Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Story & Character Discussion The Guardian rewrite was a mistake [spoilers]

I'm not sure I'd call the Guardian a good guy, but he certainly proves that most of our initial suspicions were ill-founded, and it's easy to sympathize with him. I feel a little bad that he'll probably never survive one of my runs.

I didn't really feel bad about it. After all, he is a soulless mindflayer who lies and manipulates to achieve his goals. He is polite and protects you with the magic he steals from his prisoner as long as your interests are completely aligned with his. The moment he doesn't hold all the cards anymore and you get to actually press him, he immediately turns on you.

The guardian was a good change, no one trusted the original, but the guardian? If I haven't played EA I would have been fully on board with trusting them especially when I am being told shes bad by people like vlakith

I never trusted the Guardian either but at least it felt like a coherent deception and one I could get past.

I don't think the original Dream Visitor was supposed to be much of a deceiver to begin with. It appeared as a direct consequence of you using the powers of the unbidden guest that is lodged in your cranium and as such was implied to be some sort of mental manifestation of your tadpole or the Absolute itself. Everyone knew that it was a shady deal. The pleasant disguise just helps with sweetening it. To me that was definitely more of a temptation than the Guardian telling me to shove additional tadpoles down my throat or... eye socket, I guess.

I was skeptic the first time I read on this forum the idea of the character was completely changed, but after playing the final game "the Guardian" turned out to be a net improvement over the original Daisy and one of my favorite changes.
I really liked the character and how it made me second-guess constantly if I was being deceived or if her actions were in my best interest and her advices sound.

At least until the part where we got the reveal of who "she" (in my case) really was. That felt... a bit dull as far as reveals go.
I hoped for something a bit more exotic than just the "Emperor".



P.S. Also, just to echo comments made by others in the previous replies, there's just no way I could have trusted the "Daisy" in the way she was originally introduced. It just didn't work as a deception.
I rarely ever used the tadpole powers (except in a couple of runs where I went against this rule on purpose) and every time a "temptation" dream kicked in the immediate reaction was typically "Yep, that's totally the tadpole taking me as a fool" or an even a less polite "I will never trust a single word this bitch is spouting". The Guardian manages to come off as a lot more convincingly "troubled" about protecting you and a lot more trustworthy in general (even if in the end I followed very few of their advices).

P.P.S. That said, I will never NOT find the idea of "putting more and more tadpoles into my brain to leverage my power" absolutely absurd and something I can't even begin to rationalize "for the greater good".

It would have been a somewhat solid change if there was any actual payoff. Whether you trust or distrust the guardian, follow their advice or don't, stab them or don't - none of it makes any difference. Whatever you might think of "Daisy", at least her appearances were rooted in player choice. Shame we'll never get to see how it would have played out past act 1.

People pointing out 'I would never have trusted Daisy' is one of those things where it's like, well, okay? It was clearly supposed to be a major element that you could resist Daisy (in a way you can't resist the Guardian now) or allow yourself to be seduced by the promise of power. The fact that your companions might accept the powers and you might not also heightened that feeling of 'just one little bite.' Notably, Wyll's entire rewrite focused around eliminating the thematic resonance of a character making a deal without knowing the consequences, wanting to escape it but finding the power too useful.

Additionally, we simply don't know how Daisy would've developed from those initial scenes. Datamining points out that it's likely she was the Absolute and Orpheus, with there being two Daisies and they'd be more active to trying you to effect certain things in the 'material' world. So, in return for not trusting Daisy, the players got a character where there is no reactivity and you're basically cut from content unless you go full bore on the tadpoles as soon as you can.

And people still don't trust the Guardian, which is maybe the most ironic part of it all. Larian gutted their plot for nothing.

You're right, we don't know how Daisy would have played out. What we do know is that there are people who did full early access playthroughs and never even knew Daisy existed because they never used the powers. So claiming we were going to get full reactivity based around resisting her isn't really based on anything because in EA resisting using the tadpole already meant we missed content with nothing replacing it in any sense.

That makes sense. With who the guardian is in the current build they come across as a manipulator and it works better than Daisy for that. I do think I'd prefer an alternate version where Daisy wasn't a physical character in the world and just represented the tadpole itself.

I think the premise of having a sort of "personal relationship" with either your tadpole or the absolute itself is definitely more promising than a dude stuck in the prism.

Very true, and I'd forgotten how much I complained about that on these forums. Another reason for me to be happy with the change.