Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Radically Increase Quest Notifications *Heavy Act 2 Spoilers*

I'm here for a little bit of a rant, because I just finished Act 2, and had ZERO idea that removing the Shadow Curse was even an option until it was too late to do anything about it because we were already leaving the area for Baldur's Gate. Now I realize that you don't have to remove the Shadow Curse to progress the story, but if I had had even an inkling that that was something I could do, I would have done it. I'm sure there will be people whose initial reaction to this is: "how could you have missed it?!" To those people I'll simply say, the mere fact that I DID should be a huge red flag to developers. At no point when I rested in the Shadowed Lands did I get a notification that Halsin wanted to talk to me before I went to sleep. That simple notification would have prevented me from going to sleep without talking to him. As it was, since I never had Halsin as a member of my regular party, I never had chance or desire to talk to him. For a "sidequest" of the magnitude of removing the Shadow Curse, I believe, as somebody who has been DMing at the tabletop for the past twenty years, that I should have received no less than three separate notifications about that possibility. As a DM, if there's something fun my players could do, that isn't part of the main quest, I'll make sure and drop overt notice about it to them on at least three separate occasions (rule of three: which I find a bit ironic because Larian has the rule of three built into the alchemy option of the game). Then, if they choose to ignore it, I know it's not because they didn't realize it was an option. At the very least, if Halsin is in camp the first time you sleep anywhere in the Shadowed Lands during Act 2, you should get a warning that one of your party members wants to talk to you. I'm sure I'm not the only person who is in the boat of wanting much more up front notice about all possible side quests. If there's a sidequest, I want to be told about it without having to go looking for it. Especially if that sidequest is coming from one of the characters that sleeps in my camp every night?!

Hmm... Halsin joins you with intention to remove Shadowcurse, so I don't think it is unreasonable to expect players to pay attention to him, if they are interested in removing the shadowcurse. If I remember correctly it wasn't exactly him who initiated the quest but an NPC in the Last Light. I think it is fine that the game requires active investment from players for some things to be found, even major choices like that.

It is interesting that you didn't get UI popup that someone wants to talk to you... perhaps it doesn't apply to the followers? If it doesn't, than I think it should.

However, I have issue with the other side of the issue - somewhat unintuitive points of no return. Personally I struggled more with the first one (what exactly will I be cut off if I move on?) I found implementation of those to be very heavyhanded and very vague at the same time - not great.

If it wasn't for a Shadowheart verbal cue, literally as we marched up to the Act 3 gate "what a pity we couldn't remove the curse on the land" (paraphrasing), I wouldn't have had a clue that I could remove it. Annoyingly, because of the poor quest progression I had to do a massive work backwards/around because I had no idea that the quest started in the Last Light with a dude wounded in a bed! I'd basically encountered the lute and the house of healing well before finding this info in a google search and he had already died and I'd already dealt with Oliver separately way beforehand as well - not knowing that was connected to Thaniel.