Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Story & Character Discussion Balder's Gate 3 - Ending cutscenes (we all feel the same about this)

Hey all.

I finished my custom tav run and currently working on my Dark Urge playthrough. I want to talk about those 17,000 endings that were claimed. My playthrough was based off of making decent choices for the greater good and at the time, was definitely on track for a "good ending". I made save backups just in case I wanted to go back and see how other things played out.

The Karlach ending got me choked up but it is what it it. Had the dock scene which didn't really summarise anything at the time. None of my main party said anything before it fades to Jergal doing his bits and then BOOM.........booted back to the start. I reloaded it because I convinced myself surely that can't be it. I refused to believe that after 90+hours of being invested into a rich story and amazing world to hit with a "dock scene dialogue generator". I can only assume that's where they get the idea that there is 17,000 endings. It is more like 17,000 dialogue variations. That can be forgiven, the next part not so much.

this next section confirmed my suspicions that:

A - there was a scene cut or not implemented into full release
B - the Devs were not able to implement a proper ending system.

(Spoilers ahead)

After the infamous (Dock scene) one of my companions says where do we go next. My instant reaction was to choose "let's have a celebration" which I was super excited to see. Long behold there was no celebration in game. I was furious but wasn't quite ready to roll a Nat 20 on my monitor getting thrown out the window.

Although it was on a different run, I was Romancing shadow heart and this time to my suprise there was dialogue exchange before Jergal. However, IT WAS 2-3 LINES OF GENERIC DIALOGUE. I'm now waiting impatiently for a new monitor.

If any Devs ever see my post, Balder's Gate 3 is a masterpiece in my eyes and enjoyed every minute of it. The way this game handles your final moments with your companions and romance choice is poor to say the least. It made the ending less enjoyable and left a bitter taste. I will definitely will be playing through many more times as no playthrough is the same.

I Hope by the time it launches on PS5 enough people have seen how bad of an issue it is that they revamp/redesign the ending.

I was genuinely surprised there was no Withers narrating ending slides.

Yeah, the game suffers greatly from a lack of any kind of epilogue or CRPG endslides that explore the endings of each companion, and how you affected the wider world.

30 years old series true ending, sarcasm

Yea, IIRC DA:O did this and it made the end feel a lot more satisfying. You encounter so many characters and places, I think it'd help the ending feel fuller and more satisfying if you had some idea of what happened at the end, I was a little disappointed to not see that. The end felt very abrupt.

Yeah just slides with the narrator talking to tell the conclusion of each protagonist would be good, but currently the ending is a bit lacking to this incredible game

We "all" feel the same way? Speak for yourself. Personally I find this obsession with slideshows a bit odd. If any of them ever appear again it'll be retconned anyway, and if they don't, I'd rather just use my imagination.

Any sort of epilogue scenes or slides need not be written in such a way as to require heavy retconning in the event that one of the characters returns though. Think of it as a sort of setting the stage for potential future events/stories for the character. They may not want to go so far as to completely lay out all the events of a given character's life after the end of the game for that reason, yet they could still give the player a general idea of where they might be or end up if there were a "Baldur's Gate 4" or expansion on the horizon. Epilogues can also serve as a nice wrap up and recap of everything you as the player managed to accomplish in your own playthrough.

Ending slide shows have been a staple of the genre for literal decades, it's wild they don't have them. For what about BG4, the slide shows can be about the coming months not forever so that doesn;t exclude it.

The lack of slide shows/any explaination of your actions means, there is little motivation to reply. Not only is the content in the actual gameplay RND, and playing again we have no gaurentee that doing things different will see different content because what character interjects is random and you don't see all available dialogue, EVEN IN THE FINALE ENDING SCENE OF THE GAME YOU CAN RANDOMLY JUST NOT HEAR FROM HALF YOUR TEAM
but why bother doing a quest differently? the game will never acknowledge it or have any consequence? Go the extra mile to finish the hard ending of a quest to see what happens? what happens is literally nothing, slide show type endings are the easy way to solve that problem, BG3 didn't do any way hard or easy, so focusing on Devs please implement the easy way, is a good rallying call to solve the problem

I wouldn't even need ending slides, they could do an old school rpg thing where they show a clip of the grove, life there, a clip of the tieflings doing their thing, Alfira playing on a rooftop, Halsin heading out into nature, etc. All with the narrator giving short summaries of what they did, are doing now.

