Interesting.

Such is the power of voice acting and the like. To be clear I like to hate the villains in game and I like hating the emperor just like I enjoyed hating Raphael and Auntie Ethel: they are smoothing talking manipulators who prey on innocents. *

Indeed I think The Emperor was a better villain than was Orin. Orin is just such a cartoonish edgelord I can't take her seriously . . .

What I don't like that we never get the chance to denounce our manipulator in a way that feels satisfying. "you're definitely sick" just isn't a good line and The Emperor's boss battle is boring. And, as the OP has said the "distrust the emperor path" is poorly supported. For such a high budget production the lack of support for anything other than the main path is pretty disappointing.

If I were to reconstruct the storyboard, I think the authors wanted players to feel trust, then have a crisis of confidence, then feel secure in the alliance and then have that relationship tested and, finally, to end the game wondering if we made the right decision. But that didn't work. I never trusted the guardian, the more I learned the more that my lack of trust seemed to be well founded and yet this isn't reflected in dialogue available to Tav,

Oh sure, the Gith are Lawful Evil. As are mind flayers. It's only a question of the lesser of the two evils . . .


It would also be nice if we didn't have choose between evils but this is Larian and Larian likes evil gameplay.

Tangent on gith vs mind flayer evil

Vlaakith isn't a god and thus can't enslave souls - making their evil a result of their culture, not something inherent in their souls. Indeed in their initial introduction there were early humans who were captured, experimented upon and transformed by the Illitid and altered even more by their time on the Astral plane. Gith are just psionic humans.

In DnD mind flayers have gods are therefore inherently evil. In Larian DnD they are soulless.



* Well actually I kinda like Ethel because she's so entertaining . .

Last edited by KillerRabbit; 27/10/23 07:06 PM.