Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General shadowheart in patch 5

I'll just want to be clear and say that my main problem and the reason my previous comment was "apocalyptic" as you said (I disagree but it's fine) is not with the changes per se, some of them are bad but some are good. The problem is the motives behind them

It's funny but I don't dislike her as a person it's another problem for me, its about presentation. It just annoys me that she gets more attention. I could even enjoy her company if everyone at the party had equal time, and with Shadow it's not like that.

I also want to remind you that we have never seen the First Act in full. Maybe when we have all the pieces of the narrative, the characters ' images will be more defined. There must be someone else on the ship, for example. There is another capsule next to Shadow. Astarion has seen us somewhere, but where? There are more buttons, but they don't work. Many options

Yeah, even in previous versions, she reads as a basically decent person who has been fed a load of BS on Shar, Selune, and the like.

Which, to be honest, is par for the course with Shar. That's a goddess with a long history of luring people in and chewing them up in a way that has her victims saying "thank you for devouring me / ruining my life"... even other gods.

This is the optimistic way to look at it. Another way is what I wrote a short while ago on discord:

The other companions mostly irk me.

Lae'zel is a fascist...which is fair, because she's githyanki.
Gale is all right but has a lot of Waterdeep flavored affluenza and wizarditis going on. Plus there's the artifact eating thing.
Wil is a bit full of himself.
Astarion just rubs me the wrong way so much.

If I could have Alfira as companions I'd just be happy with those two and then pick someone else based on who is more tolerable.

I can only wonder how much "over-playing" the game plays a role in the the antipathy many express towards the companions. Everything becomes accentuated when stuck for so long in an unhappy marriage of sorts.


Know your ideology. Fascism isn't about race, it's about the state and the collectivist view of the citizens belonging to it - like other socialist ideologies. She is a githyanki and as such, indoctrinated into a racial supremacist.

It's a case of an overlap to be honest. Racial supremacy is often a philosophy espoused by fascist states. And it's fair that a githyanki NPC will espouse ideals from the githyanki tradition... which are pretty horrible. People that step out of the traditional world view of a culture... or work to shift the world view of a culture... are generally a PC thing rather than an NPC thing.

Realizing "wow, my people are terrible" is a protagonist deal mostly... and protagonist is the PC position.

That said, it could be an interesting quest-giver too... defector from decadence wanting to work against the reign of [insert hideously evil supernatural ruler name here] can be a good recurring NPC. But that's not what Lae'zel is.

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As a note, I've only completed through to the goblins being dealt with once so far... I've generally stopped every time I hit level 4.

And Wil is okay-ish... and I'd be more interested in following Gale's story and hopefully seeing him mature past Waterdhavian self-importance as he seems to be mostly decent. But the "feed me artifacts" story arc is.... painful.

Lae'zel I'm interested in seeing more of... uncertain with Astarion, the attempt to feed on you combined with the way you meet him doesn't make me trust him.

This is my biggest irritation with her. There is a serious case of "main character syndrome" going on with her and I don't like it. It wouldn't bother me so much if the other characters got the same amount of changes and attention, but they haven't. I personally find Lae'zel the most interesting character of the bunch and want to see more for her, but Gale almost feels shoehorned in with basically no reason to be there. It's disappointing.

It's not like she named herself like this. It's a nickname given to her by the Church of Sharr who is literally a goddess of shadows.



And your opinion is based on what interactions with her? Even before patch 5 Shadowheart was extremely nice and amicable as long as you weren't creepy or reckless.

