Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Story & Character Discussion [END SPOILS WARNING] Addressing Karlach (PLEASE PUT SPOILERS IN TAGS)

I know that a lot of people have anxiety about them keeping Karlach's ending the way it is (I certainly do), but I really do feel like they're going to fix it. Let's for a moment take a look at what we know so far:

-Karlach was the last origin character to be added, and so naturally has the least developed story.

-Act 3 in general is kind of a mess even if you ignore Karlach's ending.

-Larian both has a history of incorporating player feedback, AND has gone back and improved character endings before based on player feedback in their previous game (Beast's questline and Fane's ending).

-Larian's incorporation of player feedback is the cornerstone of its business model, so suddenly ignoring it would be a strange move.

-Despite it being listed on the frequently requested feedback list, a new discord thread asking for a better Karlach ending pops up about once a day, and is usually one of the top upvoted posts of that day. In addition, this thread is the biggest on the site, and it's not even really close.

-Larian has straight up come out and said they aren't done with the game yet, and are currently working on epilogues for the other characters.

-We already know they called all of the VA's back in, according to both the VA's themselves and the company.

-There are numerous breadcrumbs in Act 3 that pretty clearly point to a possible good ending for Karlach, that for whatever reason didn't make it into the final game (enriched infernal iron, the Gondians existence and dialogue, Gortash being a major antagonist, the House of Hope, etc.).

-Larian has a history of being tight lipped about what they're working on, so it's not really surprising they haven't said anything about it.

-The only real evidence that we have of Larian "doubling down" is a vague PR statement that is open to interpretation, and a few lines of new dialogue.

-It's literally only been 42 days since launch, it hasn't even launched on Xbox or Macs yet, we're still pretty early in the development cycle.

Maybe I'm just huffing copium of am overly optimistic or whatever, but I feel like all of these things taken together add up to a happy ending for us. I'm certainly extremely anxious about it just like all of you (since I check this infernal website several times an hour), but I really do think it's all going to be okay.

Yeah, that. Unless they've been working on said solution for a while now. It's a possibility too by the way. I mean they know that the game is not finished, maybe they had Karlach (and other stuff) in the works even before the release.

exactly. People are impatient. Give them time. I'll eat my socks if they don't change her story.

Im impatient because it's not like her story is some ridiculous randomly patched quests, its literally missing one extremely quick quest, and the fact they didn't do it in the first place and can't keep themselves from referencing it in every single patch or update is starting to get on my nerves

Dog... it's not that simple

If you give her a fix. You have to decide where to put it. Call back actors. Change the epilogue. Change reactive dialog. And then you have to QA and test it.

It's not simple.

Except they already did all of that. They called back actors, made a cutscene, added new option and new dialogues in act 2 and 3. And it was all to try justify avernus ending being somehow unavoidable and the only option to survive as the "ending she deserves"

Yeah, I'm staying optimistic. Even if it seems like adding a small quest is an easy task, as someone who's currently coding and scripting his way through the game data (and I'm quite comfortable with programming), seeing even just the wealth of data really puts it into perspective how massive and complicated this entire ordeal is. Even if it's not packed in this format in dev.

We shouldn't get impatient - we can express discontent with the ending, the inability to fix the engine, or even the inability to explore the plausible options that may keep her alive on the Material Plane without becoming a mind flayer. But we also shouldn't want it right now or under such a short amount of time; coordinating and executing a multi-faceted development effort is not easy and they also have other things to do besides Karlach's ending. And currently, the chances of getting the infernal engine fix ending don't seem that slim.

I can understand why people are upset. To be fair, I was quite shocked and saddened too since I thought they would've made the engine fix ending, which is what we all think is the "ending that she deserves." But it does seem like there's at least some hope and we should give them more time to react to our discontent-ness rather than to become impatient/hopeless right now. Who knows, maybe we'll get a better, more fleshed-out quest/ending than the quick fixes that people are bargaining for.