Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Writing and Shadowheart's Big Act 2 Moment

When arriving at the Nightsong, it is revealed that you have found not a relic, but a woman has been trapped for over 100 years.
This person appears to be manifestly a victim and speaks truth to Shadowheart regarding the nature of Shar and the Sharran tradition.

At this point, Shadowheart's aim is to murder this woman, and we may either trust Shadowheart to spare her or try to talk her down.

In my playthrough, the game's writing has consistently shown that Shadowheart is a zealot obsessed with Sharran tradition and becoming a Dark Justiciar. She has demonstrated little doubt or hesitation on her part and, as a result, we have absolutely no reason to think that she will instinctively show mercy, find benevolence or think about the big picture here.

So, on a 'good' playthrough, the logical choice would be to gently try to get her to snap out of it. Here, even the gentlest of persuasion results in her immediately committing a jarring 180 from your established friendship into threatening to murder you on the spot.

The alternative is to trust her - which is absurd, given what we've been shown thus far - the outcomes of which are:
A) She kills the Nightsong, which would have been the obvious outcome that a 'good' hero would have tried to prevent.
B) She spares the Nightsong, which flies in the face of essentially all of her writing up to this point.

I could accept that perhaps there was some dialog option which I was never shown that could have explained this scenario better, but the fact is: if I never saw it, then the writing failed in that sense as well.

As such, my suggestion: Please rework the dialog options and Shadowheart's responses to them in this sequence to make the potential transition from zealot to apostate more believable.

So I actually really like the dialogue options in this case and I think it’s really well done. I think that the scene becomes significantly more believable when you keep Shadowheart as a companion consistently, see her reactions and approvals and disapprovals, and get to know her a little bit deeper. There’s more to her than being a disciple of Shar, and the fanaticism is largely a front that she puts up, in my opinion.

You can see that she’s not truly evil, since she approves, for example, when you save a kid or are kind to animals. (And she’s punished by Shar for caring about saving Arabella, for example, via pain from her wound.) There are also clear indications that she has a past connection to the goddess Selune, as for example, in the childhood scene with the wolves where the player character can remark that she was wearing a necklace with the symbol of Selune as a kid. She also has a reaction to the Selune statue in the Blighted Village and her wound pains her.

It also helps a lot if you are romancing her. You do see more development from her then, I think. She’ll tell you that she’s been thinking about becoming a Dark Justiciar, but maybe she should be content with her lot because she’s already blessed to have you by her side. So you can see more easily how her affection for you might make her doubt whether she should kill Nightsong.

It also helps a lot if you have her eat the Noblestalk mushroom from the Underdark. This restores one of her childhood memories. In Act 2 you get some unique dialogue with her, that you don’t get without the Noblestalk, where she seems uneasy and is having doubts.

I think there’s ample material in there to indicate that she could spare Nightsong, if you keep the character around and get invested in her. The last two times I’ve played the scene, I have trusted her completely and she has spared Nightsong both times. That was on good playthroughs. She spared Nightsong without my interference once when I was romancing her and once when I wasn’t.

First time i get this was inside the Gountlet the First Time she cut of her Hand in the First Trial, the exclamation mark shows up and i get surprised.. never saw that before.
And i felt that what couse was the statue of Selune i Find in act 2, in that run she carried that stuff inside her inverntory i forget with her becouse she looted..
And since i always replicated the same way, but in my last run the run i made before drop out patch 5 with the new endings.
I get the scene in the middle of the Shadowcurse roaming around doing stuff and in this run i had been on a relationship for longer becouse i finish grove a little bit early.
There are other Hints that she already started to Change if yu Romance her.. even so she talked like full on Sharran Path in act 2 i beleave its becouse she resists the curse and start to feel loved by Shar like never before.

A big part of Shadowhearts character is that she is as stubborn as a mule, and allergic to coercion. Throughout the game, if you try to force her to say/do something you will be met with either a sarcastic comment, or she will do the opposite out of pure spite. And in the Shadowfell this behavior is dialed up to 11 because it's such a stressful moment.

Like Ecc2ca has already said, you can see the cracks in her sharran persona during act 1&2. Even if she doesn't see it herself. And then Dame Aylin is able to shatter it for a moment with her speech. None of it is obvious of course, and even if you pick up on all of this there's still no hard guarantee as to what she'll do. But that's the beauty of this scene for me.

Apart from all the moments she gets punished by Shar for showing kindness, a quite telling dialogue happens if you save the grove and she comments how she never thought she'd find herself caring about the tieflings. On the other hand, if you massacre the tieflings, she's sorrowful about it and gets drunk to not think about it too much. The longer you travel with her the more you see that something doesn't add up when it comes to her background story, until the confrontation with Aylin confirms that suspicion. Even if you ask her if being a DJ is truly what she wants she doesn't sound like she's fully committed. If I remember correctly she says 'I THINK that's what I want'. Basicly, she makes all these pro-Shar statements, yet you can see her inner conflict, and that in the back of her mind she can sense that something is not right, but she's in denial.

If you don't spend much time with her and don't see her hesitation, there is a fitting response you can give her how you're surprised she spurned Shar. The game has multiple hidden interactions that truly let you understand characters only if invest time in getting to know them and journey together, not just keep them in your camp and chat with them there.

using the noblestalk.

In my playthrough, seemingly anything other than just keeping silent -- which is an absurd prospect for my character given the stakes -- eventually results in her going mad dog and threatening to kill me, her supposedly closest confidant. As a test, I just remained silent, and Shadowheart -- the person who has been audibly whipping herself in a fervor for the entirety of the Gauntlet of Shar expedition -- spontaneously decides to quit her mission.

Like yu Tell i always felt a little Bit weird indeed she chosen to spare the Nightsong even if yu Romance her, even if yu indeed see her Changing a little Bit when yu save grove and all..
i do understand why people love her in Selune Path and want to Buy this weird change on her..haha i love her in this Path Too..
But i do feel that the Canon for her would be she killing Nightsong.. and yu having to convince her latter to Not Kill her Parents when she Finds out the Truth
Im not Joking.. the Only Amazing Thing in this Path of her Romance for me its this ending..
Felt like Luke and Darth against the Emperor moment, Like thats your Last Shot Bro to save her for real. or shit will hit the Fun.

Whether she kills or spares Aylin serves the interests of the party, since Ketheric loses his protection either way. And you know this before going in. So for a (lawful) good character stopping SH at the nightsong before she makes a decision probably makes the most sense. But I don't see a good reason for other tav's to intervene here.

Another reason why I like this scene so much is that it shows that Shadowheart is not a character you can "fix". If she takes the light path she mostly fixes herself, with some help from Aylin. You are just along for the ride. And trying too hard to fix her backfires on you. And I found that quite relatable.

I think that they'll show how TOTALLY plausible it is that Shadowheart would spare the Nightsong in Act 2. Just feed her the Noblestalk, and voila!
























(Check my next post for the last three screenshots.)