Like, I understand certain changes they made. Lae'zel getting toned down is sort of reflective of the overall adjustments WOTC is finally getting around to with their... let's say poor past racial connotations in the rules books. But things like Shadowheart and Wyll's personality changes feel like a complete lack of confidence in their own writing, to say nothing of the pattern certain criticisms of the latter followed. Gale, Astarion, and Shadowheart opening up a little earlier is probably a good thing given we now have the full picture of the game's scope, but a lot of the complete overhauls were so blatantly unnecessary. And if there WERE "good" party members/companions on the way that unnecessary work is certainly a large part of the cause for never getting them. Of course Karlach is probably the only good character that was in the pipeline, Halsin was explicitly unplanned even without the nature of his Act 3 personality being so utterly divorced from how he behaves prior, and Helia was dropped before those quotes even happened so I have no idea why they'd be implying MULTIPLE good characters were on the way unless Early Access was intended to go on quite a bit longer (and it probably should have). Helia in particular as a werewolf (hell the ability to be one at all) is sorely missed in a game with such a hefty amount of Selûne and Shar content and the amount of work on her that was done prior to her early cut calls into question why they didn't pick her back up as a "Good" character the EA crowd was waiting for instead of rewriting everyone. Why rewrite so much, so completely so late in development? It could not have possibly been good for the team, especially with the release date MOVED UP for some unhinged reason further exacerbating the obvious problems like Minthara's non-functionality outside of Act 1.
That said the general tone of barely tolerating the origin characters always baffled me. I wasn't posting for it but I'd been lurking and truly could not wrap my head around it. Shadowheart and Wyll especially were just more interesting with the only thing wrong about Wyll being that Mizora's capture made no sense in any context prior to Karlach's backstory being explained (which WOULD make it make sense if Mizora were in pursuit but they don't appear to have thought of that). Wyll in particular was so confident and basically proud of his self-indulgent past, and they turned him into a walking doormat when all that really needed adjusting was how obsessively hateful he was of goblins, even more so than the Goblin Slayer MC. Shadowheart on the other hand made so much more sense as a devotee of Shar with her EA personality, and at least to my memory near the end of EA still had mostly the same approval spread, she was just more dedicated to obfuscating her feelings. God the quality of writing was so much higher for both of them.
And then we have Minthara who just talked the best game of all of them for her relatively few lines. She was proud and self-assured in a way that even EA Wyll didn't come close to being. In the final game rather than slowly changing as all the EA origins do, she slowly opens up and reveals more of who she is for you to take or leave. NONE of them can compare to her in Act 1, and later in the game she's the only one self-confident enough even with her inner turmoil about her autonomy being taken from her to continue being who she already is. And then oops, "the most popular EA character that we always intended to make recruitable, unlike Halsin? Yeah we forgot to make sure anything about her worked in Act 2 and 3."
Sarevok and Viconia are certainly disappointing in terms of what I personally would have liked to see from them (not necessarily Evil replacements for Jaheira/Minsc but at least having far more depth and interactivity especially with those two around) but at least in their cases there aren't any signs they had something better for them already arranged only to tear it up in some kind of misguided attempt to appease ONLY their loudest EA critics.
Honestly I wish someone archived the Early Access install. I wish I thought of it myself at the time, but how could any of us know the changes would be so wildly, unnecessarily drastic. Even the character creation models for Tav faces looked better than what we have now (granted, I mean that in terms of style, not graphical fidelity). My favorite Half-Elf face looks like it got stung by a bee between the final EA patch and the full release.
Last edited by Auric; 17/08/24 12:40 AM.
