Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Shadowheart Cutscene (Act 3 Spoilers)

So after you go to the enclave of Shar, and Shadowheart makes the decision to either kill or free her parents, we have a cutscene where she is at camp, standing looking at a statue of the goddess Selune.

Now my suggestion has to do with the version where she has just killed her parents. And it’s a very simple suggestion. If you are in a romance with Shadowheart or even if it is platonic, please, for the love of God and everything, let us give her a hug. At that moment when she has just killed her parents and is breaking down, crying for the first time in she can’t remember how long, please Larian, let us give her a hug! And have a little more emotional connection than there is there currently. Because it’s a very deep scene for her but the responses that the player character has feel so shallow. She breaks down crying and the player character basically says, well, what’s next on the agenda.

This is all the more frustrating because it’s one of the few scenes that we get with Shadowheart prior to the end of the game. And it makes her romance feel unsatisfying, to say the least, at the tail-end. Her prior romance cutscenes are awesome, but they need a strong finish. So please, Larian, do me a solid, let me give my girlfriend (apparently, my anticipated life partner if you do a good playthrough) a hug at her time of need. And have something meaningful to say.

I think not only hug needed during that scene. Tav should have an option to stay aswell(leaving her there, seriously?). Also with parents alive you have an extra option when she is LI(Selune route).
Also many important scene have aftermath talk(morning, after the long rest) and I would like to have some. I just want to tell her that I'm with her and I support her or something, especially when im in romance with her.

I 100% believe that saving her parents is the better choice even though it requires a persuasion roll. I had a really good experience in the final scenes and epilogue after saving them. In the end she seems genuinely happy and I will now never make a different choice.

Saving her parents is the only way that you get the ending where you live in a cottage with her with heaps of animals and a flower garden. Which is exactly how she envisioned the future she’d want. Just gotta do it.

1. Shadowheart needs to visit a grave of her mentor in Baldur's Gate. I think it's around the morgue somewhere.
2. There's a graffiti near Jaheira's house or behind it. SH needs to see it.
3. You need to trigger a dialogue about how she remembers the city's smell. But sometimes it's bugging out...

saving her parents is the best option.

I know, I’ve definitely heard that and I’ve done all of those things except I couldn’t get the “smells of the city” one to trigger. So it’s a persuasion check for me! I feel like the bugginess of Act 3 is part of why so many people choose to sacrifice Shadowheart’s parents. Because they want to give her agency. And just playing the game, the thing that leads her to save her parents that should be the EASIEST to trigger, namely the “smells of the city” dialogue, is actually the most difficult one to trigger.

I think it’s the game’s bugginess itself that is keeping Shadowheart from having that agency to save her parents, ironically. Throughout the rest of the game, I felt really good about saving her parents and she did too. For soooo many reasons it felt like the right thing. Not least of which the contrast in the camp scene afterwards. Where she’s getting sad and down on herself, and her parents come up to tell her she’s wrong and to comfort her. It felt like that was the community of love, in a way, that she needed to start to heal? And with the player character too if romanced. If you talk to her parents as Shadowheart, they are so loving as well. The last scene with her and epilogue is a vindication of the choice, because life seems great and she seems very happy. So yeah, I don’t regret that decision.

Well the point of sacrificing her parents would be to free herself from Shar’s curse, and it’s in character for her father to make that request of her. I think that sacrificing her parents might have seemed like a better ending, too, before the epilogue. But the epilogue leaves no doubt in my mind, at least, that saving her parents is the right decision. It was considerably more ambiguous before. I do think it’s an allegory for living with chronic pain, and it feels much better to me that she would have a loving community of her parents, pets, and partner to help deal with that as opposed to not having that pain, but feeling alone like she has most of her life. But we don’t find out what the future actually holds for her, the repercussions of the choices, until the epilogue.