Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Why does the non-lethal option exist if the game won't respect it?

So this specific instance relates to , but I've seen people complain about this happening during the part of the fight with where she : non-lethal damage just doesn't work. The game doesn't respect your choice to use it, and related quests mark the character you knocked out as dead instead of, you know, knocked out.

This was even more egregious in the case of because I could literally see him lying there at 1 HP with the cartoon stars floating around his head while the quest log told me he was dead. No, Baldur's Gate 3, he's not dead, he's right there, on the floor, with stars around his head. Stop lying to me.

So I want Larian to answer me: what is the point of having a non-lethal option in the game if it won't actually let me take advantage of it? I'm willing to bet that it's like this for basically every character in the game, because I can't see a situation in which you forgot to code exceptions for two of the most obvious people you'd want to spare while remembering to code them for everyone else.

So I want to know: why is the game like this, and what are you going to do to fix it?

Because it only exist because a few players during EA demanded it and it was never intended.
And it was clear from the beginning that it would be impossible to add enough reactivity to accurately react to non lethal combat.
So Larian added a few token non lethal combats where it would matter and otherwise ignores it.

Mechanically theyre dead and despawn after a while, its just for feel good reasons, they should add reactivity or remove it, its a half baked feature as of now, maybe allow it only for a few fights that have reactivity, by adding a popup yes/no menu at the start of combat?

For some NPC encounters it works quite well, for some not at all.

Positive example: Barth, Aradin and Remira

Negative examples: Damays & Nymessa or Mayrina's brothers

As always, the contradiction lies in a half-hearted implementation and realization. Why? Only Larian knows...

Maybe at last they will allow

No. Completely unacceptable.

No only that.

Are you serious? Larian really did this?

...brilliant.

I completely agree. Because one of my gripe is that you can't actually convince O to not turn into squidward, despite I'm bringing Gale to commit Al-Qaeda.

This surely will make you refund the game right?

For a game that's meant to be based heavily around DnD, Larian unfortunately made a lot of encounters only have one possible outcome no matter what you do. Obviously a video game will never have as much flexibility as a ttrpg, but I wish there were at least more possibilities.

I had one fight where an NPC kept telling me the target was wanted alive at all costs so I switched to non-lethal and it seemed to go as intended.

They specifically provide non-lethal as a possibility, so they should actually respect it.