Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Story & Character Discussion Attacking the Absolute Cult in Act 1 isn't the Good path, different different bad.

I'm also intrigued by a middle voice here, and trying to drift off the binary shorthand. I think The Dark Urge Origin is the only origin that actually works for me in this game.

For the other origins I feel like I'm hijacking their personality and stealing their agency, so the experience is something between RPing the tadpole itself as a player character, and Last Summer at Marienbad lol.

Basically playing as an origin other than Durge makes me feel like I'm an automaton and the story presentation becomes weirdly robotic and offputting. As if I'd just mindwiped whichever companion to ride around in their body, losing their voice/soul in the process. I think any of the other Origins might have worked if they weren't tied explicitly to a very specific characterization, but what we have is pretty much the complete opposite of that idea. Anyway not the point here. The point was that, at least for Durge the PC is given a sensible reason to bounce on the Grove immediately.

Whether embracing the Dark Urge or Resisting it, after that initial camp scene, it makes sense story-wise for the party to dip on the Emerald Grove immediately. Just pragmatically, like get the hell out of dodge, and that leaves some more room to path through the first act differently than I might otherwise.

Siding with the goblins is both mechanically and narratively pretty unattractive. I've heard it referred to many times as 'chaotic evil' or 'mindless evil' as opposed to calculating or manipulative or self interested evil. Of course nothing actually happens if the Durge player returns to the Emerald Grove after everything is set in motion there, but it's not unreasonable for the PC to think that doing so might result in a comeuppance of some sort. So you get a reason to detour and a chance for happenstance to intervene. You know so maybe Halsin dies by accident, or Minthara survives by accident, and the story veers a bit without being quite so cut and dry.

The characters who are the least flexible for pathing through the story are, unsurprisingly, also the companions with the most rigid sense of morality. So basically Wyll and Karlach early on, because they party break over this one, and attempt to kill us if the wrong stuff goes down. Karlach doesn't care if it was an accident, or if actually it was some random druid who decided to escalate a petty theft into a full on extra-judicial slaughterfest. Tadpoles connecting together doesn't seem to matter. Unlike the Astral prism Guardian interlude with Lae'zel, we don't get to 'show Karlach our memories of what just happened.' Maybe be were trying to hold person or use non lethal damage, or run away so the kids didn't get got, but she just calls us monsters and refuses to hear it hehe.

Intention doesn't weigh too heavily there, which is odd given that both Wyll and Karlach get caught up in something rather similar themselves. It's a bit hypocritical on their part, as characters I mean, but whatever.

If, instead of drawing the binary between Good & Evil, we choose to make one between Active & Passive, the setup is 'walk away and everything goes to hell' or stay 'and play the gift of death' mentioned at the outset by the OP as basically a non-choice. Mechanically it's the worst path of all and story wise the most likely to result in confusing non-sequiturs later on, as the game/dialogue struggles to account for a choice that practically nobody would make.

Anyway again getting sidetracked here, what I was going to say is that the real binary framing is basically...

Wyll/Karlach/Halsin/Jaheira/Minsc path vs the path without those characters lol.

So the choice to be a lonely solipsistic Tav/Durge vs one who gets to actually interact with the companions characters in this game across all three acts.

A 5 companions vs 10 companions binary, which isn't much of a choice. I think they could have shored it up with the Wither's zombies, but they didn't follow the suggestion to key them off the NPCs we meet along the way. I never click the dialogue option "why are you talking like that" because once you do that they all just become Withers. Again making the companions feel like automatons instead of characters with the breath of life. If they were the Zombies of the recently deceased Goblins and Tiefs, that might have been compelling.


ps. sorry forgot where I was heading with that and the reason I mentioned the origins. It's because right now the game weirdly incentivizes the player to play the Origin against type, so for example playing Origin Wyll or Karlach as 'Evil' because that's the only way you're going to see a situation where say Karlach raids the Grove, or Wyll decides to join up with Minthara. But then playing that out is doubly weird, because the character has no voice, so it feels like violating the spirit of the character way more than say changing their class or taking them to the hair salon or whatever, ya know. Obviously the Villains never see themselves as villains, so the origin dynamic kinda muddles it a bit. Or I guess to put a finer point on it, there's a resist the Durge trope baked in (suggested at one point that this might even be the most satisfying sort of run) but there's not really the same thing going on for a 'resist the Wyll', or "say please" for Lae'zel, if that makes sense?

We know what they'd do if left to their own devices, or would if we'd bring them along as companions before doing that, so it's just a strange experience to play that out, and then it also goes without commentary. We don't control the whole party really like godmode BG1 conception, the UI and everything about it keys off the currently selected character, so that also makes it harder to pan out on this one. This is cause you can do something similar by simply "controlling/selecting" a given member of the party temporarily, even when they're not the protagonist, to dodge disapproval or things of that sort. Not exactly the same thing, but similar enough to give me pause. Anyway I think that idea that playing the origin is somehow a richer or more intimate view on any particular character is a little off in that regard. I mean sure, you might get those extra memories or cutscenes for the major beats, but you lose all the other stuff that makes the companion feel the way they would in a normal run. Not sure how fruitful it is, but yeah, I guess good or bad is completely framed around which NPCs are going to break over it, which would be fine I think if there were more NPCs in the mix, but the way it is now if not Good and Evil or Bad and Bad, it's definitely something like which companion is going to start kicking up a fuss about it and then proclaim the Goodness instead of the Villainy, or just being around in Act III to do so hehe.