So this is something I've been thinking about for a little bit. People are coming out as being rather disatisfied with the story by the end, and I wonder if part of that is a result of a particular manifestation of Larian's desire to give players as much freedom as possible, specifically, the freedom to kill everybody and still have the game work.
A story needs a cast, it needs secondary characters who are, in their own way, important to the central plot, both in terms of theme and in terms of direct participation. The companions of BG3 do some work in terms of theme, but they're all incredibly tangential to the actual plot. They have to be, because Larian wants youto have total freedom to not recruit anyone and to just go it alone. I think that results in them all being at arm's length from the plot and prevents them from really having the impact they could and in some cases probably should.
The biggest offender is Lae'zel.
Her plot should be a major one, intertwined with the main plot due to the mindflayer connection and the fact that the artefact, the emperor and Orpheus are a massive, massive part of the story on a pretty fundamental level. But because we have to have the freedom to skip it, that whole thing with the gith civil war can't be central.
Another issue is with Shadowheart.
Shar wanted the prism for some reason, yet in the entirety of her plot, that reason never actually becomes relevant to anything. Nor does Shar have any bearing on the main plot itself.
Even Wyll suffers from this to a degree.
He's the son of the Grand Duke, who the villains take control of for their scheme. That should be a bigger deal than it ends up being. It should tie into stuff in the endgame.
Jaheira is another example.
She's High Harper of Baldur's Gate. She should have a lot more to do in the city, but because we can just not recruit her, or she can die pretty easily, her plot is just getting Minsc back
Even outside of companions, we don't have a set cast of secondary characters that can really hold up any narrative weight since they can again, all be killed and so have to be somewhat non-essential. Compare that to Mass Effect, where you can't just kill any character, or the Dragon Age games, where even though you can dismiss some characters, you still keep a handful of companions and you have a somewhat wider cast beyond that. I think that this all ends up weakening the plot because we effectively only have our own single character to hold up everything.
What do other people think?
