Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Arka's Story Makes Choices Feel Meaningless

Having played through the entire Early Access plenty of times as I'm seriously addicted and can't stop, one story arc that consistently keeps disappointing me and makes choices feel completely meaningless is Arka's story, due to > inconsistencies < with her dialogue and responses always leading to her death.

• We are first introduced to her on the ramparts of the Druid's Grove, mourning her brother Kanon.
• We observe her passionate rage towards goblins and get an option to either further encourage that rage or sympathize.
• No matter the choice she storms off to kill Sazza as payback, where we get yet another conversation with speech checks.
• We can step in front of her crossbow and persuade her that killing Sazza won't avenge Kanon nor change anything.
• After we further persuade her that drowning her heart in revenge will only be yet another victory for the goblins, she admits that the player is right, calms down and peacefully leaves.
• But the story still treats her as if we fueled her rage, so she despawns and once again is found dead in front of the goblin camp. Just... dead... without any consistency with her actual responses and any meaningful encore.

Patch 8 re-introduced the option to calm her down and make her see the error of her way by mentioning it won't bring her brother back, which she agrees with.


And I was thinking, great! Finally a way to save Arka and she will now hang out in the grove with Memnos to comfort her. Well... wrong. The choices in her story arc are utterly meaningless because no matter what I say or do she ends up dead once again and Memnos is nowhere to be seen.


Which makes this whole story arc so disappointing and the main reason why I completely avoid Sazza's quest in majority of my playthroughs. Because Arka's corpse otherwise stands as a permanent monument of failure and a reminder that she is dead because of me.

If she is dissuaded from the path of revenge and acknowledges us to be right, then she should be alive and well in the grove with Memnos as her dialogue lines imply.

There are far more minor side characters in the story that end up having more satisfactory and actually meaningful outcomes...

• Scratch the dog
• The baby owlbear
• Sazza (female goblin in the camp)
• Pandirna (tiefling woman with legs paralyzed)
• Lakrissa (tiefling woman with an interesting humor who makes a bet with you on surviving the goblins)
• Guex (tiefling miserably trying to hit the training dummy)
• Mattis (tiefling child trying to scam you with rings)
• Timber (a squirrel that tells you there's treasure nearby)
• Bored Oxen (the philosophical oxen that tells you about treasure hiding in the hay)
• Efrin (the petrified dwarf in Hag's lair which can be saved)
• Possessed Masked people in Hag's lair which can actually be saved
• Mayrina's brothers who die no matter what, but at least serve as a progression of Mayrina's story and are a catalyst to turn her against the hag
• The three stranded fishers being possessed by the Mindflayer, we either save, kill or knock out.
• And if I'm even going to go into other games, in Divinity Original Sin 2, "Septa the Ineffable" which is the most minor character of them all and an insignificant crab on Fort Joy beach has a more meaningful and rewarding outcome than Arka
• And could honestly go forever with this list...

So why is Arka who actually has an engaging story arc when compared to all these other minor characters, always getting the short end of the stick where choices are meaningless and always end up with her abruptly dead and Memnos missing. Shouldn't Memnos be dead alongside her at least since they both leave together? Or to at least have a few goblin corpses near her to show she went down fighting? Or actually have a meaningful outcome based on our choices and her responses which imply she is supposed to stay at the grove?

It's incredibly disappointing to have all these various choices, but only one set-in-stone outcome, especially because her death serves absolutely no purpose, makes no sense nor does our main character even acknowledge her death. It's just an abrupt, unacknowledged and disappointingly hollow end for a character without any encore whatsoever.

I seriously hope that Arka's disappointing story is just a result of it simply not being fully fleshed out yet and will eventually get consistency with an outcome that feels satisfactory. I've pointed out inconsistencies with her story in the post below and how it actually should be playing out, based on actual responses by Arka.

Shit happens

Heh she is the living embodiment of the phrase, that's for sure.

Loses her brother, doesn't get revenge, dies in the middle of nowhere and doesn't even get acknowledged by the main character. Only thing left is for a Worg to come and drop a turd on her corpse as a final insult.

Sheesh, even Mayrina's story is not this depressing and that girl lost everyone.

Dude, I didn't know arka existed before i read this post.

could be that the storyline isn't complete yet. As you said, new options were added as of the latest patch, so maybe there is still some hope for poor Arka the grieving tiefling.

Arka wouldn't bother so much except that I have a memory that you could save her when the EA first came out.

