Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Story & Character Discussion [END SPOILS WARNING] Addressing Karlach (PLEASE PUT SPOILERS IN TAGS)

I wouldn't put karlachs ending as it is now anywhere near a happy ending with the open ended cliffhanger. Wyl inspite of making deals with devils knowingly and willingly giving up his soul still gets an ending where he makes up with his dad and gets to keep being the blade of frontiers with barely any problems other than the horns. Gale ends up as a professor in the school of magic. Sure they gsve up something so it's not a perfect happy ending but it's actually satisfying how they end. Karlach doesn't get an option that ends with yea she can live in baldurs gate but she wont be able to fight as well or rage like she used to. All she gets is a cliffhanger that the player has to take and run with to give her a happy ending. The others don't get that kind of poor treatment other than Maybe astarion but idk all his endings.

This is my sentiment towards the epilgoues at the moment but the avernus ending being atleast vaguely hopeful for karlach and tav makes it alot easier for me to finish my playthroughs. That being said it's still a far cry from what should've been done like you said a simple line or 2 for dammon with enriched iron could've solved this month's ago. The only reason I can see for it is they either never wanted karlach to have any sort of happy ending what so ever. Or they wanted to do more for her questline than a quick fix would give her. I'm hoping for the later because it's the only thing that seems possible now. I'm still shocked larian has let this glaring community request sit with 0 word on it it's really infuriating.

If they wanted Karlach not to be fixable from the beginning, they could do her whole quest differently without hints, that you can save her and make her story really sad and no one will probably be against it. But they've implemented Gondians and Dammon into the game and didn't expect that someone will ask, how it is not possible to ask them, when they are the key persons for the fix? I don't think they are completely honest with fact, that Karlatch wasn't mention to be fixable from the beginning. There are too many hints that at least in some stage of the development, this meant to be possible.

If they wanted her truly dead at the end, they should do it correctly and close all possible (I mean the obvious ones) ways how Tav can save her. This will be sad story, but well written story. I hope they didn't do this patch 5 fan service like we wanted her dead, but fans not, so we'll let her live.

After the ign interview I'm kinda thinking the same. Their entire story for her at launch was "look at how happy she is in spite of her condition isn't she great and upbeat! Well now she's burning alive. Alone. On a random dock. Please ignore all the ways to save her."

Just finished my first play through. Karlach is properly is the most lovable character in terms of personality. So her ending is quite unsatisfying in both emotion and logical terms.

Personally I think her story/dialog is really good, especially the ending of her personal quest and right after the final battle. You do have to make a few choices to have her not dying right there. I went out of my way to search for solution and went back not sure how many hours of saves(I think I re-do half of act 3 or even more). Before this I tried so hard to only research non-story related stuff. Then I broke the rules for her.

I kind of accepted the no dying ending after the battle.

But in the epilogue, when emotion subside, I couldn't help but question some logic:


PS:

Yeahhhh I mean, all very valid questions, and there just seem to be oversights in implementation. Act 3 needs a LOT of work and I hope that they don’t just kind of phone it in with the last act because they’ve had so much success up to this point.

Exactly, the question with romanced Shadowheart is very interesting.

Also if you look at patch5 epilogs more detailed, you can see more and more plot holes with this update. If you imagine that Karlach is able to teleport instantly between Avernus and Faerun and has engine cooled down twice with infernal ores, she can spend quite a long time in Faerun. After the engine is going hot, she can basically teleport back to Avernus, spend a night in a tent and return back to Faerun and repeat this again and again.

Happy new year everyone, new year new me. Same old bloody infernal engine. Been checking periodically to see any news but with the hokodays and with patch five i figured tgis thread was screech to a halt for a while.
Just want to make a point of saying for the record to Larian, please dont take the lack of activity in this thread as most of us being *over* the karlaxh issue. Patch 5 was extrenely good and much needed for bg3 as a whole. But it still doesnt give us a way to fix Karlaches very fixable engine. I and many others Are probably quiter now because there is heavy hinting at a DLC or more content regarding Avernus that will allow us to pursue that fix, i hope it is true, if it is. Take all the time you need to make it epic. But if it isnt...well i dont know what to say other then its a horribly big missed oppertunity and we would be oretty disappointed .

Yup this matches my sentiment exactly especially after the epilogues

Same, still watching the thread, hoping for any reaction from anyone from Larian.
So still hoping for a new ending, or, a continuation of her Quest.

