Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Add more answer options for Astarion

The second set made it feel like they had an argument off screen and were just coming into the tail end of it.

It is not consistent with the things you've had to say and do to reach AA in the first place.

The very last line is a perfect example. Why would we suddenly take issue with him calling us "pet"? He's called us that as a spawn earlier in the game. Why is it a problem now? It makes sense that AA would respond to it in an upset manner, given the players hostility toward it comes out of left field. But the comment itself is OOC given it was never an issue before.

There is no context for the *players* hostility in the second set of dialogue. You've just achieved a goal that *both of you* have actively worked towards, plotted together, and fought hard to achieve. I'd love dialogue to reflect that a good portion of players are *positive* in that moment. Not upset.

The first option has an answer suitable for a romantic line, but the second option is such a "romance" that the player can only gasp. Magically, the continuation of the altruistic, hopeful line is interrupted, there is no continuation, why was it even there in the first place? At the same time, two hostile lines appear at once, repelling the player and reducing all possible choices to two selfish options. The player is at a crossroads - which will be the lesser nasty? "To the evil Tav, an evil tongue" is somewhat irrelevant, given that there was an adequate line before that after all.


The line about vampirism is also very unpleasant. First of all, Tav could exclusively want freedom for Astarion (Tav himself has no problem with the sun or hunger). Tav could want to share eternity with Astarion, but not demand it, especially now, at such a significant moment for both of them. In this line, Tav looks like a character using Astarion purely to achieve his own immortality. In the second version - using him for sexual gratification as a "body" while, as you correctly point out, knowing about his past. Using Astarion - either way, no option. And using Tav (on the game script side) as an example of a "bad girl/boy". No romantic companion in the game has such "on-rails" and dystopian dialog.


I support it. No matter how you make sense of this scene, the game thinks you enjoy degrading yourself. It's like asking a person with a gag in their mouth if they agree, and then smirking with satisfaction, "Silence is a sign of agreement".


Players have been talking about this for a long time and asking for other lines to be added for this dialog. This thread has offered some wonderful, logical, and roleplay-appropriate options. Fix one dialog or spend a lot of budget on high quality and detailed animated traumatizing content added to us by patch 6?

Adding dialogue for positive/neutral/negative is pretty good for roleplaying your Character the way you want. I wish they would do this in all aspects of the character, not just the romance. Yet I do see the romance end is so extremely screwed up right now and it is causing some major issues. It also doesn't help that it seems what the player had prior to moving the original team that worked on Astarion to different "projects" (probably new games or something else within Larian). In all honesty (my opinion only) if the original team's work would stand (be kept for the canon of it all) and the current team would quit making changes to the entire story, then maybe we wouldn't even have as many bugs in the WHOLE game due to all their changes that affect so many other things. I want the story back. I want the choices back. I want the choices put back into the PLAYER'S hand, not someone who wants to change the story and take away PLAYER Agency!!

If they allow us to direct our own game choices, as was what I originally understood for the marketing and the whole thing from launch (a fun cRPG that will be close to the DnD tabletop experience). Now they are just trashing their own product? It simply makes no logical sense. I can't even play the game now, due to not knowing what new "triggers" they are going to slap me with and also because the game doesn't play very well when it is nothing but one big Bug City from Act 1-2-3.

I would enjoy the game to go back and give me some better options. I want no morals (moral lessons for adults? please, I bought this for entertainment, not life lessons) or BS added to my choices because the current team cannot handle it (IMO). I bought a roleplaying game. Not a game that will change everything & the story 6-7-8 months into the game instead of sticking with the original creator team's vision. This is not beta. This is not Early Access. I also don't want myself treated like I am trash either. Larian is playing a high-stakes game in real life, and that wire doesn't look stable enough to hold you, either fix it or fall. Just do something for the audience that loves the character, not the ones that think we deserve something bad to happen to us or hate us because they do not like the choice we made in the comfort of our own personal game. Don't do things to spite them just because you are listening to a few loud voices on social media and also changing the story after the fact of by a different team. Please instead do this for the reasons that your fans used to enjoy the game, but you are losing them due to silly choices made by your current team's handling of this story and no bug fixes (or at least, fewer unnecessary bugs).

