Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Story & Character Discussion Daisy, the Absolute, and the Emperor [SPOILERS]

Also don't forget the retcons, for example to make the emperor timeline work. Also not a sign of quality writing.

What I didn't like is, the Honey Trap of the Emperor, making my Guardian a female but turns out it's this some dude from the past...

The reveal of the emperor's identity just felt like larian pulled it from their nether regions. I'm positive the only reason they did it was for the 'wow' factor of the name recognition, because it adds nothing to his character, and nothing to the plot. Same as if the character was revealed to be 'actually Manshoon' or 'actually Anomen' the reveal feels like a very thinly veiled attempt to assign importance to a character by taking the identity of another known one that never needed to be anything other than a normal mindflayer in the first place, and who could (should) be important to the player through their personality and actions within the game of BG 3 itself. It was tacked-on, in essence.

It's an irritating trait of Larian's writing in BG 3 IMHO that they need to make every major npc (particularly party members though) have this ridiculously OTT importance assigned to them in the world.

Emperor never 'needed' to be anything other than a mindflayer who had broke free of the Elder Brain's control and was pursuing his own agenda

I disagree. The Emperor now embodies the question "what actually is a mind flayer as opposed to a person with a human body"? Which is important since we can use the tadpoles and become more like a mind-flayer eventually. The theme is handled in an unpleasant way overall, but it is good that it is present within an NPC.

Only that he does not answer this because the Emperor is a super special one of a kind mind flayer. Omellum is a much better character for that purpose.

And as contradictory and hand waved the Emperor is written he is useless to deliver any kind of answer.

I think Leurcotta is on to something although I have slightly different take on it.

The Balduran plot is under developed. At the point of the reveal - Balduran goes from founder of the city to the evil mastermind of diabolic criminal organization. This is confirmation point. If players are on the path to become a mind flayer they can adopt the emperor's POV "I'm sorry you were put in this situation" or the scales can fall from their eyes and they can realize that the Emperor isn't like Omelleum at all. He's fully a fully evil character who has been manipulating you from the start.

Our guardian literally killed the guardian of the city, it corrupted the government and the moral justification it claims - I only fed on criminals - doesn't pass the laugh test because it ran a criminal organization. How many of the people you fed on were people you led into a life of crime? Recruit em and consume them once they get caught - efficient and so very evil.

The reveal moment should be pregnant with possibility but isn't - only the becoming a mind flayer path is well supported "I'm so sorry you were put in that situation" Yes Guardian I agree with you: clearly Ansur was a victim of xenophobia and wanted to kill you because they can't accept tentacles and silver blood. I believe this despite the fact that Ansur was a dragon, a non humanoid species that had no reason to identify with humanoid norms.

Yet the Tav who sees through the Emperor's lies gets shitty lines "oh you're definitely sick" Because, you know, the only reason to dislike the Emperor is xenophobia.


Not: "can't you see how far you've fallen? You disguised yourself in a form that pantomimed Ansur's own but you act nothing like him. Your claims to act morally are contradicted by your actions. You have lost everything that made you you. You are no longer a hero, you have become soulless monster that leaves a trail of bodies in your wake. You told me there was nothing to find down here but I have found something - I've found my resolve, this is why I will never stop searching for cure. I will not lose my soul.

At some point Larian decided that becoming a mind flayer was the main path and avoiding soul destruction became a poorly supported alternative. And, as the OP indicates, this happened when they deleted Daisy.

That change happened when they deleted Daisy, but I don't necessarily agree that becoming a mind flayer is the main intended path. It seems to me that rather, allying with the Emperor is the intended path - supported by your observation that not doing this is underdeveloped - by which you avoid becoming a mind flayer. The problem with this is that it runs contrary to what should happen. If you ally with the Emperor, then you're more likely to have used more tadpoles and consequently closer to becoming a mind flayer. You're also less likely to have a problem with it.

If anything, it seems that they were determined to deny everyone a satisfying ending with no existentially relevant downsides from the viewpoint of your PC. Which is exactly what they did in DOS2, and in Ego Draconis (that one stands out even by Larian standards). And probably in more games, only I haven't played them to their endings.

I think we largely agree - I just see slurping up tadpoles on the recommendation of the Guardian as being steps on a path to becoming a mind flayer. And if you swallow the astral tadpole Tav becomes half mindflayer - which the emperor calls the next stage in our evolution. 'Next' implying that there are stages after that. The game doesn't tell us what happens to the MC that take the main path through the game. Are we still half illithid?

