I’m not sure we needed a separate thread, a lot of this is similar to the “did you like...” one.
That being said I disagree with a lot of the points regarding evil in FR. The Drow for example or the Illithids are per default, evil. Thus it is possible to have an “evil” play through by behaving in an evil manner.
Now after multiple attempts at the EA Act 1 you get a feel for how one could do it, but that again shows a missing narrative hook. Given the game isn’t doing alignment like in ye olden days of AD&D, the game should essentially treat you as neither good nor evil and entice you equally, or yeah, we will all end up playing the “good” story because it is simply the one that makes sense regardless of your morale compass. Again, I can do the grove story and still be a complete arse and murderhobo.
Playing a pure murderhobo and going solo is the only real way siding with the goblins makes sense, they are willing to assault the grove with you whereas you have to infiltrate the goblin camp by yourself. Now tricking Minthara into attacking and then betraying her is another option and I think they just need to change the language behind the whole "good" and "evil" dichotomy and that is why the old alignment system is so great.
In a lot of ways we are more choosing between chaos and lawfulness more so than good and evil also it is narratively impossible to keep a consistent alignment associated with any storyline when there are just so many ways of going about everything. They need to update their idea of what a good and evil playthrough really is before just labeling Grove=good and Goblin camp=evil . Fantasy stories have just gotten too complex for that way of thinking and in a lot of ways the old alignment systems were designed to handle these narrative complexities as they arise in a DMs campaign.
So Larian needs to either fully ditch this alignment labelling of each storyline altogether or bring back the old alignment systems and make companions sensitive to your choices to entice players to choose specific paths for specific party members. Much like we did in BG 1 and 2.