Also, one last note. Please acknowledge you hear our requests & suggestions, which we are respectfully & properly asking for. Feedback goes both ways.

I agree with the OP. We have been asking for a long time, with no response. Thank you for your time.

Bump

There have been very few instances in the game where I don't like *any* of the dialogue options. In my first playthrough, I would answer to myself what *I* would say and there were so many times something very similar would appear in the options. It's one of the many reasons I fell so head over heels for this game. I find it so weird that one of the very few times I hate all the dialogue options with my romance partner in an important scene.

I would love to have an option for "I just want to be with you" or something like that then it could just loop to the node where HE offers to turn us. I don't want to ask to be turned first, and I don't want to have to have to ask for his body (yikes) or ask him what he's "learned" (eyeroll). As it stands I usually ask him what he's learned, then choose "I hope you'd learn to love me" because in my RP I'm saying it in a teasing way. His response of "who's to say I don't" always sounded like it *could* be in a playful tone so that's how I view it. I would prefer to have just that one more option though.

Agreed Nicolean. More options are needed and they have been needed for quite some time. Another ongoing issue. Which is why I bumped the post. It still has not been addressed for those who wanted more & frankly better options than what was presented.

This is a great outline of the dialogue options during post-Ascension discussion where it becomes problematic. It's seems like the writer(s)/director(s) wanted to make sure you feel bad for helping ascend Astarion. Like they are directly calling you selfish or stupid.

It's a little offensive to us players and completely disregards that someone might be roleplaying either a naive character (who didn't do it because they insensitively only want his body) or someone who just made a mistake and is rolling with it because they are partly responsible for what he becomes, but they're not going to abandon him and they still care about him. There's all kinds of reasons for ascending Astarion that aren't selfish or stupid. There's just no reload sometimes and mistakes happen. Why is this roleplaying possible throughout the whole game up until Astarion's ascension?

All of a sudden having an issue with being called pet is out of nowhere, since Astarion has called us pet before and we didn't jump down his throat for it.

Agreed, with both Natasy and Metarra.

Few?
Lucky you ...

I made topic about missing dialogue optiond during EA, and it grew to like 5 pages. :-/
https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=741085#Post741085

All of your points are excellent.

If we are meant to feel "bad", I did not. And the majority of ascending fans did not. They found it to be his favorable ending. Even if it's his "evil" one.

As a writer, you can't force your audience to suddenly align with the writers morals for a major arch in the game. You can't force the audience to share your morals at all. Or your values, and your feelings over a certain occurrence.

If this is indeed a roleplay game, acknowledging that a good portion of the players who are likely playing evil aligned aren't going to suddenly out of thin air have an attack of conscience and think what they did was the wrong thing to do. Or regret it. Or do anything but want to celebrate and revel in their wicked decisions.

Why would you not acknowledge the more realistic reactions of the audience through proper dialogue? What is the purpose of instead telling the audience there is only one acceptable way to feel about their chosen path?

Tldr; knowing your audience > telling them how to feel. Larian failed here. A point to improve on in the future.

All of this might be related to the player character in Astarion's romance having a very fixed role to showcase his story.

If you want to pursue a romance with him, you cannot not fall for his theatrics in act 1. That scene in the woods is extremely fake, but to go on with the story, your character has to enjoy the performative act. There is no way to throw a wrench in by saying something genuine that forces him to work off script. You cannot tell him that he does not have to put it on quite so thickly because you like him, or that yes, actually you would be fine with just talking. You can't act as a person in that situation might, with sincerity or gentle humour to get to a more genuine side of him, your character is just there to showcase him in a certain way. In this case as a seducer. In the issue you all are describing in act 3, it seems to be much the same, you are there to showcase something.