See that's what I don't get Our Guardian was tricking us all along, so that just makes the PC a complete dumbass for trusting an Illithid, baring Olemuum...
Putting all that work to seem actually trustworthy with all those options... hell you even have a chance to "kill" the Guardian, not that it actually works...
It all just feels haphazard... There should be a quest line where the Emperor (is it just me or am I the only one who wanted him to be a female, I picked a female Guardian after all) does have our best interests at heart...
Maybe I'm just salty idk.

I dislike the Emperor (moreover the guardian) because of the forced ‘sorry I can’t tell you everything yet’ shenanigans that are basically prevalent until the start of Act 3. It feels forced and doesn’t flow narratively (there are a bunch of other instances with other characters and scenarios that suffer in this regard as well). This is amplified by the fact that when he finally reveals himself his ultimate excuse is ‘you wouldn’t have trusted a mindflayer’… which is just such a cop out because it’s forcing an opinion on the PC in a game where agency is pretty standard, add to that we have an entire quest line with trusting Omelumm well before we meet the Emperor.

Daisy on the other hand is another can of worms. So overt in its attempts to seduce you that anyone with a brain can see it’s a trap. I supposed at least you could have had the dichotomy of resisting that temptation or purely giving into it.

I don’t think either of them work narratively because plot ‘mysteries’ are incredibly hard to pull off in a game of this size and scope. Daisy simply has the benefit of the doubt because we only ever saw him/her in Act 1. The tadpoles were a lot more insipid and worrying in EA compared to what we got in the full release of the game though, so I guess Daisy makes a bit more sense in that case.

+1, couldn't have said it better myself. It's the main reason I dislike the Emperor cause he's just full of these contradictions.


Also, hard agree with one but. I think Daisy could've worked narratively if there were more paths to her persona written. In a perfect world Larian would've toned the seductiveness of Daisy down, given her more nuance and made her less obviously evil from the get go. Iirc she went full evil after 2nd or 3rd dream, right? Make it a slow burn, the more you use the tadpole, the more power over you she exerts (and make it so the game's ending IS affected by these small choices along the way too, not the consequence free tadpole bullshit we have right now).

So make the 1st dream mandatory regardless of tadpole use, and then have multiple diverging paths - where she has to use different tactics to try to seduce you, so people who go on full 'reject the tadpole' still get dreams, but dreams that are unique to that specific path. Kind of like the original BG1 - where your Bhaaspawn dreams were tied to your alignment AND reputation. So good, neural and evil characters had different dreams and received different powers.

Look, originally I was one of those people who weren't really engaging with the tadpole and Daisy (but did have a few runs where I did just to see it in action) and I have been advocating for Larian to make different dream paths depending on your tadpole use since day 1 of EA... instead we got Emperor. Sigh.

I agree with most of what Moongerm and Nicotta have said - I especially like Nicotta's suggestion. Yes! Good players should have gotten different powers. This is a big departure from BG3 - good players got healing spells, evil players got combat spells.

The only point that I disagree with is that Daisy was flawed because she was so obviously evil.

A question for both Moongerm and Nicotta - what did you think of Raphael and Mizorra? Did you not see them as obviously evil? Did that make them worse vilians?

I think there are problems with the Mizorra's ultimatum scene - notably there's no option three: "we'll just leave the existing contract in place without modifications and see you in 6 months" BUT I saw that as a successful seduction. I felt caught - do I encourage Wyll to sell his soul and save his dad or not?

Likewise I was never going to be convinced by Raphael but I felt some loyalty to Lae'zel by chapter 3 and she really wanted me to make the deal so I felt like saying yes to keep her happy.

So I was never going to give into the seductions of the dream lover inside the dream but I might feel tempted to AUTHORITY my way through a conversation knowing that this what Daisy wants me to do . . .

Daisy is one of the biggest disappointments to me, based on what I heard they changed her/ him because people didn't like having it be a '' surprise lover '' thing ( it wasn't even rly a surprise tho, ppl couldn't take the hint xD? ).
Altho uh, they still did that but even worse.
I've played A LOT of RPG's in my life, and the Emperor trying to get inside my pants was probably the only time a romance thing in a game has genuinely weirded me out and made me gone '' wtf were they thinking? '' lol...
I mean the game is already bizarrely horny and I say that as someone who enjoys '' fanservice '' and lewd stuff, the characters were very pushy and annoying with it but the Emperor was just on another level.