After speaking to my friend and trying to write down a more eloquent way of wording our collective disappointment - decided that it'd be good to post the feedback we've sent to Larian earlier today for all of you to see.
This goes without saying; if you're not lgbtqia+, sapphic, wlw, this is likely not something for you to have an opposing opinion on because you don't live this norm and you haven't felt what sapphics have felt for years and years of tropes repeating themselves in games and media.
------------------------------------------------------

Not me finally being able to put into words why Karlach means as much as she does, and how the clash between tragedy, sapphics dying in media and the world of DnD/BG3 has caused the past months to be as much of a loud curve as they've been regarding her.

Very long story short;

It's hard to just accept the inevitable death of a character that's specifically written and shown as sapphic (both by the writer and actor), in a game where choice is EVERYTHING and her fate being that of death or returning to her personal place of trauma.

It's a clash of titans: Bury Your Gays meets Dead Lesbian Syndrome, meets choice-based RPG game. IF you're somehow unfamiliar with either term, you should look them up. Those two, are now met by a game that creates a character very much catered toward women who love women. Sapphic-coded - despite being open as playersexual to allow everyone to romance her if they want.

You can turn the tides for everyone but THE most sapphic coded female of the entire roster of main characters to play and/or romance. In itself, it’s a beautifully written tragedy, but it’s meeting a world that's not yet used to sapphics surviving, to allow me to be okay with her death. And with the choice of giving her a new life being held away from the player, many of us sapphics are yet again met by the death or tragedy of someone who instantly came to mean so much to us.

It's hard to make a game during times where sapphic ladies rarely make it through the whole story. The team at larian has a ton of LGBTQIA+ folks working hard for proper representation. Despite how well all aspects of being and playing as LGTBQIA+ work in the game, it’s still incredibly hard to be alright with the death of the classic badass futch sapphic biker who broke the chains that held her and escaped years of torment (none she deserves), only to be given a choice of letting her die or taking her back to Avernus – the original place of said torment.

To write someone as a good tragedy and powerful death, we first need enough people alive within the demographic to be able to kill them off. I can't say that the tragedy isn't good; it's human, it's painful, it hurts so much it wants you to throw a tantrum and burn everything because your beloved character is DYING and she’s been sold off and mutilated and her life will be over before you can even life it - and it's not her fault.
But in the light of recent events where sapphic shows get cancelled as soon as they confirm a wlw romance, or that the main character is sapphic, and after decades of burying our gays, I’m not okay. I’m not okay with calling it a hero’s death when in truth, she didn’t have a life lived nor experienced enough joy to say, it’s okay to let go.

In a world where Warrior Nun gets cancelled, Killing Eve ends in death right after a huge wlw revelation and the potential for calm after the storm, and Lexa’s death in The 1OOs 3x07 becoming a loud, thundering echo that started a movement to save our sapphics - we need more.

Before we can accept the death of our sapphics, we need enough stories that allow them to thrive as they are, loving who they want. There’s enough death and tragedy on the wlw roster, it’s the most common one there is. I know that her story was meant to be tragic – but for a lesbian that’s yet to find hope and be able to play hope - I’m tired. I’m so very tired of losing every character, series and game that’s been keeping me alive when the world around me wanted me all but gone myself.

In a game that’s given me the choice to save every one of my companions, it feels really bitter and hard to ever want to accept anything but a solid choice of positive outcome for the one character that has come to mean to much to me and other sapphic women.

Please Larian, consider at the very least giving us an Avernus expansion where we can give her the life she deserves – and by extension, us the players, the hope we try to look for each and every day. Karlach deserves to live and she deserves to do so outside of the one place we swore not to bring her back to no matter what.
-------------------------------------
References that are a good read regarding the issue I bring up:

https://medium.com/@aferricks/dead-lesbian-syndrome-how-tragic-tropes-continue-to-misrepresent-queer-women-9f0a1ead9b2c

https://whataboutdat.com/whats-new/2020/4/15/the-lesbian-unhappy-ending-problem

https://www.vox.com/2016/3/25/11302564/lesbian-deaths-television-trope

https://medium.com/the-coil/growing-up-reading-queer-the-legacy-of-tragic-endings-81244b48766

https://www.surinenglish.com/six/dead-lesbian-syndrome-20220520184705-nt.html
-------------------------------------

It's been a month since the epilogue released and it's quenched most people's need for a resolution. And that's fine. But I and multiple friends still cannot stand how the game treats its most queer-coded female and her story, and especially that the glimmer of hope we're given both with the extended ending and epilogue talks about a potential fix, wouldn't fucking be here if it weren't for us all chatting and banging pots and pans for months.
Cheers!