The ending started great, with the baldurians fighting back against the dying mindflayers, and then cheering, but then the companion stuff was just..brutal.

I was romancing Astarion, and I didn't have any romantic relationship with the others, but the ending didn't even have a romantic dialogue with Astarion before Jergal. I really feel heartbroken, it just feels like he left me in the end. I didn't even know if this is a bug.

Without ending slide is painful enough for me, the lack of dialogue with Astarion makes me more painful.

I re-rolled the ending many times (I made a quicksave during the braincrash cinematic), and only once did Astarion speak and then it wasn't to me but to Minthara, because it's completely random and your relationships, what quests you've done, what characters you've developed, may no role in who you hear from. I heard from Minsc, who while I recruit was literally never in my party, in most of those rolls than from characters who were in my party the whole time. Laz was the only character to have an actual scene. And I assume thats only because I did Orpheus ending, not anything to do with her.

It's often worse to miss an ending than miss an entry.

Most of the people are actually doing the game, only pure RPG already have done it. But I notice the more people finish the game, the more the disappointment grows about the ends.

It was already the same problem with Divinity, and Larian solve some narrative issues about how brutal and inconsistent the ends were compared to the overall quality of their game, like you beat their game on the way you want and at the very end the game give you a choice that's doesn't care with the choices you did during your playthrough. Like you can start your game at the last moment it's the same thing.

That's more or less the same feeling here. Whatever your relationship are, whatever regions are modified after your journey, game is supposed to finish on very few rails and that's frustrating for a game which is supposed to be adapted regarding the way you play.


Larian is fantastic because they're good customers about player's feedback, I'm pretty sure the most claimed storylines problems will be reworked. But hope aside, it's now in Larian's hands to think if they want there game becoming iconic like CP2077 that listen to the player's community to fix all the bugs, or forgotten like Hogwart's legacy. The first two Baldur's Gate are still iconic thanks to there consistency from the tutorial to the very end of the game, 20 years later there is no reason a 3rd opus cannot have the same result.

Maybe I'm a bit alarmist, but BG is a so big reference for CRPG, and Larian is such a passionate studio, I would be pissed if in few months Larian become the new CD Projekt or Hello Games, aka "the studio that promised you the moon (17,000 ending) and gives you some rocks (few railroad ending that doesn't matter of all your 80+ hours of ingame choices"). Their reputation can collapse as fast as it explodes.

I might mention that 17000 ending permutations isn't actually all that much. Just a basic calculation: if you have 10 NPCs and each of them can have three endings, name them "good ending", "evil ending", and "dead", you'll end with 3 to the power of 10 = 59049 ending permutations. And you'd only need 20 different scenes for that, two for each NPC.

Having said that, I agree that having no epilogues, in whichever form, is undesirable, but on the plus side we'll not run into the situation that no possible epilogue fits what we want.

It's more, each character as a dozen different lines, they don't even have good ending-evil ending-dead, they have snide comment to something character A said, snide comment to something character B said, etc most of the lines that trigger in the ending sequence don't even mention endings or good/evil/etc or if you did the character quests? just which randomly selected other character they will randomly have an extremely brief dialogue with that doesn't really relate to anything?

The slides is good for games likes PWotR and other oldschool games, im waiting more then slides in game with this sizes, but you have nothing in the end lol

The ending scene was a joke.
2-3 one liners from random companions and then cuts to black, after being with these people for 80+ hours it just felt insulting.
They need to add something to the end to tie everything together, something like the party DLC in Mass effect 3.
But id literally take static shots with narration at this point, as it is now, its awful.

Yeah it felt rushed for sure, lets hope the inevitable enhanced edition fix this. I enjoyed my time in the game but the ending and Act 3 all together could use a lot of love and extra dev time.

Ok., the dataminers have new info

THERE WAS A SIX MONTH LATER EPILOGUE, instead of 1-3 random lines from random companions about maybe jokes about what just happened or maybe them saying what they'll do and a nice scene for maybe 1-2 characters, there was supposed to be an EPILOGUE with catching up with your party 6th months later and finding out what they've been up to since!

Hopefully it is a bug not a choice to rmeove this and once they fix it it'll be back as seriously, having no ending was bad enough but having no ending AND THEN there being a good ending in the files just sitting there unused??? hells below

link https://www.reddit.com/r/BaldursGate3/comments/15umpxk/to_those_disappointed_in_the_endings/