The fact there wasn't a good Karlach ending tied to the Upper City found in the files isn't necessarily grim. Maybe one was intended but it didn't make it into the game's files before the Upper City was cut. Maybe one was still in production and the last minute rewrite forced them to shelve it for the time being. Maybe they simply ran out of time before release so they just released what they had knowing they would have unlimited time and money to fix it after the game was released. Maybe one wasn't intended until everyone hated the endings we got. There's lots of explanations that aren't "the devs hate Karlach".
Yeah, I just wanted to investigate that cut-content datamine thread that gained a lot of traction on the Steam forums, and that a poster in these forums that claimed something along the lines of "yeah, the Upper City Karlach stuff isn't leaked [to YouTube like the cut-content Wither dialogue] because it's in your game files." Like ??? goes without saying that making strong assumptions like that can be very dangerous and may spread potential misinformation. Right now I don't think it is, as much as I would like to continue both hoping and investigating.
Originally Posted by NomTheBurritos
Watch me make an account to connect with like-minded people about the fiery love of our lives... TL;DR: I agree with everyone in this thread and will do my darndest to wait and hope that a fixed engine ending can happen. Because I can't live with the fact that everyone else can get something good (complicated =/= inherently bad, mind you) at the end, but not the character that genuinely deserves it the most. JUSTICE FOR KARLACH!
Wow, this was quite a read and I resonated with so much of what you said. I think you captured the sentiment that many of us share. Thank you. You, I, and many others "will do [our] darndest to wait and hope that a fixed engine ending can happen."
Originally Posted by tarraxahum
Hearing Karlach's whole speech after Gortash's defeat (a monologue which I carefully did NOT spoil for myself) and then IMMEDIATELY being hit with the "Completed: Our Fiery Friend" notification and the "We did all we could for Karlach's heart" popping up in our journal AS she's walking away to camp absolutely devastated WHILE we're standing among a bunch of broken Steel Watchers full of goddamn infernal iron felt just, I dunno, flabbergasting.
The dissonance is SO strong in this one, because within the given plot in a vacuum the way Karlach is dealing with her situation and the way you the player react to it in dialogues is so well-written and brilliantly voice-acted and heartwrenching and beautiful in a tragic way, but then the second you look at it in the overall scale of the game and what you've "done" for her so far you as a player just feel like a clown. Did I do all I could? DID I?! A complete breakdown about going through a shitton of suffering and being betrayed and surviving all that only to die and rot is her quest's COMPLETION?! Not a beginning of a new one, not the middle, but COMPLETION?
I am switching between being horribly sad in-character and being incredibly mad as a player so fast it's giving me whiplash.
Originally Posted by sailorgundam
Precisely. I was so shocked, in the worst of ways, that it prompted me to do a Karlach Origin run, believing there had to be another ending to her quest. Lol. Lo and behold, it’s worse as her.
If you look at the quest log afterwards, it still comes across as absurd. I keep looking at Shadowheart, Laezel, etc’s questline, the richly described and written twists and turns spanning all 3 acts… To then look at Karlach’s one sentences, plain and cynically written one. It makes you feel someone deliberately did it as if they hate her. It’s nuts.
On another matter, I have a question: if she decided to return to Avernus, where the heck does that portal come from? How?
Oh man... welcome to the "why the heck did we only try ONE option out of the many plausible ones to try and fix Karlach's heart" confusion club. I get that they maybe didn't have time, or it was in the upper city, or whatever is the case. But as it stands now it's so abrupt. My Larian development head-canon is that this is the Dammon 2-infernal option was the only one given to us because there was a definitive fix for Karlach's engine/heart in the works, so giving us all manners of possibilities for trying to fix Karlach was fairly moot as there was already a real fix being implemented. Then they cut it, and now what we have left is the one option that doesn't fix her.
Originally Posted by Gray Ghost
My big question about Karlach is: how did she end up this way? She was planned as a companion since pretty early on. They were certain enough about her that she got featured in the MtG set with the other companions. She's not like Halsin, who at least has the excuse of not being planned as a recruitable companion originally. Throughout most of EA they had her in mind, they were tweaking her look, but her actual questline... isn't really a questline. You just gather a couple pieces of metal and give it to someone. Compare that to Shadowheart and Lae'zel, even Astarion and Wyll.
This along with the above comment I had is really sinking in the sentiment/statement of others that Karlach was one of the if not the last Origin on the dev roadmap to have her story/questline fleshed out. It feels abrupt and empty, and getting the short end of the stick narratively being she was last seems plausible.
