Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General If the main hero dies, and you don't revive them, can you still finish the game?

A completely valid preference, of course, but for me I think it would actually increase the sense of connection of my custom character to the plot if, rather than have this dictated up front, a core element of the story was how they came to be the hero (or villain) and the leader of a powerful group that defeated their foes … or how they came to alienate everyone and die a lonely and ignominious death … or somewhere in-between . And I do think that there is a trade-off between the freedom to make whatever character we want and how connected their background is to the plot, so having their in-game connection being what happens in the course of the adventure maximises that freedom while still allowing us to give our custom characters a personal story that we can tie into their imagined pre-game history.


One problem I have with the story setup so far is that sometimes it seems that it has been envisaged that way, but then in other ways it treats our character as the leader from the start. I’d say that Larian need to jump firmly into one camp or the other rather than what currently feels like half-arsing this element, but I’m not sure that it would be technically much more difficult to go one route rather than the other. In fact, I think a lot of stuff that would be needed to make my preferred option work would be beneficial anyway, such as: making our custom characters a stronger presence on screen, making them less purely reactive in conversations with party members, better writing of the protagonist’s dialogue, continuing to add content that reflects our characters’ races, class and background and having multiple ways quests can be achieved that can suit different characters’ stories, showing the party interacting more as a whole rather than having so much mediated through our player character, and having our party more vocal and involved in dialogue and decisions while adventuring.

But I am not a writer and so could well be underestimating the challenge involved, or the frustrations players might feel if their characters weren’t established as the leader of the group from early on. And, given that we’re now only a few months from release and the game’s dialogue trees are clearly hugely complex, I’m sure that whatever direction Larian have already implemented into their full release is now pretty much locked in, so all we can do now is keep our fingers crossed for our own preferred solutions!