She does not need a ending fix.
Make us able to use the metal and for the love of god do not change the ending for pandering reasons.
Thats the number 1 reason why gaming studios start failing. God I hope the do not fall into that trap

Look, english ain't my first language so I do apologize, but... can you elaborate what you mean?

I do not know half of the terms mentioned here, but I agree wholeheartedly.

Also, that Lexa -mention brought some painful memories.

I’m sapphic too, and I couldn’t have said it better myself. As a newer player (I started the game just around a month ago), I wanted to add onto this thread just to share my feelings about this problem and keep it alive. Personally, Karlach has been the only party member I actually wanted to romance (yes I do have a type lol), so that made the thing with the endings hurt even more. However, after thinking about it for a while, I’ve realized that there’s another big reason why it bothers me so much.

Here’s the thing. In this game, there are generally hundreds of different ways to overcome obstacles. You can stack oil barrels and explode all your enemies. You can bypass puzzles with lockpicking. You can use moves like Blood Money to deal ridiculous amounts of damage per turn. Heck, you can even instantly defeat bosses by turning them into sheep and shoving them into chasms. In addition to this, the game also offers a huge amount of narrative freedom. I like playing as strongly good-aligned characters, but the game doesn’t force me to play that way. If I wanted to play as an evil character, I’m sure I’d find just as much interesting route-specific narrative content as I’ve experienced while playing as a good character. This holds true for almost all of your companions’ stories, as well. I love the fact that this game offers you the option to help these characters and really make a difference in their lives. From beginning to end, the game offers players an insane amount of choice and freedom and agency…except, of course, for Karlach’s story.

Although I really don’t like the endings themselves, the thing that pisses me off more is the fact that in the third act, there literally isn’t anything I can do to even try to fix her engine. I can’t even ask Dammon about it in the city. Her quest is completed as soon as her engine gets updated a second time. In a game that’s ostensibly all about player freedom and forging one’s own narrative, this limitation feels super out of place. It feels un-Larian.

Furthermore: a lot of my enjoyment of this RPG comes from its narrative, and my ability to, well, role-play. My redemption run Dark Urge character, a Seldarine drow Oath of Vengeance paladin named Sola, is an incredibly tenacious character who’s willing to go to insane lengths to support the people she cares about. Especially Karlach. So, even if Karlach has given up hope for a way to permanently fix her engine by the time she tells you it’s breaking in act 3, my character would respond to this news by doubling down on her efforts to help her girlfriend. She wouldn’t just jump straight to “let’s kill Zariel,” either—she would comb through the entire city before bringing that idea up with Karlach, because the last thing she wants to do is hurt her by dragging her down into Avernus again. The lack of an option to do literally *anything* breaks my narrative immersion. And my heart.

I legitimately had to put down the game once I learned that there was no way to even try to fix the engine in act 3. It would have been one thing if players could at least ask people, or if there were a solution that required some sort of horrific sacrifice, like turning her into a full-on Warforged or something. I might be okay with either of those options, because at least that would preserve the feeling of player agency. But I am really not okay with her quest just ending in act 2. It legitimately feels like something from a Bethesda game. I sincerely believe a quest this low-quality does not belong in BG3. Karlach deserves better.

Yeah seems like they seriously phoned it in with her quest line and don’t have plans to add to it, since the solution is represented in the epilogue I wouldn’t call it “un-Larian” though (to have some unfinished, low quality content) because Minthara’s romance for example is still pretty broken.

And also, contrary to what you might think, I have heard that the evil run is pretty empty and isolating compared to the good run. So you lose a lot of content, but don’t gain that much. There aren’t a bunch of unique evil NPCs who show up again and again like the good NPCs do. And for the character quest lines that I have completed, there are pretty dichotomous, either/or ending choices, so not a whole lot of flexibility. The 17,000 endings thing was a wild over-exaggeration in my opinion.

So the more familiar I’ve become with the game over time, the more I realize that the Karlach thing is a bit par for the course.

Also, yeah, the “tragic lesbian” thing is a huge trope in popular culture and it’s very disappointing, yes, that the most obviously lesbian-coded character, down to her sex scenes, is the one who has the most tragic ending. I will say, Shadowheart is a very queer character also and I really enjoy her if you want a slightly more pleasant sapphic ending.

Fair, I guess. But I still feel like they should at least add something to make players feel like they *tried*. Especially since Karlach is like the second most romanced companion in the game, iirc.

(Also re: Shadowheart: she is a very good person and a wonderful friend, but. Idk. She’s not quite my type.)

100% agree, I wish that they put more effort into Karlach’s quest line. It needs work, not disagreeing with that at all.