Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Does anyone care about Thaniel?

Six years is not enough to come up with a decent, coherent story?

For what it's worth, I got a kick out of the dollar store writing criticism. I felt like I had truly been told.

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I believe this fairly fits into the "feedback" portion of the forum. Although, I imagine the Story section is just as fine. I'm a simple whatever kind of person.

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I accept that only so many NPCs can have arcs throughout the saga, but I'd argue I'm talking about something slightly different.

A pivotal NPC like Thaniel matters. Not Thaniel's arc, but his end status. And the only way his end status matters is if you care about him as a character.

This is the problem. He's unnecessary, at least in my opinion. We see the devastation of the land. It's undeniable. That alone elicits emotion by the very nature of creating a mood. But once that land gets personified, suddenly we have to somehow care about this boy, and the only way we can do that is to involve ourselves with him. Unfortunately, that's where it falls apart. He becomes nothing more than a Halsin quest. A box to tick before we stroll into Act III.

I'm not saying the Thaniel angle can't work, but in my opinion, it would need more rewrites, focusing the story on his tragedy and subsequent existence, or lack thereof.

Consider, we don't even get to see Thaniel and Oliver playing together. The game neglects to grow our emotional connection to this character.

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Regarding Isobel's death at the hands of Halsin, I personally find that interesting. It's emotional conflict for Halsin, and that's what makes for good storytelling. How it happened? Shrug. That's part of what has to be figured out in the narrative. Maybe Halsin was swinging at Ketheric but Isobel jumped in the way to save her father. Or maybe Halsin lost himself and went wild on everyone, only realizing later that Isobel was an innocent. There are options. You want a toe? I can get you a toe.

At what point do you discover any or all of this?

I met Oliver before I got to the LL inn and I spoke to Art without ever having Halsin in my party or having talked to him since the post-Grove party. It's a poorly constructed and pointless story that has go to several locations just to pad it out.

Not sure if this will come as a shock to anyone, but I didn't even know Thaniel existed. Not until after I was on the move to Act 3, and had a cinematic that told me how disappointed Halsin was that we didn't remove the curse that I was never told how to remove. Then I went on a Google search to see what in the Shadowfell happened. I would have loved to have formed any kind of attachment to Thaniel or Oliver, but I was too busy not realizing they existed at all.

I agree with the folks saying Thaniel is a glorified plot device. Genuinely, if you turned him into an inanimate object, nothing substantive would change. He's not a character. Dame Aylin? She's a character. You have meaningful interactions with her, she makes choices that have impact upon the plot in some ways, she does things. You may not like her character, but she's a character. Thaniel isn't, and that's a problem because then all the stuff where we talk to him is pretty much a waste of time. He doesn't even reinforce the themes of the act, really.

" I didn't even know Thaniel existed"

Aren't you the lucky one? I wish I could same the same about Halsin.

Does anyone remember if the Shadowcurse started 10 years or 100 years before the events of the game?


Also, re:Aylin...

As someone that complained about Aylin and Isobel in Act 2, I think Act 3 does them more justice to character development. Still, I would have liked a conclusion to that "Paladin's Fatigue" plot bit as it sounded interesting before they disappeared to do plot stuff, but I'll take what I can get.

Aylin literally forgets you were just responsible as DU for the death of her beloved and helps you anyways, or immediately forgets you let her get abducted by Marcus. She's as non-sensical character as one can get besides her "HULK SMASH" writing. She starts very well with her encounter with Shadowheart but quickly goes downhill as a caricature after that.

Didn't have a strong connection to this part of the story, though I think there are probably a couple issues and reasons for that.

First, if you've just come off the Evil path, you know the one where you can say stuff like 'At least you'll die before the Goblins find the children' I think they needed to do a little more to make this material personal for the PC along that path. Easy example would have been to have all those Tief kids continue haunting us, along with Thaniel.

Chasing us up trees like the end of Flatliners. You know like Dorff and Kiefer Sutherland teaming up to throw rocks at me.

Maybe some Night sweats about what happened with Arabella and the snakes back at the grove. Little flashes of Halsin saying "Oakfather... Nooooo!" and then we just hear Kagha cackling the "mwahaha" the whole time, like with ominous reverb while the shadows give us grief.

Like honestly everything else in this Act is pretty solid for the horror set up, all the house of healing stuff. Creepy kid's doing the shinning angle. I'm on board with all that, but it was still very one sided and like if you are playing as the character who really deserves to get got, you can bypass almost all of this material or miss it.

Had the Goblin's overrun the Last Light, and Crusher or whoever is telling the gobbo kids about how the devils in the woods are real and watch out! Maybe we run into a random Ghast, but learn he's the high priest of the church of Tiax, so your villains can get a little callback to rival the Jaheira one we get on team Goodness. This could all help prop up Thaniel material, particularly with Minthara having some extra takes on this, which would cover the 3 characters you gave up to recruit her out of Act I.

