In order to make the evil path have substance, it needs to establish a proper motive and goal for our party.
Quite honestly ... i would hate it.
All motivation you need is right there, its simply not just explicitly said to you ... you sort of have to figure it out yourself.
I mean, yes Good path is obviously presented to you, shown, you are aimed towards it by other characters ... that makes sense, bcs they need you ... and in the proces you can benefit fromit aswell.
But Evil path is completely different, that is not something that is presented to you, nobody will offer it and nobody SHOULD offer it ... its an opourtunity ... and you either get it, or not.
Personaly i love this.
Also many people (willingly?) ignore several stuff around Evil path, just to make it look bad ... while their arguments dont really makes sense.
Take few examples:
- People keep talking about how saving Halsin is the only logical approach, bcs you *need* to get rid of your tadpole ... except you dont ... for example Astarion dont want it gone, its beneficial for him to keep it, all he want gone is risk that he will turn into humanoid squid.
> Nobody in the Absolute Cult shows any sign of turning ... therefore, from knowledge about regular ceremorphosis that our character can have ... we can presume that IF we live on borrowed time, they were tadpoled before us ... and therefore will also turn before us ... logicaly then, as long as we keep around Ragzlin, Minthara and Gut and see that they are all fine, we have nothing to fear.
> Even futher, it seems like people in cult of the Absolute have nothing to fear from Tadpole ... again, logical opourtunity is to mix between them and investigate their secret ... but to do that, we need to be willing to play along with them > in this case then masacring the Grove is just means to an end.
As we say in Czech: When a forest is felled, chips fly around.
- Another often used argument is that Minthara was "told by the Absolute to kill us" ...
I mean, this isnt exactly true ... all we can say for sure is that Minthara "said that the Absolute demands our death" i know its not much difference, but bare with me:
The important part here is "Minthara
said" ... bcs if you check her speach a little more thoroughly, soon you find out that as any proper fanatic, even her claims that all her actions are directly ordered by the Absolute ... and if you persuate her to let you go, she litteraly sais that "The Absolute wants to test you" ...
One must ask how? Few seconds later she demanded our death and now she want us to go to Moonrise towers?
The only logical explanation here is that Minthara dont actualy get any instruction at all, she simply presumes that the Absolute would let her know if anything she wants to do would be against her wishes ... and everything she dont deny, is acording to her will and wishes.
> Therefore this argument is simple missundersanding of Minthara speach style.
- Finaly (to present at least three) there is that motivation argument ...
As stated abowe, the Absolute cant really invite us to her cult, while offering some power ... that would simply ruin that whole experience. :-/
Nah, the cult is just there ... we see that there is a chance to infiltrate them, for whatever reason, with whatever goal in mind ... and its up to us, we can try it and maaaaaaybe benefit from it ... or not, that just risk of the job.
If there would be clearly established path, with specificaly stated rewards at the end ... it would be completely different story. :-/
- And one bonus argument ... loot.
This one is especialy funny to me, since you never know what loot you will get ... so logicaly loot can never affect your decisions, from roleplay perspective ofcourse.
But even so ... there is nothing stoping you to go to Goblin camp, kill them all and loot their corpses even if you join them ... so, basicaly if loot is all you care about, you can have it all.
The only item you cant get in Evil path, is that helm you get from Zevlor.