Agree with Natasy again. I do not want to be "forced" on how to feel. I do understand the whole story that was written. My Tav nor I would "choose" any of these options. We want better options, it is not that hard to understand why we are upset with the "forcing".

The romantic scene of the first act is excellent, the only problem was the change of Astarion's facial expression in the scene when he offers Tav intimacy (unhappy face) brought by one of the patches. The romantic scene itself is highly affecting and leaves a huge impression on first playthrough - the suddenness of that proposal, the charm and seductiveness of Astarion, the moment when he greedily welcomes the dawn, it's a moment that is impossible to forget. Regarding the topic of lines for a good roleplay - there are enough interesting response options for Tav in this scene. We can flirt with Astarion at the beginning ("You don't have me yet") and see a very seductive Astarion responding to that, there's the passionate option of saying nothing and kissing Astarion right away. And that doesn't make Tav a "sexual objectifier", Tav knows nothing about Astarion's trauma, Tav may think that Astarion after 200 years of slavery, on the contrary, wants now to drink all the pleasures of a free life, this is absolutely normal behavior for Tav. Then we can just relax and enjoy or playfully offer him a neck. The dialog after intimacy is also interesting and varied. Honestly, you are the first person in my memory who is not happy with this scene, but I understand that some players don't want such an early start to the romance, they want to get to know their partner better, and of course lines could have been added for this wagering as well. But this doesn't apply directly to Astarion's romance, it applies to the general idea of dynamic romances in the game, Lae'zel tries to start a romance even earlier than Astarion, and in that case, the option to just talk should be added at least to her romance scene too.

But in my opinion, fixing poorly written scenes like the one this thread is dedicated to, a scene that is disliked by a large number of players who choose this route, a scene that gives no opportunity for adequate roleplay to players, a scene that directively places a certain label on our characters, a scene that is not difficult to fix (in this thread players have cited quite a few variant lines for Tav, each of which is better than the lines the author of that scene offers us) should be a higher priority than expanding the roleplay options in a well-written scene). Although the latter is also useful and would certainly further improve the game.

I agree with Marielle.

You very early on get the chance to find out that he is just spinning you along and all he sweet words are lies. You can then either warn him off or go along with it for the fun and sexy time because you think he is hot. Later on you can ask him if Cazador's victims really fell for his lame routine, for which he mocks you because you after all fell for it too. And why did you fall for it? Because there is no way not to, if you want to romance him. There are no dialogue options for someone who likes Astarion but thinks that his seducer mode with the cough-drop-voice is lame or too artificial. From the start, the range of emotions and stances the player character can convey towards Astarion is very narrow, so it's no surprise that it is also very narrow at the end of his story arc.

Someone mentioned that the player character in BG3 is less of an actual character and more a focus through which to observe the stories with. I think that is very true for Astarion.

Yeah, I personally have always really, really disliked his act 1 romance scene. I think it's just a me thing, I'm going to spoiler it since it's quite negative:


Back to the topic, I'm pretty sure I've brought this up in the other romance improvements thread, but I'm actually quite partial to the approach where Tav is there to serve as a narrative tool rather than being, let's say, more roleplay focused, because I don't care so much about roleplaying a character in contrast to experiencing an interesting narrative and the world the devs have made for me (I will say I was a bit confused I could only be mean to Naaber, lol.). But this is very much a personal preference, there's definitely no harm in adding an extra option that is after all still going to lead to the same dialogue branches that are already ingame.

Some tidbits of thinking in-character from some of my games:

What if I rolled my eyes and smiled but accepted the penny-dreadful romance lines because i want some goddamn sex and escapism from what is happening to us for a night?

Or, what if this exchange was just as transactional for me as it is for you? Bestie, did you not see me putting it out all over the place with everyone else (and i've already had sex with Lae'zel)? This group doesn't run on heroism and virtue, if i have to fuck you to keep you close, i will.

