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From what I've read, and my own personal take on evil playthroughs, it's less that you aren't a specific sort of evil, but more than the specific sort of evil that actually gets implemented is bad.

Most evil routes that games use are focused around the "Chaotic Stupid Murderhobo" type of evil.

Where it's all about doing heinous things for no reason. There's no logic behind the actions, it's just "Here, kick these puppies because kicking puppies is evil and you're evil right?"

Contrast this to good routes, where helping others has the logic of they will help you in return. You save Halsin and he joins your party. You help the kids and Mol helps you out later. You do quests for literally anyone and they give you a reward in return.

This is not just your everyday stupid either, this is advanced stupid because of the fact that "Evil" is more about personal gain than cruelty. The very core of evil is all your actions are preceded by the question "What's in it for me?"

Even ostensibly cruel acts are all about personal gain. Lord Vader will force choke a guy to death. Why? Because he leads through fear. His position as Sith Lord is entirely based around others being kept in line and not wanting to try to usurp him, so cruel acts like killing some random nobody is a tool to secure his position. He's not choking the guy to death just for the heck of it, he's not doing it because he gets sadistic glee from it, he's doing it because the person is not worth anything to him alive while killing him furthers his own goals.

Meanwhile in BG3:

"Hey, go torture Liam!"

"Why? What for?"

"To find the location of the Grove!"

"But I already know the location of the Grove. I literally can't be here without finding it because the game shoehorns its discovery into a bottleneck that cannot be bypassed without exploits"

"... Torture him anyway!"

We can go further into this rabbit hole of stupidity in terms of evil route design by factoring in the freedom that players are granted in modern games. That being, you can make your OWN murderhobo path by killing NPC's without the story mandating you to do so. With the ability to initiate attacks on NPC's, combined with no stupid things like essential tags making everyone noteworthy immortal. You very much can just kill bunches of NPC's if you wish (Which can have innate story consequences by said NPC's not returning later into the game)

Thus, why would you make the actual story path one of being a murderhobo when you can access that kind of route by default using the already built in game systems (Like, you can even do it while following the "Good" route too).

Then even deeper into the rabbit hole, we get to the nitty gritty of what an "Evil" character would actually do. Given that evil is predominantly about personal gain... This leads to a lot of the cases, where in a game a choice between good and evil is presented, the evil character would take the good option because that leads to more personal gain (Quest rewards, experience gains, more allies to aid them, trust with a group people etc).

Like, take the Goblins vs Tieflings scenario. Upfront you're told that Halsin knows about the tadpoles. Your goal at the time is to deal with the tadpoles. Ergo, an evil character would want to rescue Halsin to find out more information about the tadpoles, as that is in their best interest.

But the actual "Evil" route has you go ally with the goblins and kill the Tieflings. Why? Some rambling about being a "True Soul" and at least 1 act of being betrayed. Will you gain anything from this alliance? Minthara suggests maybe power? (Though in a meta gaming view that "Power" being offered is just some tadpoles you'd otherwise have looted off the corpses of Minthara, Gut and Ragzlin)

Why do the users need to give their phone number to verify the identity?

Firstly, it's a little disappointing from a privacy point of view. I have no idea who's going to have access to that information, nor how it might be used. Privacy in the US isn't much of a concern most of the time.

Secondly, it doesn't allow to verify the identity, as it claims to do, so I'm not sure what the point is. The only possibility it offers is preventing people from using two different accounts, I suppose, although I'm not sure it actually does (I don't have two accounts nor the motivation to try).

Has this requirement been enabled by mistake, and would it be possible to remove it?

I see what you're saying here and agree it can use some work. I had the issue in BG3 where Gale was trying to "teach magic" to me and the moment I said yes things got 1000% gay. I mean that's cool if that's what you're going for and I'm glad it's there for people that want it, but for me it went from 0mph to 1000mph and from straight to gay very very quickly. One second I'm asking him about the girl he's in love with, the next second he's standing uncomfortably close to me and looking deep into my eyes.

That whole scene always bothered me because of how jarring it felt. I suppose the kind of lame way Bioware used to do it with a heart next to the message would at least warn you not to click it. But I'm not so sure I want icons displaying next to dialog choices. But yea, either way relationships both platonic and not can always use more time to simmer, more options to lead it, and more options to back off or put the petal to the metal.


