced. I think this is because if we looked at the good archetype with as much scrutiny we would lose any sort of frame of reference and be forced to realize its all ponderous grayness.

The problem we have here with act1 of this game is how would we, in this situation, distinguish good and evil action? Your character believes it is in danger of becoming a mind flayer at any moment. They are effectively a time bomb of evil, one of a number in close proximity at that. For all you know through most of act 1 you could have a group of 6 mind flayers suddenly appear to terrorize the entire region. So is it evil not to stop to help along the way when you are on a time sensitive mission to stop something bad from happening? It is appropriate to be self centered here because helping yourself not become a mind flayer is also helping everyone else not have a mindflayer trying to enslave them. Both good and evil characters would act more or less the same way here varying only perhaps in the surface character of how they interact and appear, not in what they really do. The main difference boils down only to internal motivation. An evil character might not care about some indirect deaths or hardships, whereas a good character might lament not having the opportunity to help but realize there are more pressing matters.

So the companions, for the most part, who are apparently the 'evil' or lets say 'less good' companions we are given, tend to for the most part (with exception) approve of expediting a resolution to this tadpole problem, this seems to be framed as evil. I played through trying to roleplay as a fairly neutral character, reasoning its best for all involved to simply get healed as fast as possible. This disposition pleased all the bad guys. Did i do an evil playthrough?

Honestly it seems shadowheart is the most evil simply because shes running an errand for an evil god. In a setting where good and evil are actual cosmic forces then 'serving cosmic evil' is about as solidly evil as you can get. But shes honestly kind of a softy and not so bad. Some evil.

A real evil choice would be something like expelling the refugees, agreeing to 'guard' them, and then clandestinely using the opportunity to abduct some of the stragglers and framing the goblins for it, using plot magic to force the worms into them instead, wait for them to turn into mind flayers, then drop some rocks or something on them. An example of an evil resolution to the tadpoles.