Also, i don't have a tent, i don't know if you noticed that, i will exchange sex with anyone who offers to let me sleep in their tent so I'm not outside with the rain and the bugs. (why are we always having sex outside? as someone who has actually done this, it's not fun.)

EDIT: sorry about the duplicate posts... why is the larian forum like this?

When in the first act before the romance scene can this be seen? On first playthrough, the beginning of the romance looks exactly like Astarion's sudden burst of desire. Of course, it's silly to assume that such a "trust no one" has fallen in love, but that he wanted intimacy with Tav is more than believable, and it feels that way. Relationships can start with intimacy, and you can expect to earn trust and grow closer to a person over time, gradually melting the ice, proving by deed that you can be trusted. Tav gives in to passion and finally falls in love with Astarion, after all Tav could die at any moment, there is no telling what will happen to the larvae, and to give up such happiness for even one night seems strange to me. The strong desire to talk and find out what's going on with him, instead of immediately falling in love, comes when they change his facial expressions and make an unhappy face, while really not adding the appropriate lines and reactions. I'm glad I went through this scene for the first time back when he didn't have that unhappy facial expression and I was able to really fall for Astarion. And in my headcanon I still hope he enjoyed it at least a little bit too, he called Tav beautiful and when I put my neck up for him to bite, he looked very predator-satisfied. And I don't think this chaotic fire that erupts in response to his advances relegates me and my character to the simple platitude of "have fun and have a sexy time", it's more than that.


Astarion has never mocked me (except for the fake sadistic Astarion in patch 6), those lines I don't choose, but it's good to have them, it allows you to reveal more of him, I see his manner of seduction as charming and (pardon the tautology) very seductive. In the first act, I'm completely fine with the range of emotions, right down to the lines and actions I would have done myself if I were Tav. The only thing that spoils the roleplay is the inability after this scene to openly announce to everyone that I'm dating Astarion, here I have to turn on the headcanon to somehow explain this strange need to hide the relationship. In the scene after the ritual, when I already know about Astarion's injury, when I'm more than serious about him, I would never think of such dope as: "I want your body." And I don't know of anyone to whom it would have come at all. It's primitive, it doesn't reflect the significance of the event, it doesn't reflect Tav's attitude towards Astarion. And most importantly, it breaks the classic rule of dialog in RPGs - when we have conventionally "good" (altruistic, loving), neutral and negative lines. The first act scene has this classic set, the post-Ascension scene has all the lines being negative to one degree or another. And there's a difference between there being no way to start the romance any other way than to give yourself to Astarion (after all, it is a romance, and BG3 itself is just overflowing with sex) and between looking like a horny nymphomaniac when the romance is already deep and serious. That's just as surprising.


I played after the release, and I missed Astarion's seductive lines in response to the phrase "You don't have me yet" (if I understood you correctly that you don't like these lines) because I don't like Tav's line, it seemed to me too much like a possible rejection, I was afraid to push Astarion away (flirting is not my strong point, that's for sure :)) and immediately went for a kiss, without words. I played it without spoilers, completely unaware of what was going to happen next or where it was going to lead, and just opened my mouth when I saw his scars at the moment of the bite. Astarion was walking around in his white shirt at the time, never changed his clothes and I actually saw his scars for the first time. That whole scene really impressed me, just as much as the scene in the second act impressed me (although there were different feelings there and it's hard to compare them). But Astarion's lines, when I watched them on video, I found very seductive and charming, just as I found Neil's acting to be great, but of course everyone has different perceptions and feelings about one or the other. But the dialog scene after the Ascension gave such a negative contrast to the previous two romantic scenes that it completely breaks the immersion in that moment and instead of "being inside" and feeling and perceiving what is happening, one wonders and asks, "Who wrote this at all?". I believe that when a player goes into "critic mode," that is, the player begins to evaluate the quality of the script in a negative way, right at the moment of play, detaching from the game, withdrawing from it emotionally and mentally, this is the clearest sign of a poorly written scene. And I agree with you about the scar reading scene, that scene just cuts to the heart.