Imo I think the moment the Emperor was introduced is when the plot started to nose dive and become less interesting, every time I think about replaying the game again I just think about him and the direction the game goes in.
I didn't know he was based on some existing guy in the lore, so it didn't really affect my opinion in any way.
But finding out about it just kinda feels silly, like there's a bit too much '' memberberries '' maybe.
But I really didn't like at all how the game turned from a personal quest to find a cure and deal with more human villains who can ( or could've given different writing direction ) potentially be reasoned with, to a Mass Effect space alien invasion.
The cosmic stuff just felt like an unnecessary escalation just for the sake of it, it all felt very sudden and like the game just bombarded you with way too much that kinda made everything else feel irrelevant.

( Also the scene with him telling his backstory was oddly cheesy, maybe weird pet peeve but it felt like '' Emperor propaganda '' lmao, like it was trying REALLY hard to establish him as a good guy. )

The weird thing about romance and sex in the game is it feels like we have too much control because literally everyone is bisexual and worships the ground that you walk on seemingly by default, and then when they could actually have done something interesting like Daisy deceiving you through seduction nah can't do that.
I mean it's not like you couldn't have had the option to resist it, it's just disappointing to me that people complained about it and that they changed it.

Sometimes I just think it's better to not indulge the player 100%, even tho I do think the characters generally are better written in BG3 it's still something I felt was refreshing in WoTR.
There's a character I was planning on romancing from the start, but she just wasn't into women ( and was quite '' descriptive '' about it and what she liked lmao ).
I spent quite a bit of time in the game trying to romance her but then she was just like '' nah I don't swing that way '', altho I was a bit disappointed it still makes the characters feel more real and like their existence isn't just about stroking your ego or indulging your own fantasy 100%.

I mean, she was meant to be evil, obviously, but she could've been a bit covert about it.

My personal theory was always that Daisy was disguised Absolute. But also the thing is, I always felt that there should've been more 'higher' powers involved. So the Absolute is obviously the Elder Brain (that later becomes the Netherbrain), that was always obvious. Then there was the person locked in the 'mysterious artifact' which turned out to be Orpheus (a lot of people thought it might've been Gith herself, except that whenever you meddled with the box in EA it was kind of stated that it was an ancient gith general, a male one, so no Gith) but I found it quite curious that the Prism didn't want to be handed to Voss in EA, which means that indeed there was something else going on there... Well, it was Voss who defeated and handed Orpheus over to 1st Vlaakith, so maybe he was afraid Voss still served her? I dunno, pure speculation. And we'll probably never know cause Emperor was inserted into the Prism for 'reasons'.

But regardless, the "evil" mind flayer powers would've come from Daisy/tadpole while there might've been a possibility for Orpheus trying to help us block Daisy's dreams and giving us entirely new ones where we could've gotten to know him more (since yeah, currently Orpheus is underdeveloped as heck, yet he knows about the Githyanki egg, hmmm) and maybe gotten some 'good path' oriented powers like some sort of mind shields and whatnot more akin to what the Prism was doing for us.

And more neutral path would probably be using tadpoles up to a certain point (like seeing the dream of BG on fire maybe?) and then you could entirely reject that scenario and seek 'help'.


I think both of them were written with something different in mind in the EA... I find both of them quite likeable and somewhat well written currently but I will break it down.

Mizora WAS supposed appear in a human guise at some point (there are even renders of that)... which she never uses in game currently. Such a missed opportunity too, but I guess Wyll's major story rewrites are to blame. Also when Mizora comes to renegotiate the pact, like you said there should be an option to let it run until it expires in 6 months, or maybe, I dunno, let Wyll choose? Lae'zel can choose for herself (reject Vlaakith), Shadowheart chooses for herself (reject Shar), Gale chooses to hand over the Crown of Karsus to Mystra by default (unless steered toward evil by you, but by default he's Mystra's best puppy) and Wyll doesn't have that option?! Sure, he will choose to become the 'Blade of Avernus' when asked, but it's the only place where you can ask him for his input in his fate, why? Also, why is Mizora hanging around when Wyll broke the pact anyway? She feels kind of shoe-horned to stick around in this particular scenario. I did 2 runs btw. one where Wyll broke the pact and the other where he kept it to save his father and aside from the possible cringey Mizora 'romance' her lines to the events involving Wyll barely change, again, blame the rewrite. I think the original Mizora would've been a fascinating character, sure the current one is likeable enough, she feels more like a joke not a threat.

