The thing is, if you play a character that's not straight forwardly good then immediately you're on the same page with everyone. Be out for yourself, be violent as you need to be, don't give a damn about anyone else. Gale approves of us being good but he doesn't really push us to be. Wyll, for all his talk of being a hero falls back to violence and cruelty whenever it comes to finding Mizora or dealing with the goblins. Shadowheart only cares about being cured. So we only have Karlach as potentially advocating for the party's better angels on a consistent basis. Does that not seem imbalances and a problem? They only clash with a character that tries to be stalwartly good.
I'm also very annoyed at the concept of good characters being written off as simple or incapable of being morally complex. The fact that we lack that sort of firm good character just tells me Larian lacks the interest or ability to unsersrsnd what makes one interesting, which to me is a mark against them. I think most of the nuance these characters have shows up accidentally underneath the frustrating need to make everything "edgy" and "cool" and "morally gray" and that for example, Larian has considered the moral questions of Astarion's character far less than you and I have. They just wrote "tortured vampire" and accidentally walked over depth.
That much seems proven to me by the fact that they don't even take advantage of the clashing personalities and ideas in the party. Everyone seems to get along with everyone else just fine, it's only us they clash with. If Lae'zel weren't a githyanki and she was the same in all other ways I don't even think Shadowheart would have a problem with her.
Well, unfortunately for us, it is very much Larian's view that honestly good characters are boring characters that their writers have no interest in creating. Larian's message to us here is simply: We like to write ONLY edgy, hipster, angst-ridden characters who are morally questionable to outright evil. We don't care to create classically good characters because that's boring and a waste of our resources. But if you players keep insisting on having good companions to play with, then fine, we will give you a couple of resurrected companions from the old BG games. But we will not have created those two companions ourselves, which is the whole point. And, we get to kill two birds with one stone by being able to claim that having Minsc and Jaheira in the game now "connects" BG3 to the previous BG games. Perfect!
Larian are from Belgium. American protestant puritanism is alien to them.
