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

Thaniel is a big part of Act II. Sort of. You don't really talk to him all that much. You don't actually save him; that's Halsin.

I have no emotional connection or investment in this Thaniel character. The spirit of the land? Is it me or is this just an incredibly weak part of the Act II narrative?

I'd rather all of the Thaniel dev work have been put into the Thorm family members, fleshing out their stories and making them more interesting.

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Oliver is slightly more interesting. At least you get to interact with him somewhat.

Lord, he looks like Thaniel, but for the crud in his eye.

As a rule, I am somewhat displeased that camp companions get the DOS2 Boat Companions treatment. They recur once or twice, stay at your home base, have cool backstories, but otherwise lack in character development. This is most prominent with characters like Thaniel, Barcus (who is an exception that seems to have development), Aylin (who almost gets development in Act 3), Isobel, Act 3 Cat Girl, Arabella, and Volo.

In my opinion, all of Act 2 should have been centered on the Thorms, Shar, and Myrkul. The living Thorm family members needed more development, while Halsin's story is an afterthought. I was interested in the idea of Myrkul swooping in and stealing Shar's toys, as a conflict between Evil God and Evil God sounds really interesting, but it's all blurred. Also, why does Halsin never mention Thaniel in Act 1 if Thaniel's so important to the Shadowlands? Wouldn't pursuing the Spirit of the Land make more sense as a Druid's motivation than seeking out Ketheric Thorm?

there's only so must time to develop all these things, it just dose'nt happen at a snap of the fingers.
Give the game a break, cant have everything your imagination can come up with!

No. I hyped this game up over the course of three years to unattainable heights and goddamnit, I'm going to whine when it doesn't reach my ever-raising expectations. This game did not cure my depression, and that's bullshit. I still have problems in my life even after playing this game and that is simply unacceptable.

Is that a yes, you were emotionally connected to Thaniel, or a no, you weren't?

Yes, I was. I mean, how can you not have emotional investment in the freaking Arch Fey patron of the land, who is the only one that can restore the shadow lands to their beauty before the curse? Or the fact he was Halsin's only friend and first teacher of the path of nature when Halsin's family got killed? Obviously he's not a talk show host, he just woke up from a slumber brought on by Shar's curse. He was recovering, and when you leave Act 3 you start to see the beginning of the land's rejuvenation.

Late Night with Thaniel Archfey

Only one?

I'm the one who did all the work, good grief.

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I felt like he was a bit pointless as an inclusion. The Act would have been fine without him. Better, possibly, especially if that same effort had been put into the Thorm family.

To piggyback somewhat off of Zerubbabel's comment above, I feel like this act should have been devoted to Shar and Myrkul. Bringing in some Thaniel kid spirit we don't save and never really talk to seemed out of left field, narratively speaking.

I mean, Thaniel doesn't even fix the land. It still all comes down to us taking out Ketheric. All it does is personify the land, which (at least in my opinion) was unnecessary, and actually somewhat detrimental the more I think about it. Specifically, because his personification of the land doesn't do anything for the flavor of the setting. The land itself felt corrupted and interesting. To see it reborn would have been powerful if left at that. But to tie it all to Thaniel lessens all that magnificence and stuffs it into a boy with next to no personality, at least from what I saw.

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I'm beginning to realize how much I dislike Thaniel in the game. Bah humbug.

You don't need to emotionally connected to Thaniel. You just need to know the stake to save or not to save Thaniel.

I dreading to ask how your version of retcon would be better, I'm betting it's the same as other's dollar store level of writing.

Yes, this is one of my favorite quests!

I'm totally ok with Thaniel as the spirit of the land, that needs to be cured in order to get rid of the shadow curse. I find that story quite interesting, especially if you stumble upon the strange boy in the woods, who sics his even stranger 'family' on you after a creepy game of hide and seek, only to realise later, what his story is. I didn't feel left out here, I took care of Oliver, found the soldier and his lute and helped Halsin to find Thaniels second part and restore him. I mean, it wasn't like we had no involvement in that, so yeah, I was invested.
I was less invested with act 3 Halsin, being totally pointless storywise, but Thaniel made for a good storyline for me.

EDIT: In hindsight, I don't care.

I killed Halsin, so the only interaction about Thaniel I got was some soldier at the inn crying about him. It felt disjointed and sudden for something as big as the source of the shadow curse, and also stuck out like a sore thumb as a QUEST YOU MISSED. 1/20.

Also in hindsight, it doesn't really impact the player experience of the game.

So you save thaniel which lifts the shadow curse? Except you never get to see that happen. Its only referenced in a cutscene or such once you get into act 3, and then you can't even go back in the game to see the shadow curse removed.

Regarding feeling 'emotionally connected', I don't feel that in video games and personally don't care about it, nor the excessive in most games nowadays character chatting and romance stuff. I get that these are the reasons other people need to play games, I've always thought 'If you want a story, then watch a film or read a book?'.

The only thing I care for is the gameplay, personally I feel like I messed up rescuing Karlach because its just +1 whiny brat in my camp that I need to tend to her every emotional need. I'd rather play with a full custom party and just kill all the companions so I don't have to deal with their baggage.

