I found all the endings to be pretty unsatisfactory. I spend all this time with these characters, getting to know their stories and helping them with their macguffins, and then it's just done byeee. It all seemed so sudden. I guess I took the road to Avernus ending with Karlach to be a possible segue into BG4. Good, on one hand. On the other, it means she was little more than a sacrifice for a potential cliffhanger.

For the most part, I loved the storytelling in BG3, but there did seem to be giant chunks of it that resulted in, "Well, why did I even bother at all, then?" I mean, the story was still good, but many of the various story endings seem dead.

Also, knowing the dismal endings for some characters, I purposefully no longer make much use of them during the game. The vicissitudes of life are such that I don't need a reminder of all its unfairness in my escapist entertainment. Part of the joy of video games as escapism is being able to turn a problem you can't fix in your head to a problem you can fix in Faerun, or wherever else you might journey. So I tend to spend very little time with Karlach and Lae'zel. Which is too bad, as Karlach is an awesome character to have in the party and so well-done overall.

Karlach is one of the biggest problems in the game that one wants to fix... and you just can't.

I know all characters last until the end, but traveling with someone you know is doomed is just depressing. I like the idea of bringing a more "permadeath" concept from pen-and-paper D&D to video D&D. Back in my day, being able to brag that you had a 12th level wizard used to mean something (and get off my lawn!).

But yeah, it seems like it would be hard to please the people that wanted D&D in virtual form AND the people who wanted a video game loosely set in a D&D world.

I guess that kind of encapsulates the problem with Karlach. At some level, video games provide a payoff. We struggle, we fight, we win. Then we get paid. That's the contract. The new loot. The new level abilities. Whatever the prize, if there isn't one, the struggle becomes empty. Just a way one passes the time with no sense of accomplishment at the end. Well, with pen-and-paper D&D, you didn't need that catharsis. The catharsis was the meeting of fellow freaks who gathered around that old oak dining table for way too many hours at a time to go spelunking the sewers of Stormreach.

In a video game, that community IS the characters. Nihilistic endings sort of ruin the catharsis of playing in the first place (for those of us who need that sort of thing). I'm not sure if this is a gap that can be bridged between in-person and single-player gaming.


"Often forcing his victims to eat their own lips, he was caught and imprisoned for tax evasion." -Yellowbeard.