Fascism is fascism. National Socialism is national socialism. Both are Socialist ideologies. The class conflict Marx predicted would transpire in Western industrialized nations first, failed to occur sending Socialism into a crisis that saw the birth of two variants; Fascism and National Socialism. Both rejected the Marxist dogma of class conflict and the worker's dictatorship instead opting for citizenship in the case of Fascism, or ethnicity in the case of Nazism, to be the unifying/polarizing factor for the struggle for supremacist power. Fascism is fundamentally not a racial ideology, certainly less racist than Marxism and much less racist than Nazism. Marx was an ethnic Jew and an ardent anti-semite who considered capitalism and Jewishness inextricably linked. Jews were capitalists and Capitalism was Jewish, thus the term "Jewish Capitalism" that Hitler latched on to. I could go on to categorize today's Neo-Marxist hyper-focus on race, but that would likely derail the entire thread lol. I understand the deep-rooted desire to obfuscate the issue and preserve the current false dichotomy status-quo, so let's agree to end it there.



Certainly both the original Baldur's Gate series and D:OS2 had dynamic companions which were capable of fundamental change. For better for worse. I would argue this is a vital part of what makes a BG-game Baldur's Gate. Consequently, I fully expect this being the case of the BG3 companions as well. Shadowheart seem the most likely candidate with the Shar/Selune-theory. Lae'Zel seems a tougher nut to crack. Would have liked to see Larian deal with the gith as they did the drow and incorporate both "variants", only to see her reaction. Not sure she or the PC would live to see quest branches from such an encounter though

get a load of this guy

Post: what does everyone think of Shadowheart in the game Baldur's Gate 3?

Replies: Have you considered that Karl Marx is the real anti-semite here?

yea i'm not sure why the political gurus are here lol, but please do that somewhere else

on topic


yea, if I was alone in this I might consider myself just biased, but to say "she's extremely nice and amicable as long as you're not a creeper" is just being disingenuous. There's a reason a LOT of people have mentioned how annoying she is. hey, if she's your type, have at it, but I'm calling it as I see it. If I'm so off base, why are they changing her and why is it noticable?

Shadowheart in the past was understandably bitchy and distrustful after being left in an alien vessel and imbedded with an illithid parasite. Add to that she's a devotee of Shar and yeah, her behavior makes a lot of sense. What made me interested was the "Shadowheart approves/disapproves" messages because she kept approving of things I would not expect a Sharite to approve of and it doesn't appear to be a glitch because some of her dialogue supports those messages.

As to her name, I definitely am on the "she didn't choose that name."

It's more like the read of "my parents were hippies and thought this would be a neat name" but with "I was raised by a cult that worships a powerful and abusively predatorial supernatural entity" undertones.

Though, as I said, she doesn't seem to have internalized a lot of the Shar teachings really.

My suspicion is that she either stole something from or is being asked to do something by her cult. But she's very clearly not approving of the people that raised her... though she's still taken to heart some of the Shar stuff, however, like her opinion on Selune being a corrupting influence.

I don't think this has been mentioned but she now has the "Orphan" tag so you gain inspiration points when you do things like Take the Food when meeting with Raphael and are nice to children if she is in your group.

Where do you see these tags, out of curiosity?

When you If you bring up journal then inspiration (default hotkey P) it will show Shadowheart under Urchin, so long as you have preformed at least one "Urchin Background" action, as part of the new backgrounds thing they added. It also shows it on the character sheet under background and flags it when you preform the action itself. Lae'zel is "Soldier" and Astarion is "Noble" for reference; I have not used Wyll or Gale so don't know about them.

I feel like I've been playing the game wrong all this time, because I have not had that much interaction with Shadowheart and I stop to talk with all my companionsfairly regularly. She's always seemed withholding and cautious, a little short on patience, but nothing that didn't make sense given her situation and beyond that she seemed perfectly fine and reasonable. It's genuinely very baffling to me where all these interactions come from that make people feel like she's getting too much screentime or that she's annoying.

Also as an aside, I'm really curious why she has such a problem with Githyankis. From what I gather, Gith are so uncommon and so rarely a factor for people that there wouldn't be any cause to develop any opinions on them whatsoever. I get the sense that they're even less common than Tieflings, who are themselves not super common either. I feel like there's gonna be some explanation given for that.

Thanks.

Shar worshippers are a bit similarly fringe and tend to operate out of dark corners of the planes. So it's possible that Shadowheart's cult has clashed with the Gith in the past.