Honestly not even against storylines like that. Not necessarily sure how I feel about it regarding Arka this early in the game (I do think it is too harsh too early actually), but I think having unwinnable, grim, downright depressing stories lends a bit of realism. In my personal life experience, shit really does just happen.

Yeah, I’m okay with not being able to save everyone … well, not okay, but I think it makes for a better, more emotionally engaging story if there’s a bit of tragedy thrown into the mix.

But I agree with the OP and everyone else who has complained that Arka’s story seems unfinished. As folk have said, it would be good to have some more evidence of what exactly happened to her, some acknowledgement from the main character or companions, and to know where Memnos got to.

Arka have lots of wasted potential ....

Personaly i would also like some upgrade when talking to her at gate:
Cleric should be able to offer her prayer, just as they do to Aradin ...
Wizards(or wielders of neckage, or owners and users of scroll) should be able to offer her one question when talking to dead, just as they do to that Blonde guy in Waukeen's rest ...
And im 100% positive that theese situations we should be able to use Revivify scroll ... wich btw should be MUCH more expensive to discourage us from that action.

I mean ... those all are things we CAN do in this game and are part of its roleplay ... we should logicaly be able to do them in every situation!

Rez was the first thing i tried! i agree 100%. Players should not have those scrolls from the start at leastt not on the hardest difficulty and they should give us the option to rez him. Maybe they go kill goblins with Arka and later they make a whole new adventuring group that we meat in BG city... Or any other of 100+ ideas they could make. If Rez is not an option, we should not have rez scrolls at all. The whole talk to the dead is not used like you said, i would think she would be surprised to see him talk if nothing else.

The same with Mayrina's brothers i even tried knocking them out to save their lives but the game didn't register it at all. Somehow they magically teleported to the swamp and died. Like wtf they got there before me?!?! How?!

Ow and those scrolls should be rare just like all other things and not be infinite. Larian removed few food packages from the starting gear so that was good. Maybe it's time they look into those as well!
IF anything Elder ring showed us that people are ok with hard games and player can die in games aslong as they have fun doing it.


BTw did anyone try to follow Arka and see how they die? They probably just disappear?

She disappears just like any NPC if she goes outside of the minimap.

If you do follow her though, once she leaves Sazza she will go near the blacksmith with Memnos where they will be talking. She can be approached during this time and this is what she says:

However the window to gain this part of the dialogue is incredibly short, as you have to do it before she despawns. Which makes no sense since she acts like she was staying within the grove for quite some time and thinking about our talk.

So it ends up feeling terribly unfinished and incohesive, as the timeframe of the choices, responses and events being made feels disconnected.


Actually I was wrong. The option technically was always in the game, but was bugged so it wasn't showing most of the time. I never saw it myself until Patch 8.

There is room for improvements that's for sure like with Mayrina's brothers. All i got was the line: they are dead or something like that, even if i didn't kill them. i bet other similar quests down the line will have same problms. So it's best they fix it now. Minimal effort would be just add a new line of dialogue for Mayrina explaining the knockout. With more effort anything can be done.

I mean, it's unfortunate that you can't save her, but I never once thought "All this happened because of me, me, ME!".

She made her choices.

I fully agree with this. You can't save people from themselves. You can offer guidance, support, empathy, sympathy and so on. And maybe (hopefully), that will help. But at the end, people make their own choices.

Their mistakes are not yours

Ya
Fuck around and find out

Yes ... true ... 100% agree ...

And yet ...
It seems (and feel free to corect me) that complain from OP is not about her making her choices, or that it would be our fault ... as i understand it, the complain was about our effort was completely ignored. O_o

The problem is not that you can't save her but how it all works or in this case doesn't. You can literally TP there and clear all goblins and other enemies before she even leaves the druid grove.

But of course she still dies. Why? Simple it's just bad scripting - maybe it's not finsihed yet, no way to know.
Playtesting can poke holes into stories like this all the time.

The whole sequence doesn't react to players actions in the world. Not like it's the only case like that. More than one "quest" can be seen with problems like this.

Nothing new in Rpgs, holes like this show up even with the best of devs. Good news is, it can easily be fixed.

Yep. The fact that it's EA strongly incites me to not judge to strongly this sort of things.
That being said, it's a good thing to rise the question (like OP and others I've done) just in case this is something that wasn't planned to be improved but could now be improved.

My previous reaction in this thread was more focused on OP saying :
I felt bad for OP that's all x)

I'm not at all against a polishing of this type of interaction with npcs