I think this becomes clear when you consider that only two recurring non-companion NPCs get emotionally invested character arcs. Not a terrible thing. I never gave a shit about Esbern or Delphine or the Greybeards in Skyrim. I never gave a shit about Kirrahe or the Quarian Admirals in Mass Effect. I never gave a shit about Tarquin or any of the other boat companions in DOS2. The only two characters who actually changed over the course of BG3 AND had emotional investment in their plots were Barcus, and, oddly enough, Rolan (this one surprised me A LOT in Acts 2-3 as someone who thought very little of Act 1 Rolan).

If Thaniel were a companion, emotional investment and character development would be a necessity. But Thaniel is, at best, a background character. A plot device. A glorified MacGuffin given a few lines of dialogue and a character model. He could've been a glowing orb without a personality and it wouldn't make a difference to the main story. His primary purpose is to give Halsin a quest and character development and to restore the land after you leave.

Unless a character is a member of your party, they are just plot devices, as opposed to complex characters. When you consider that the game needs to continue regardless of whether they are alive or not, their lack of characterization becomes clear.

We don't need more Thorm family drama. It's made pretty obvious through all the freaking books around town and the dialogue with some of them that they're a highly dysfunctional family, each gripped by a different vice and put on steroid by Shar's corruption. We have Ketheric and Isobel's daddy-daughter drama on top, and Shar has entire arcs in every act of the game, including Shadowheart, I don't need more arcs on characters we already have plenty of. Myrkul's entire theme runs through Balthazar, Ketheric, and the Grand Mausoleum. It's not like Bhaal got that much more in Act 3 outside the murder chain and Bhaal Tribunal, and we won't even talk about Bane.

I get it, you don't care about Halsin or the background of the Shadow Cursed Lands. But the game is not only made for neutral or evil characters obsessed with edgy grimdark motifs and cynicism. And quite frankly, showing the denizens of the forest before the land's corruption is interesting for many people, including druid players and archfey warlocks.

I strongly disagree, assuming I understand what you're saying.

NPCs are part of the world. Your connection to the world on an emotional level is what makes it possible to experience an arc, or at the least, a warble. An important character like Thaniel living or dying should paint the mood in entirely different ways, all dependent upon your connection to that character.

The problem with emotion, of course, is that it has to be earned. You can't start a story with someone desperately crying in despair even if you, as the author, know why. The audience doesn't. The tears have yet to be earned.

So it is with the death or survival of a plot centric NPC. The result must be earned. And felt for it to be effective.

In short, there should be more characters like Rolan, not less.

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But all of that aside, just the whole concept of Thaniel seems unnecessary. I can see how it functions as a quest for Halsin, but wouldn't it have been more powerful to reveal that Halsin was the cause of Isobel's death, and to wrap his quest line in matters that addressed that issue directly?

1. I object to your classification of me.

2. My suggestion is in line with what I consider to be a better storytelling angle for what's offered in Act II, not because I have some preference for grimdark or otherwise.

3. I accept that some folks might want a druid/fey viewpoint of what's going on. That's certainly fair. Nevertheless, I feel that part of the story was noticeably weak and didn't seem to accomplish what the writers wanted.

Okay, so answering your points in order:

1. I agree with you in principle that every recurring character should be more like Rolan or Barcus, not less, in their emotional and character development. However, I do not think this is a reasonable thing to demand for a game of this scope. We are talking about giving every recurring NPC a multi-Act arc with cinematics, story implications, and emotional satisfaction. I think that's way more work than anyone on this forum realizes. Further, people already complain about evil characters lacking in content. Imagine now that good characters get double the content on top of what they already have. Sometimes it's okay for a character to serve a functional role, rather than an emotional role.

2. I've heard a lot about Halsin being responsible for Isobel's death in an alleged prior version of the game, involving the weapon "Sorrow" somehow. However, I'm confused as to why all-around good boy Halsin would stab all-around good girl Isobel to death. The only way that makes sense is if Isobel was originally written as a Sharran as opposed to a Selunite, and that she never had a relationship with Nightsong, which then narratively isolates Nightsong as a MacGuffin with a personality (which she already is in most of Act 2 at least).

Also, more of a general comment to a very small group of posters in this thread: there is no need to have a visceral response to JandK's critiques. This was originally in Story Discussion and moved to Suggestions for some reason. Larian is not going to do rewrites. JandK was just stating his personal opinion. We can have a character discussion without throwing shade at anyone.

I think that Thaniel isna victim of Larian's approach to giving player freedom. If you think about it, ending the shadow curse should be a major thing, an action which should be central to the plot of the act. Healing the land or not should have been a big deal and all things related to it should have been equally big. But ultimately he's a side quest, something we're told is important but we could entirely skip it. We could never recruit Halsin, we could fail at several stages, and ultimately it doesn't matter to the experience. Because for it to matter, Larian would have to enforce things, they would have had to *gasp* make some npcs essential. But he's no different to any other side quest and he feels that way.

I have no investment in Thaniel. The guard guy died during the battle at the Inn and I used speak with dead on him. Then Halsin went into a portal to save him, then I had to find Oliver, got sucked into a battle and then and he was just standing in my camp doing nothing and barely having dialogue. I barely understood who Thaniel was because I didn't ask Halsin about ending the curse. I meant to but forgot since Halsin isn't a character I care much for. So suddenly Thaniel was important and I didn't understand why. And he's the spirit of the land but I barely had context for what they meant, everyone talked like it was obvious. Is he the spirit of all the land everywhere? Was he the spirit of just this land? I don't understand him enough to feel invested. He's an archfey apparently? Never found that out! So yeah, Larian's approach made the character fall flat for me.

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.