Originally Posted by fylimar
Originally Posted by WizardGnome
I should say, fun cameos for some characters I don't consider bad. Some characters are more deeply written than others. I think you could get away with a "Wink wink nudge nudge oh look it's Jan Jansen! Or Mazzy Fentan!" or something like that.

Other characters, however, are clearly more important and need to have more thought given to their inclusion. Viconia, I think, is a nuanced enough character, with a fantastic enough romantic arc, that her appearance should have been more thoughtful. Maybe I'm biased, because she is by far my favorite romance in the originals (And not just because she's an edgy sexy drow lady, though that helps).

But Viconia is such a tragic character, in my view; born into the heart of evil, into a privileged position there, and even then still having an attack of conscience. And her reward for her conscience is to be persecuted, to be hunted down arbitrarily on the surface. And the only character who treats her with any decency is you, and just being shown a bit of kindness is enough to get her on the path to abandoning evil. In a way Viconia can be read as a character with an innately good nature, struggling against the fact that she grew up in, was brainwashed into, one of the most dehumanizing, sadistic, cruel societies imaginable. And this appearance could have shown that tragically, there is no happy end for her. That absent the redemption path in BG2, she wasn't going to find redemption on her own. She couldn't do it all alone, and in service to Shar the sense of injustice she once had would slowly be chipped away, forgotten, erased from her, even as she erased Shadowheart's identity. Her potential fate in the original games could really make you *feel* what a sadistic monster Lolth was. I feel like if she was written better in BG3, it could have made you feel the depths of Shar's evil.

I don't know, again maybe I'm biased. I just feel like she deserved more.


That is personal taste. What makes Viconia more important than Mazzy or Jan? I personally have Jan and Mazzy always in my party but do not care for Viconia at all.
I would have been more mad, if they brought in Jan or Mazzy and not get them right.
I'm not saying they are more important than Viconia or Sarevok, but from a players perspective neither are less important.

Just because Jan and Mazzy don't have the standard edgy backstory doesn't make them less deep. I personally prefer some more sane and healthy conpanioyover an edge fest.

And yeah,I agree with Bubba, Viconias development was from one crazy evil goddess to another. That isn't much of a development imo. ( and without going into real life stuff: evil dictators, that kill thousands for their world view,are rarely sane, just saying).
I personally would have been ok, if Viconia wouldn't have made a comeback in BG 3. And Sarevok neither. He basically was purged of Bhaal similar to resisting Durge, so I would want an explanation, how Bhaal was able to control him again.


It is not about "more important" or even personal taste, here. It is that you can capture a lot of, say, Jan's character on the first blush. He has depths to him as well, including a surprisingly somber personal quest. But if you included him in BG3 as a funny little gnome guy who tinkers with things and tells long, rambling stories, you'd capture the majority of his character - and it's exactly apparent that this is what he is within, like, two seconds of meeting him in BG2. With Viconia, on the other hand, her character isn't super obvious from first blush. It's more difficult to do a simple cameo with her. You could have Jan appear for a single scene and do a faithful job representing him; Viconia is more difficult, and I think they really badly failed her. Even in the BG2 endings where she remained evil and wasn't romanced, her story was more complex and ambiguous - she kills a Shar cult for "betraying" her (angering even Shar), but also is honored, by the elves no less, for saving one of their cities. Even when she remained evil during the course of the game, her ending seemed to speak to the the complexity of her character.

BG3 changed her back story to make her much more along the lines of "Actually, she secretly was obeying Shar all along!" and her actions bear no small resemblance to what initially disgusted her about Lolth to begin with. And again, like I said, even THAT can be fine, even THAT can be a good story, if it actually feels like there's some DEPTH there. It can be a sad story about how Shar's evil eventually wormed its way into Viconia's heart and corrupted her, robbed her of her complexity and conscience, and eventually debased her until she was doing, with her own hands, what so disgusted her in the first place.

But unless I missed something, it doesn't feel like there's depth to Larian's changes to Viconia. It doesn't feel like they actually considered her character in the previous games at all. It sort of just feels like they wanted some cruel and fairly shallow villain for their new character, Shadowheart, to overcome, and at the same time wanted to do a cameo. So they just sort of mashed what they wanted on to Viconia while, for the most part, ignoring her actual character. It kind of makes me wonder if the person who wrote Viconia in BG3 actually even played BG2 at all, or if they just sort of skimmed through the character roster and thought "Hey, an evil drow who worships Shar? That could kinda fit the villain we want for Shadowheart!"