I need to complete the game before I make my final judgement but, thus far, I agree with the OP. The original theme - evil is seductive - was supported by many different pillars. Wyll's Patron, Astarian and Daisy are all seducers.
And so is the Emperor - but I feel like my opportunites to call it out on that fact are constrained.
"Oh look more worms that eat brain matter, you want that in inside your skull" Yeah, no. Nope. Even I were playing an evil Tav I wouldn't enjoy playing someone that stupid.
I'm fine with hard choices to use the tadpole - if you don't use it you can't let captives, including Shadowheart, out of their cages but the continual "there's a parasite, infect yourself" is annoying. We really need to be able to tell the guardian to shut up.
I don't think it was EA feedback that led to the change - this seems like an internal Larian decision. Larian devoted a great deal of resources to creating the tadpole powers but analytics told them that people weren't using them. So the rewrote the story to encourage them to do so.
And that's all over the story. There's no real consequences to stabbing the Guardian. "glad you came to your senses" "uh, no, I wanted to expose your deception. And I did - but the game doesn't seem to acknowledge that I did so. The Emperor hands me an astral tadpole but I don't have the opportunity to refuse it or to destroy it.
Perhaps they should have made an illithid cultist origin - someone who always wanted to become an mind flayer in the same way that Beholder Cultists want to be transformed into an eye tyrant.
Make no mistake I'm mostly enjoying the game and there are some aspects of it that 1) show that Larian listened to
some EA feedback and 2) are done amazingly well. Like superlative, superlative,
superlative levels of goodness.
But, thus far, the game seems like a good junk shop - some real real treasures nestling among some disorganized disaster.
But, again, I'll decide once I finish the game.
