So far, I am quite happy. I hadn't expected the brothel situation getting improved for Gale, and the blessing he is now given, when you decide to stay on the "good" path of his quest is an equally unexpected and awesome addition. Up until now the choices you made in Gale's quest felt disconnected from the final battle. If you didn't go the explosive route, your choices only had relevance after the game had ended, now garnering Mystra's favour actually means something.
I am also absolutely in love with the new ending option Avatar Astarion has for romanced Gale.
You can mention your concerns of having to take care of the other spawn to him and he will agree to follow you to the Underdark. At the epilogue party some of the text has been modified to suggest you both are helping to keep the spawn save. It's such a small thing but it has the "when we are together, there is nothing we can't do" energy, that Astarion's spawn romance never quite manages to achieve.
This is such a good improvement.
Edit: Gale smooches are the best smooches and they should have taken Gale's playful kiss for the Valentine's Day promo. It looks most adorable with Avatar Astarion. This is my 100% unbiased opinion.
Glad you’re pleased with the patch! I am too, of course. Hard not to be with all of the lovely new additions and fixes.
As has probably been apparent on these boards, Shadowheart is my favorite character, and I really liked some of the additions for her, even though I haven’t seen all of them with my own eyeballs yet. I really like that she’ll have something to say when you sit on that stool in camp, and that she’ll have more banter-type lines in Act 2.
Her new smooches are pretty nice on the Selunite path, can’t complain, but I still like the epilogue one the best. Can’t beat that one really. The animations for the newest additions are maybe a little awkward, as were the animations for the post-finale scene. But they are still cute and an improvement.
Btw on the Selunite path, they did actually use the kiss animation where Shadowheart walks around behind you and kisses your shoulders, but it’s a sweeter and less rough version. So the one they advertised was definitely the Dark Justiciar version. (I would’ve preferred that they used sweeter versions as the teasers, too, but I suppose the rough stuff is flashier and more provocative?)
And I’m sure that her post-Act 3-quest scene is massively improved, although I haven’t seen it myself quite yet. Based on the patch notes, it sounds much better since they will be incorporating a hug. I was a little sorry to see that they haven’t added at-will hugs yet, since they have the hug animation well put together already in the epilogue.
However I think I’ll wait on starting a new playthrough until they completely debug her. There are a couple of other bugs, like as I’ve said like a broken record, the Grymforge kiss being broken, and as far as I know, the Mother Superior cutscene may well still be broken.
I really like that they’re adding more options for the endings. It’s getting closer to making good on the infamous claim that there are 17,000 different endings lol.
