Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Story & Character Discussion On Returning Characters

"Help me! If you don't help me, they'll kill me." Now it would seem, it's time for us to answer the call again!

Helm of opposite alignment, Girdle of you guessed it, Throne of Bhaal, for people who may not get the importance...

In BG1 there was a Helmet which would change the PCs alignment to it's concordant opposite. Worked for everyone except the true neutrals, like Jaheira, though I suppose you could head canon a Dark Jaheira out of that one, but it was particularly cool for Viconia.

In BG2, there were 3 romance options for a Male protagonist, but only 1 for a Female protagonist. Although it was not possible to import the girdle from BG1 into BG2 to trick the game, with Weidu, you could call it up from the console. Using Shadowkeeper it was possible to change the avatar and tags of Charname, allowing Viconia to romance the protagonist, no matter who they were. You could change your own avatar to make match whatever cosmetics and trigger the romances. This gave something to people who found Anomen dull, and a villainous option. Also made sense for her character archetype I think. This was never in the official games and not possible until mods started cracking it open in the Tutu modding era to force put BG1 into BG2's engine. Still it was a nice touch and kept things going during the afterlife.

In Throne of Bhaal the player was able to achieve an alignment shift for this character, which under 2e and given the rest of the game/gameplay there, was pretty novel. It was a precursor to the sort of approval/disapproval mechanics that we see in play these days.

So for the first instance of that, you figure, there's going to be some extra baggage to unpack here. I think this one is like worth calling the VA principles back into studio, so we can have like 3 or 4 different ways that scene might play out depending on who's in the room and what Tav feeds the game as the initial dialogue responses.

One of these paths should allow recruitment, ideally without giving up Shadowheart along at least one path. The advantage here of the CRPG form, and also of the EA writ large, is that you don't have to undo the work that's been done, just keep that but add another path which plays out differently responding to the player and the old crew.

You know like as if the Dread Wolf wasn't around the entire time. When we cleared the Mines of Cloakwood, or when we slew the Doppelgangers beneath Candlekeep, saved the City from ruin and devled deep into Durlag's together. Faldorn, the only character in BG1 who could cast a lvl 5 spell! I mean nobody's going to care what happened to her right? lol. Our options there were to kill her in ritual combat or kill her outside of ritual combat, and in either case pretend like we basically didn't know who we were dealing with. Complete miss.

Now with Faldorn we can give this a bit of a pass, cause she was the same voice actress as Jaheira. So you can sort of imagine it like "ok guys, I don't really have it in me to do her all over again, how about we just make her into a big bad and cinch it up with Jaheira's questline..." OK fine, water under the bridge there, we've had plenty of time to cope on that one. In BG2 usually these were very quick cameo interludes, just enough to make you feel kinda bitter about seeing them again, but it didn't really derail any one character's storyline, or color it in that way, except maybe Cernd's.

Shadowheart on the other hand is a more major character here. She's the first NPC we can recruit once the game begins in earnest, so these choices have knock-on effects for how I feel about that character now. Shadowheart is much more like our Imoen in the BG3 context, pretty close to a secondary protagonist and there from the getgo. This is why I suggest the Doppelganger wipe, as a way to leave well enough alone if they just don't want to touch it. But of course I'd rather see a redux here and a more nuanced implementation of that story wrap, for reasons mentioned by others - that this will be the first time many people meet some of these characters. They already put her in the game. Now they have to do her up proper. I mean right? I think they can salvage this, because like the OP I know what I wanted and expected, and the set up was all there, so if they could just give us a little of that, it would be so major!

I have just started my first Origin campaign with Shadowheart. I did not expect this to be the thing that finally has me engaging with the Origin idea, but I guess we're going for it. Just to see.

For Sarevok, here I was willing to reserve judgement, because while he was also a top fav and pretty much the only Throne of Bhaal companion worth mentioning, he's a bit harder to pin down. His initial role as our primary antagonist and killer of Gorion always made him a much tougher sell. He's a blackguard anti-paladin archetype, responsible for everything that goes down in the first game. But then again, the villains got short shrift in the sequel with many fewer companions, so he was able to fill a real niche there. I thought his character was fantastic and his interplay with Imoen sorta made that whole sequel to the sequel for me.

It's easy to imagine him as the Kurgan from Highlander (for all too obvious reasons), so like, if they're going to go there, they should at least make him look like a young Clancy Brown right?

And then let us bring him back for one last family brawl!