Agreed. Unfortunately I don't think there's a right or wrong answer here.

I think it's mostly in the hands of the devs on how they want to handle it and it definitely has an effect on the way the relationships feel to the player but I guess it comes down to choosing the right design for the right game.

Update: Part 4, Chapter 38 is now published. Bye Bye, Castle Greyhawk. Hope you enjoy it!

BG3.5 - Hellraisers (Fanfiction)
Baldur's Gate 3.5: Hellraisers - an original fanfic story that is a sequel to Baldur's Gate 3 Fanfic: The Afflicted. It picks up immediately after the events of Baldur's Gate 3 as characters from the previous fanfic - Fiovay, Kai, Aelun, Vlyn, and the other members of their party - travel to Avernus. Their quest is to save Karlach but also to hopefully find and rescue Darson, Aelun's father, from the clutches of Demogorgon.

Here is the link to the blog site: https://baldursgate3hellraisers.blogspot.com/2025/10/baldurs-gate-35-hellraisers.html

I saw a comment somewhere that it was funny to give him a giant weapon looted (well, weapon-dropped) from an ogre or minotaur, so that's what I was trying to do. Evidently he's perfectly capable of picking up things like that, forbidden from PCs by code.

The problem was it's apparently too big to toss to him through the bars. You keep getting a no path warning. This is a change from one other time I did it long ago.

I don't know if this was just a side effect of design, or they wanted to disallow him from ever holding that weapon, which would be bad, because it's funny. He'll hold a full-sized maul no problem, and whack the walls down in one go.


Anyway, for that special case, he will take it in barter mode, after you approve the warning he ain't paying you squat for it.

My favorite was the line in the old INT table that said something like 5 -- Here or lower, character can only be a fighter.


Then there's this fun with Google.

Which is reasonable since it is objectively not "Artificial Intelligence"

It's literally just a bot that runs pre-scripted code.

That's all current "AI" is, in its various forms.

It's only being called "AI" because it tricks people (Notably, investors) into thinking it's actual AI, but it's not.

This isn't bad in of itself (Outside the economic concerns of this investor hype, with it massively impacting prices of computer components and causing lots of Data Centres to get built which suck up all the water and use tons of electricity)

The main controversy surrounding "AI" comes from the way that the current fad iterations function. Which is by training a dataset to regurgitate to users.

For LLMs this means that it will often confidently state wrong information making it a terrible source of data. With the worst aspect being its programmed "Agreableness" where it reinforces particularly dangerous ideas (Like pushing someone towards terrorism or self-deletion - Things that have literally happened)

For Gen-AI this means it goes around and steals tons of real artists work in order to copy/paste it into the stuff it "Produces". Thus not only is its usage tied directly to replacing artists, it's also outright plagiarising them to do so.

As one of them 90's kids, the earliest I can remember is a simple DOS based racing game.
A little bit later, mostly settled on RTS as a genre, having spent time with the more classic RTSs (like Dune 2 or Red Alert 2), but ended up spending years with a more obscure game known as Outpost 2. To the point where I had a whole high-school project centered around making a map mod for it where I implemented the board game of monopoly using the in-game chat to hook into to supplement the player input that would need to go into the code in an easy enough format. All with the help of the small community that kept that title alive through the 2000s.
Never was a genre purist, as some other titles of the time caught my attention, like the Descent games, Hellbender, can't deny having played Doom 2 and some other of those early titles where so many more things could fly in terms of games as they do today. BG1 and 2 were also in there somewhere.

So, factually, I can't actually name a title that made me a gamer. It was more the exposure to games as a whole. In fact, to even list my whole repertoire of games played to date would be largely impossible, as I'd have to count the titles from before I had access to legally purchasing games. A short teaser would include stuff like The Incredible Machine (3, maybe), Empire Earth, Fire Emblem titles (5 through 7, really), even the Sims 2 and 3, diablo 1 and 2, emperor: battle for dune, C&C games down to Generals, the aforementioned titles in this post and on and on. Admittedly, my young adult life was vastly spent with an inordinate amount of play time in Path of Exile, but by this point in time, I have a steam history can rely on for a recap. Prior to that is purely memory-based and we all know how reliable that can be.

