Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Story & Character Discussion SPOILERS! Can someone explain to me what the hell with the endings?

I saw the credits roll but I'm still waiting for an actual ending. Any help?

On a more serious note, calling the two actual endings we got disappointing would be an understatement. There's also only two choices our player character can make that end up affecting the ending, both of which happen in the last hour of the game - that is unless you want to count swaying our companions to decide on their respective fates as choices of our player character. Are we still the main character of this story or is it I kinda got confused over the course of act 3.

It's especially bad since not using the tadpoles turned out to be complete red herring that made me hamstring my character's abilities for absolutely no reason beyond my own headcanon. What a shame. The tension of weighing the tadpole's benefits for your quest against its potential corrupting influence was the most intruiging part of the early access' story. Not only does it never get resolved in the finished game, it gets completely evaporated and supplanted by an artificial one-time choice you get to make in act 3. There's no point to any of it. It's like Larian had a plan for the mechanic to work in tandem with the story at some point but scrapped it because they couldn't find a way to resolve it in a satisfying conclusion - which happens to be a greater overarching problem with act 3 and its main theme of ludonarrative dissonance.

There's more to be said about how pathetic act 3's villains are compared to Ketheric (both in build up and in terms of their actual combat encounters), how the Early Access' version of the Dream Vistitor was infinitely more intruiging than what we got in the finished game, how the game offers you illusions of choice at every step of the way (usually involving Shadowheart's mystery box) but it's not really something that can be fixed at this point. I could also definitely say a lot about I guess the real Baldur's Gate were the squid friends we made along the way.