Wonderful feedback. I fully agree. The evil playthrough lacks depth and most of all it lacks good rewards and an incentive. How about we meet the True Soul before visiting the grove and they promise us power and how to make use of our new powers? That would give you an incentive to side with the goblins.

When I played through EA, I only got the information that there is a possibility about raiding the grove after I was on my way to kill the goblin leaders. After I spoke to Draw Ragzlin in the Mindflayer ritual. That was when I first got a quest to raid the grove. However, this Quest should be added to the journal much earlier. Like I said, meet Mintharra or another True Soul earlier and have a promise of power.

The goblin leaders and Mintharra carry powerful magic items. If you decide to side with them, you end up killing Priestress Gut because you trust her to cure you (which she doesn't do). But you do not get Mintharras items and you do not get Ragzlins items. Instead, you just get worthless junk from refugees aswell as some trader inventory.

I suggest that the Goblin leaders should grant you their powerful articats for your service after raiding the grove. And mintharra should grant you her items aswell. After all they cannot successfully raid the grove without your help.

The whole "goblins turn against you" also makes little sense, and combined with the fact that you gain no strong items makes this playthrough feel terribly dissapointing. Just a day before, there were cowering in fear. You are a True Soul like the others, why should they trust someone else over you?

If I play evil, I expect to gain servants, followers, slaves who I rule over by fear. If you play a good guy, you gain followers who have similar goals and follow you because they trust you. This is how it works in Knights of the Old Republic for example. Playing evil still means you have loyal companions, but they are loyal because they fear you or because you made them devoted servants.

The evil path in this game offers nothing like this. Instead, you end up doing the dirty work by killing some refugees and then you get betrayed. This makes the player feel stupid. Especially since I went out of my way to actively pursue "evil" choices in dialogue. As OP and me explained, there needs to be an actual incentive to side with the Goblins, which there is not.


Also the Brand needs to be more clear. The player needs to learn that the powerful artifacts require the brand. And the fact that your character is branded should show up as a tag in the character sheet. There should be a choice to have your companions become branded aswell.

Another problem is the fact that your companions constantly dissaprove if you do anything for the Absolute. Everyone of my companions hated it. Even Astarion.

I will give a very nice example of how to salvage this poorly written playthrough, from a user on reddit:

[Making the Evil path feel more rewarding, by reddit user u/Crashen17]

Yeah, the main issue with an evil run is motivation. There isn't really any reason to side with the goblins besides fucking Minthara. The goblins turn on you if you help them, if you go to Priestess Gut about your worm, she turns on you and tries to kill you. If you talk to Rogzlin and don't pass a pursuasion check the Ilithid outs you and turns against you.

In the end, if you want to be evil, you have to kill men women and children for no reason and for no special personal gain. The gobbos betraying you is both predictable and kind of nonsensical for this particular story. Regular goblins and drow? Yeah makes perfect sense. But goblins and drow united under the Absolute and taking orders from True Souls have no reason to turn on you (a True Soul) who actually butchered an entire druid grove to complete their mission.

A better narrative arc would be to have two true souls at the grove. Have the drow be in the cage alive, and the girl gobbo be a true soul, dead in halsin's lab. When you talk to the imprisoned drow, you connect and he introduces you to the concept of true souls. He promises to take you to the gobbos where they will help you control your powers and grow strong, if you help him escape.

From there you either kill him, leave him, or help him. He meets you outside the Blighted Village and joins the party as a pet (same way Halsin does) and will get you into the camp and past the goblins if you are terrible at social skills or don't want to use the tadpole for some reason. Otherwise things proceed normally and you meet the three leaders. With him returned, Minthara now knows where the druid grove is and sends you to kill Liam the prisoner.

Meanwhile, Priestess Gut wont try to poison you and imprison you. She will promise to help you "harness your True Soul" but only after the Druid Grove is dealt with. If you do, she basically takes the place of Halsin in the story, directing you towards Moonrise Towers.

Next, if you decide to take out the druid grove, you can either lead the goblins right to them and kill everyone, or you can find some way to sneak back to camp and warn the tieflings to leave, possibly extorting them somehow. The druids stay and have to die however. Maybe you can use Liam to send a message to Zevlor and help him escape.

Reasons for giving the tieflings a chance to escape are simple. Either your character doesn't really care about them and removing them from the picture will make razing the grove easier. Or your character wants the goblin's help in controlling the tadpole, but doesn't want to kill a bunch of innocent refugees to do it. The druids so far are pretty shitty so killing them isn't so bad, but the tieflings haven't really wronged you at all.

Or you can just kill everyone.

After the raid, things progress as normal. Priestess Gut inspects you and determines something is different about you (the Tadpole in her head is probably creating a mental blindspot preventing her from realizing you guys have brain worms). She determines that you need to go to Moonrise Towers to speak to so-and-so. Or to present yourself before the Absolute itself. Whatever Larian plans on having there.

She can warn you that because your True Soul is damaged somehow that the Shadow Cursed areas might have unpredictable affects on you, and tell you to ask Minthara how to get there. Minthara can then set you on a path to the Underdark. The goblins then leave, being directed somewhere else. Maybe Minthara joins your camp in place of Halsin, or maybe you just lose that whole narrative thread for being a dick.

Later on, if you gave the tieflings a chance to escape, maybe you find their caravan slaughtered by gnolls bearing the Absolute's mark. Or maybe they make it to Baldur's Gate and have mixed feelings towards you. Maybe only some of them make it to Baldur's Gate and tell you the rest were killed on the road by goblins or drow or gnolls or whatever.

Either way, you still get a good chunk of refugees killed, you just don't necessarily get your hands dirty.

[End]

In my opinion, this is a much more interesting story and it would solve the issue of a lack of an incentive to side with the goblins.

Please remember, playing evil is NOT just murdering everyone mindlessly. Playing evil is ruling by fear, power and authority. Power and authority, exactly what we get to read in our dialogues when we can use our powers. But this is not reflected ingame at all! After raiding the grove we should have gained slaves and servants in our camp. For example those who will bring us items like the Dog does when we speak to them. And of course the rewards are currently garbage. I do not see myself pursuing the path of raiding the grove again even though I want to play evil, because it makes no sense to do so.

If I want the good rewards, I will have to go into the fort after the goblins are hostile and kill them myself. So in the end I end up having to kill both the grove AND the goblins. Thats not what I expect to do. You always have the option to kill everyone anyway. It shouldn't be required just to have an evil playthrough with similar rewards to a good playthrough.