Along the path where Halsin is with us, here I think what they needed is simply to make him the vehicle for a lot of this story material by accompanying us on this leg of the journey. He should hop into the party immediately after the camp celebration, and as soon as he does, he should start foreshadowing the Thaniel stuff. Basically we need a vignette that shows Halsin and Thaniel as kids. Like again, just copy Flatliners, I'm sure it'd work hehe, but then you'd really have that hook you know. He makes it all sound so personal to him, then sits out pretty much the entire quest until the end. I think that's why it doesn't work so well and didn't fully land for me. I don't know that I needed to care all that much really, but I think that would have made me care a bit more.

The way it's framed now works pretty well for the path of Goodness, it makes him seem more Papa bear I guess, cause like making sure the kids alright. But still, he's overshadowed during this whole period by Jaheira. I think he needs to come along for the end of the first Act and help to set up the transition more. He makes it sound like he's going to be there to give us aid and guidence in the Underdark, but at Camp he really doesn't have a lot of input. The whole Myconid sub-plot would have been a good time to give him the spotlight, and perhaps this could play into what happens when we reach the shadowlands ya know. They do that whole bit about voice of the circle, but then why not make use of that during the next segment when we're in the haunted forest and everyone is basically tripping balls and dropped into the Haunting. Lot to work with there.

Oliver was great! It's too bad we don't just get him if we botch that whole plotline hehe. To make it hum, we'd probably have to return to this area to give it another pass as part of the anticlimax to see what's become of all the choices we made in the second Act.

They should use this part of Act 2 to respond to what we did in Act 1, where our choices feed into it, so the shadow curse feels more like a curse I guess. Like personilzed to get us invested beyond just the healing of the land stuff or the cold case mystery detective stuff there.

ps. if you really want players to experience this part of the story at least have Halsin join the party in the Underdark or the Shadowlands as a summons (attached to the PC) who can aid us. This way the party is not penalized for taking him along, by having to trade out another party member. You know WIld shape bear, the help button, his standard kit and spells but under out control. When we unsummon him he should say something like, "I'll go scout ahead" then wildshapes bear and exits stage left. This way if you don't want the buff, you can just leave him unsummoned for the challenge, but he'd basically hop in with interjections during the intermission to do the set up on all this stuff at various points. That might also work pretty well.

This is also true, but I think this thread points more to a systemic problem in RPGs: characters not central to the overall game/plot are not given the same level of depth as characters that are, even though screentime and the existence of dialogue may lead one to believe these characters are more important than they actually are. Just because the plot device has a face and a voice doesn't mean the plot device is meant to have the depth of a character.

As someone who has been DMing and playing in various iterations of D&D for the past thirty-something years, I can absolutely confirm this happens at the table just as much as it does anywhere else.

This is actually a compelling thread for why stories don't really work well for games.

Not every player is going to enjoy the story, some are just going to try to skip all the dialogue, and some just play games for the story.

Personally as I've said a few times, the story and chatting with characters is the least interesting part of games for me.

This could also be an interesting thing for developers to actually research whether gamers consider the story aspects of a game to be interesting or not, and for players that primarily play games for stories, theres quite a lot of text driven RPGs on Steam as well.

I think with AAA games they try to simply cram in everything and too much to the point that certain aspects in each area feel underwhelming compared to games that focus entirely on gameplay or story, and other such aspects.

And before someone says again 'do you even like CRPGs', yes its my favourite genre, but especially ones with minimal dialogue or at least such stuff can just be clicked through as quickly as possibly. I don't play spiderweb software games and such for the story, I play them for the tactical combat, character building and exploration.

I don't think this thread is an argument for why stories don't work well in games, there are loads and loads of people who absolutely do play games for the stories. I for one would not be interested in crpgs at all if it weren't for not just the stories, but the ability to influence and shape the stories. And frankly history has proven you quite wrong in terms of mixing story and gameplay. The original Baldur's Gate games are constantly praised for their stories, as are the dragon age games, Mass Effect, the most recent God of War games, the Final Fantasy series, the persona series and many others, just to name a few. You're not a fan of the abundance of story and conversation, but there's enough peopel for whom that's the point of the genre.


I think the issue is that he's a character that's intimately connected with the whole of the act. He's a character whose quest SHOULD be really important, an importance amplified by the fact that he's an actual character. But he hasn't been given anything to reflect the importance he logically should have.

Well if it had been me, I’m have made him weirder, darker and nothing you would connect with like an actual child, because he isn’t. But that’s just me.

It’s OK, it’s not a standout part of the game, but it gets the job done.