I'm not sure how much of a stretch it would be to say that if my Steam library consists of some 200 games from about 2010 onwards, there could easily be another 1-2 hundred titles that I've spent *some* time with at some point prior.

To be fair, I do have clinical ADHD and each game can only hold my attention for *so* long, depending on how much of said game there is to learn and toy around with. I will also not hide from the fact that I had ample time to spend on playing games during a decade-long depression cycle where vegetable wasting daylight playing vidja games would not be a stretch to describe my functionality back then.

It's a little difficult to convey that notion that "even the greatest heroes can end up adventuring with mismatched socks", when the socks may be mentioned once, but the focus will remain on the heroic deeds anyway.

Highlighting hubris is indeed a theme we could do more with, especially given nowadays. Grew kind of attached to a simple quote "The road to hell is paved with good intentions", as it is a simple form for many meanings, ranging from faking good intentions to actual good intentions that went too far and still got one to the same destination. It also includes good intentions that were only perceived as being good, when ,in fact, they were kind of destructive. Like overbearing.
I remember Kreia from Kotor 2, who was mostly lecturing on how both good and evil are largely misguided and their intent can end up causing the opposite they set out for. Of course, this does involve the temporization factor.

But overall, actually making a game where a certain decision earlier on in the story actually leads to a cascading effect where the characters will not even end up in the same locations due to the stuff set in motion by said decision presents the conundrum: how do you make alternate routes that reflect something that happened earlier on whilst also somehow guaranteeing the main plot is followed and the character(s) still feel like they had freedom of choice. But it tends to just be that all roads lead to plot (and Rome).

All we have thus far is the reveal trailer. All the temporization we have is of the TBD, TBA, whenever time frame.
I would hazard at least a couple of years to release and dev diaries in Larian style were more a near-release kind of thing, IIRC.

Whilst the argument is ongoing, my 2 cents:

Just about any long-lasting game series will suffer from human lifespan, exponential growth and the general lack of discussion withing the frame of time relevant to each entry.
To sum up: Within 30 years, we've gone from CRT monitors to LED-based monitors, pixels that you could see with the naked eye to pixels that you might see with a magnifier glass, etc, etc, since that's just how fast the hardware technology has evolved.
Now speaking of the Divinity series, I have personally played them all. Even if the order was more: Divinity 2: Dragon Knight Saga -> Divine Divinity -> Beyond Divinity -> Divinity: Dragon Commander -> D:OS 1 -> D:OS2. The catch would be that Dragon Commander was not even out yet by the time I went through the first 3 titles. Nowadays, I would find it hard to go back to the originals, even if simply because my eyes can only take so much strain nowadays. But if we're to talk about Divinity (series) as a whole, ignoring the early titles that are still cannon to the universe may be unwise.

But then think of each of the titles within their own time frame. Larian has always gone as far they they could push given the technical limitations (as well as studio size and costs) of the times each of those entries were released.
Casual reminder that both D:OS titles were quite literally all-in bargains for Larian.

What remained consistent throughout was the good old Larian flavor. Talking with an immortal lich you're about to fight? Sneak in a quip or two, get a matching retort from the lich, making the dialogue feel way less stiff. Because the more notable characters, at least, have some dimension to them. Bellegar, the mad mage who speaks only in rhymes? Still shows some method to his madness when he actually helps the player character. Whatever the form their titles took, I could never fail to appreciate the Larian...ness(?) sprinkled here and there.
The other aspect that always drew my attention is the art direction. While I am auditory and typically fail to grasp visuals that easily, the sound design and the music kept stirring me onwards as I played each title. RIP sir Kirill, your work will be remembered, but that is not to belittle sir Borislav's work.

All in all, words alone will hardly do justice to Larian's own legacy and it's that very legacy that keeps me coming back. Now, if only the creature mechanic from Divinity 2 (not D:OS2) would sneak its way back into the series. And on that note, what wizards of the universe will grace us this time? :p

Ah yeah. In addition, taking photo in photo-mode, now takes 3-4 seconds delay before the snap. Previously it was instant.