Yes, Act 3 lacks polish and I think the main problem with the Mystra audience is this weird hybrid state it is in.
Before the scene starts you are informed that it is an audience for Gale only, which makes sense, it should be a private conversation given their relationship. When the scene starts however, you are still privy to it and in the adjoining conversation Gale knows that you witnessed the whole conversation. This is very weird. I am not sure why they did not either make a scene that the player character is part of like for Shart and Shar, and Lae'zel and Vlaakith - or just give Gale dialogue to only talk about his audience. Instead it seems to me that they ran out of time and chopped together parts of Gale's Origin audience and added it to the normal game.
Then there is a tendency in the game to make the romanced versions of certain dialogues more relationship and player focused than the friendship version - which is something I really detest. I looked up the friendship version of Gale's Act 2 scene, in which he is expresses his fondness for the whole tadpole group, while in the romanced he is focuses solely on the player character. I would have liked it if the importance of the rest of the group was at least mentioned. In the same way I hated that when facing the Act 2 finale, with romanced Gale you can only choose between using love as a pressure tool or telling him that using the orb isn't his decision. Why not use the argument of innocent lives lost, which is the one that always works with Gale?
But I digress. I think the reason why romanced Gale's Mystra feels somewhat colder depends on both the focus shift to the romanced PC and that you have no input in the conversation. I felt that when I could actually choose my replies in Origin, the whole conversation felt very rational. "Why did you defy my orders?" is, when you can actually answer, an open question and the conversation as a whole gives you good opportunities to make your feelings known (though some are more bitchy than others). If you are only watching the conversation, you are forced to swallow your resentments if you have any - and I feel a lot of people on the anti-Mystra train have those. I also got the feeling a lot of people of the anti-Mystra train don't understand that Mystra, Gale, Elminster and Tara are all Int based characters, capable of rational discussions and decisions which just aren't very fluffy.
I think that if you go down the ascension path, you definitely make Gale extremely bitter, while he mostly felt a little lost to me at the end of a very cordial romance. That spot of resentment wears of rather quickly in the "good" path after all - or at least it did in my version. Though I still think that Astarion's romance - which I had in Gale's origin - works better for Gale than his own romance does. Having the vampire's little confession that he started the romance with ulterior motives but didn't want this deception any longer, was just an insanely good story beat for Gale.
Edit: And while we talked about this before, Withers can't tell you Bomb Gale is in Elysium because he simply isn't. Withers spirits Gale's soul away before Mystra can remove him. I also don't think that atheism is really possible in a world in which the gods chat with you. Humanism - placing the human experience over the value of the gods or at least on the same level - is still a viable option. I am ok with Gale wanting to use the orb in Act 3 to save his friends and the Sword Coast (though I'll always talk him out of it), even with wanting to use it to remove orb and crown from existence, I will never be ok with him wanting to use the orb to gain Mystra's forgiveness.
@Tauriel, yes his circle of close friends seems to be tiny. I was more thinking about how when you end up with God-Gale, you get a very heartfelt letter from Elminster in which he mourns the loss of Gale the person and when reading it, I thought that these were sentiments that maybe should have been expressed a little earlier.
Last edited by Anska; 13/02/24 07:13 AM.