I know what you mean, although I have rather the opposite approach, I really appreciate roleplay and the ability to influence events rather than be a tool, which is why RPGs are my favorite genre. The option for the player to observe the characters and story "from the outside", without involving themselves in the plot, fits much more with, say, an interactive novel than with a genre like RPG. And when it's claimed to be an RPG, the player feels cheated. I don't mean it's so important to express directly my character, but interactions with other characters (especially the dearest character) should feel real, not someone else's story, at least so that there isn't such a stark contrast, Tav shouldn't be the opposite of the player and what the player represents. If the basic principles of dialog construction in RPGs (conditionally positive, neutral and negative lines) are observed, there will be no such a knock-out contrast. The author of a book or short story can be guided only by his own vision of the story, but the author of RPG must necessarily take into account the player and the possibility of roleplay, it is a feature of the genre. A novella can be liked or disliked, it's a matter of taste, but an RPG is always about roleplay, and when, buying an RPG, the player gets into pieces of the novella that he doesn't like, the RPG ceases to be a good RPG, at least in those moments.

In addition, the lines for Tav in the scene after the Ascension are also extremely selfish. "Become a vampire" is a selfish line, as if Tav sees Astarion as a tool to fulfill his own needs. And the "body" is the same way. Astarion becomes a tool for Tav, Tav becomes a tool for the narrative, the player's hand becomes a tool to make a facepalm. Alas, gentlemen and ladies, it's low quality scripting when tools stick out of every crevice of the narrative. It's like an irresponsible attitude towards plot and narrative logic amidst a lack of understanding and/or unwillingness to do "dark romances".

To be honest, I mean the entirety of the dialogue Astarion says there, "There you are, I've been waiting, etc...", but yes, that too. The morning after is good though, I really liked that you can pick on him a bit and he takes it really well, I think those are always the best dialogue options to pick with Astarion.
Act 2 and Act 3 scene (I think both of the Act 3 scenes, but unsure to which degree, I know Act 2 scene was almost if not completely them) were written by the same person. The act 2 scene is extremely good, I think I spent the entirety of the next day after playing it still chewing on it. I think with Act 3 there's still a narrative that Tav is being used as a tool for to reinforce the story that's been set up by Rooney for AA's characterisation, and I personally appreciate it. They're selfish options for a reason, but I'm, again, personally quite uninterested in the power couple Sylas/Delilah angle or the devoted angle, so of course I'm content with not having an option that reflects that. But that's just me, and there's no harm (or much of a cost, really, I think) in that extra option.

I am a bit in between. I do not care for Tavs/Durges because they are boring blank characters, instead I much prefer to have a focal/origin character, that I feel some kinship with, so I can think about how the story affects both them as well as their travelling companions while I play the game. Which is why I do appreciate dialogue that allows to portrait a wider range of positions and offers meaningful ways to influence the story or to show it from different angles. In the case of Astarion's act 1 romance, for example, it would have been interesting to confront him with a pc who is attracted to him but somewhat repulsed by or uncomfortable with the seducer persona. It would have been very interesting to see how he acts when his expectations are completely turned on their head.

For me it's mostly the cough-drop-voice and the lines said in it too, I think. The kitschy romance novel visuals (stepping out shirtless from behind a tree) are fun, but the voice is hard to endure. It gets even worse during the second time he invites you to spend the night because here the dialogue can be interpreted as being quite cruel.


When he showers you with compliments for the first time, there's a background insight (I think it's insight) running that can prompt the narrator to tell you that he is probably lying to you because his whole body language is just a bit too perfect and artificial.

I find him most charming when he talks about how to off you when ceremorphosis starts, or you fool around about the Wyvern poison Nelly gives you, or how he reacts when you tell him that he does not have Lae'zel's level of charm. It would have been nice to coax out this type of banter during the act 1 night together - the morning is nice.