Raphael, Raphael... the mastermind behind so many plots. Just like you I would never have taken his deal, but I think again originally he had a different role to play and was rewritten to accommodate Emperor and given a McGuffin to free Orpheus. I do genuinely believe that his original offer of removing tadpoles was legit (and he would be the 3rd higher power I mentioned earlier) but that obviously would've cost us MORE than Karsus' Crown. Very likely our damn souls. Still, when it comes to villains in BG3 - I loooooooooooooooooooooooove Raphael, such a climactic fight too! Entire House of Hope is just beautifully written barring some small glitches and minuscule plot holes. But seriously, when Raphael offered me the Orphic Hammer my 1st gut feeling was: 'this is a trap, there is definitely another way to get it!' and I went with that, Lae'zel berated me for that and said she admired my conviction too. So I was satisfied with that outcome.

I dont find Raphael or Mizora to be inherently evil. More like that is just their nature, like a lion hunting/eating a deer. I dont call that evil. It just is. I love both these characters, I think they are pretty much perfect. But I would have been more interested in seeing the direction they were going with Mizora being captured and the whole Spike plot from EA (same goes for Wyll).

Daisy meanwhile (from what I remember of them in Act 1) is simply doing what it was programmed to do (If they were indeed the tadpole/absolute). Again, I dont really class them as evil - manipulative, seductive, foreboding, sure, but not really any different to what the Emperor ended up doing with our PCs (yet somehow entirely worse on his part lol I just burst out laughing whenever I get the cutscene with him missing a shirt, at least Daisy tried to be subtle with its promises of power and attempt at romance).

(edited parts as I misread some of the question)

@ Nicotta Fantastic response, thanks!

Like you I looooove Raphel - that song! The aesthetics of the house of hope. The extended "a hope in hell" metaphor . . . Makes we wish BG3 had been about devils instead of mind flayers.



I think you are right that originally we would have given up our souls. But it's an intriguing question isn't? Raphel is so obviously evil and he's also a seducer but we both like him . . .

But I guess I was in the minority since I preferred Shadowheart 1.0 and Wyll 1.0 to their replacements. I don't think the Emperor is a well loved figure so I hold out hope the end game can be improved.

*****************

I had forgotten that Mizora had a human form!

Your comments on Wyll are spot on. Like you I reloaded and had him say no to the pact but was upset to see that there was very little difference between the two choices. Uh, Wyll, why are you calling yourself the Blade of Avernus? You are free once we hunt down Mizora, you need not identify with the hells at all. You are still the blade of frontiers . . .

And yes a dream battle between Orpheus and Daisy would have been great! And would have been true to the legacy of BG1 - where both good and evil players received powers.

And it would makes sense that someone who remembered the fall of the Illithid empire would know how to extract psychic powers *without* empowering the tadpole - from the lore in 1e I got the sense that the Gith and the Duergar received their powers from the mind flayers.

Just chiming in to say that the Emperor has some fans and I am one of them. I didn't play in early access and knew close to nothing about the story on my first playthrough. My opinion of the dream visitor changed many times as I progressed through the game and in the end I found myself unable to betray him.

Daisy never struck me as being sentient. Whether or not it was intended the scenes with her felt like they operated on dream logic, much like our interludes in Baldur's Gate II, so calling her evil doesn't quite fit. I was really hoping for some rug pull to come later on where her seemingly sinister designs would be given more nuance, making our attitude to it ironic.

The Emperor plot does nothing like that,

Me too and there are others as well. But the hate he receives is sometimes quite irrational. Not that people need a reason to dislike or hate a character, that is fine, but sometimes there are even made up stories about him as if there was a need to justify how people feel about him. Based on postings on reddit it seems people who took the Emperor ending are more satisfied with the outcome than people that went with Orpheus .

I played EA and I disliked daisy. I don't see the appeal. Daisy was obviously evil and so not tempting at all for my good playthroughs (and I don't play evil).

And it is kind of ironic if people are praising Daisys seduction attempts and then be heavily offended by a shirtless Emperor who is open for romance (if you did not try to kill him before), although in contrast to Daisy he might actually be sincere with his feelings (at least according to the dev notes in the game files).

Anyway, I am glad they added him and replaced Daisy, but the late rewrite shows and I hope in a new edition they will try to add more content to him and to address some of the issues (time line e.g. is really a mess).

It feels to me that he is in-fact not sincere with his feelings in that regard, given that if you reject him too harshly during his romance