Or is that just mine?
Please just let me say that despite everything I will say here I love the game and I am utterly impressed with the number of options that seem to be present in it. I think Larian did do a fantastic job. However, exactly because I am so impressed by it I feel occasionally so let down when the quality seems to be inconsistent at places. So I came here to rant. Forgive me for that.
So far I am just in Act 2, and this might change later in game - if so, please do let me know.
I am currently doing my first play through and I am playing a custom githyanki character. I picked this race because I really loved it during EA, I loved the weird outsider/fish out of water feel of the character where, you can wonder about local customs, accuse people of having strange attractions towards cats, and generally freak everyone out with how odd you look and act while being one of the sceariest thing walking around. However, I didn’t want to play as Lae’zel for 2 reasons, one is that in the EA she had a few really funny lines that I didn’t want to loose out on and two, her overzealous love for Vlaakith made her personality too rigid and different from how I wanted to role play my character of this race. I couldn’t have role played Lae’zel without making her completely OOC.
So Act 1 was mostly ok, until when I got to the Githyanki Patrol where everything started to fall apart. As soon as you get into ANY situation that matters, the custom githyanki character is immediatelly treated as if was one of the vanilla races (human/elf/etc) enslaved to/under the guidance of Lae’zel.
First of all, you can hijack the githyanki patrol scene as a custom gith. However, if you don’t do that and instead interrupt the conversation later, with the githyanki specific “Die traitor” interruption, Voss gives you the basic line about how Lae’zel can’t control her slaves.
Later on, when I got in the Gith Creche, I, as a gith constantly was reminded by the game how I can’t read tir’su and therefore can only read any text that is in common or ask Lae’zel for help. Why? Seriously?
As a custom gith you are basically playing a fool and called out for it constantly as well, by literally almost every single githyanki you meet with, not just by Lae’zel. This actually even makes sense as most of the gith specific lines are about asking how gith customs work (something the PC should know) and the non gith specific lines are often actively out of character for a gith. We are apparantly the egg that was dropped in the creche.
Then things get somehow worse, when we meet
. Whose reaction in general is like :
“ Ah, Lae’zel, you fantastic child! And… uh… you, other one over there… “
and from there onward our custom PC is treated as if we were Lae’zels slaves/servants again, to the point that if you actually kneel infront of her when told (again a gith only selection), she does commend Lae’zel for training us well. Like… really? Basically as far as the game is concerned at this point we are a non-gith sidekick of Lae'zel.
I kind of got completely fed up when Laezel’s quest progressed after the creche and
we have a night visit from Voss.
He will at this point tell us about
wanting to bring Vlaakith down using the Artifact, saying that he was approaching Lae’zel because she had the Artifact (no mate, I have it! Or Shadowheart.) and well, because she is a gith. Except Tav has the artefact and Tav is also a gith?
Lae’zel, who up until now was ranting about how she still thinks Vlaakith is the best despite trying to kill her, at this point also seems to fail to throw her intelligence saving throw and pulls a weapon on Voss for daring to say anything negative about the Queen. But, if Tav does say to her that they trust Voss, she suddenly puts the weapon down and does a 180 deg turn, “Actually you are right, Vlaakith betrayed me and my people and I will destroy her! Argh! Go for the eyes Boo!”
Funnily enough this turn is so sudden that even Shadowheart comments on it in a rare meta moment.
At this point I started to get seriously sick and tired of Laezel’s attitude and also started to wonder what does happen if you play a gith and don’t have Lae’zel in the team? Are you even allowed in the creche and offered purification? (You should be, as you ARE a gith!) I didn’t want to reload from before the Gith Patrol, but I did a reload from before meeting
the inquisitor and killed Lae’zel, thinking, as far as the story with Voss seems to go he still should show up in the middle of the night. After all, there is the all important artefact and a defector githyanki PC to convince for him?
Right? Nope. He never turned up again.
Obviously Lae’zel is special and this is her character’s quest, but surely some racial reactions were very much warranted for in those situations for the custom PC? All of her backstory is essentially that she is a gith, which means if you also play a gith you have the same backstory, except nobody cares about yours. Because you are a custom pc.
Why is this an issue? Well, not allowing the custom githyanki to be recognized as a githyanki in any situation where their race actually should matter, makes it pointless to play as a gith. As a custom gith in environmental and story reactions the game either treats you as if you chose Lae’zel as the Origin character or as a non-gith PC. It would have been better simply not making the giths a playable race at all and just leaving Lae’zel as the origin character.
I would actually restart this game now as a different race if I didn’t have some 45h game play in it already, but the gith playthrough is really ruined for me at this point.
