This thread is a great convo about what seems like a really complex plot moment! For me, the moment felt confusing and somewhat sad. So I definitely feel what you guys are saying, Levghilian, Thunderbolt, etc. Though I do appreciate that there are lots of playthroughs and many turn out to be satisfying.

There are a few reasons this climactic moment felt confusing to me.

The interaction begins with the all-knowing narrator saying, "You might be able to sway Shadhowheart from the path of darkness to the path of light." And then the game is like, "Actually, attempting to sway her is the only wrong option."

Even more than this, it felt confusing to me that the dialogue options do not correspond to what happens. If you choose "Trust Shadowheart - do not interfere," then what happens is that your Tav actually just waits 1-2 seconds for the Nightsong to drop some utterly game-changing information ("I know about your fear of wolves, and your past, which Shar has lied to you about")--after which point you can then interfere. If this happens, you can convince Shadowheart to spare the angel using a potentially attainable persuasion check (vs. the essentially impossible one that happens if you follow up on the narrator's voice-over by trying to sway Shadowheart before choosing "not to").

For me, when I see an option that says you are choosing not to interfere, I think of that as a serious decision that I should be prepared to face the consequences for. It does not mean "Wait like 1-2 seconds because there is an ongoing conversation, in fact we are between a couple of sentences right now, and then you can change your mind and interfere."

If the dialogue option had been written as, "Allow the Nightsong and Shadowheart to continue speaking" or even just "Wait and observe," that would make sense. I wouldn't have felt so confused about how "not interfering = interfering more effectively a couple of seconds later after Larian continues its conversation between two NPCs."

Finally, I can't help but feel a little eye-rolly about Larian's messaging overall. It feels like they are saying, "Didn't you notice that Shadowheart has doubts about committing this violence? Therefore you should not intervene."

If a friend or loved one is continually talking about committing an act of violence, but shows some tell-tale signs of doubt or uncertainty about whether they should go through with it, the correct response is not to stay silent and let them figure things out in order to demonstrate that you "trust" them. Withdrawing yourself from their decision-making or emotional space is not what prevents folks from doing violence, at least as far as I understand it. It felt pretty heavy-handed to me, narratively, for Larian to be like "Well didn't you notice that Shadowheart was actually conflicted? If you did, then you should let her have free will. Free will is important. In fact, as a reward for letting her have free will, we will have a second NPC just keep talking and convince her to change her view."

I do think it's interesting that this messaging connects with the themes I've noticed in Larian's writing overall, in BG3 as well as in Divinity: Original Sin 2--the theme of free will, that doing "good" is always more complicated than it seems, that Gods/faith/religious doctrine is illusory, and that free will is the end goal and dogma is bad. All of that feels present in Shadowheart's climactic moment.

But for me, the implementation in this conversation felt off. There was no other moment in the game where I so keenly wished Larian was aware of the medium they were working with--i.e. that they tried to account for the limits of not having a DM interacting with players.

If I was playing D&D in person, and the DM brought us to this crucial conversation and said, "Do you want to do anything?" And I said, "I want to try to persuade Shadowheart to not kill the innocent prisoner and cause dozens of people to be consumed by shadows," and the DM was like, "Too fast, my friend. Nightsong was actually still mid-convo. I was just asking but now your over-eagerness will alienate Shadowheart," everyone at the table would be confused.

BG3 functions more like a chose-your-own-adventure book; I think it has to, and has done amazing things within that form. But if I choose "don't interfere," I'm thinking, Ok, God help me, I'm turning to page 52 to see what happens when I've waived my chance to interfere. Not, "Cool, I'll just wait a second and let Larian keep writing. Good thing I'm not overly eager to be good, or Larian's good character would not have swayed my companion to the path of light."


Sorry for rambling. That's just my thoughts. I totally had the same experience as Levghilian. I think there are lots of good points in this thread tho, and everyone''s playthrough is of course individual. And, to give Larian props, I feel like it's got to be incredibly hard to engineer a conversation so that every interaction takes the plot in a direction that emphasizes the themes you are interested in exploring in the game, which seems like something that's important to them.