Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Did anyone genuinely enjoy the "Evil" Route?

I abhor Astarion's voice actor. He is feigning to affect Tim Curry with an atrocious southern accent, like they wanted Gabriel Knight with a "bit of sass".

He is disgusting, and wholly off putting in every mannerism. I kill him on sight out of principle. /spit

Astarion's accent is not Tim Curry's or 'Southern'. It is British, with a nod to the upper-middle- or upper-class accent of the likes of Terry Thomas and Leslie Phillips.

Astarion's voice is silky smooth

Who hasn't. We can't fault Larian for it but it definitely factors into my decision making as a player that in every CRPG besides Tyranny the gods are tangible beings who you can and often will usurp for their power. Aethas especially in PoE2 made followers of gods in these settings look like deluded morons.

Tyranny at best is Neutral. If you take evil decisions (and there are a couple) you basically lose out chunk of story and get bad ending (like you have to basically skip the entire DLC if you are lawful evil?). The worse case of this is with a vendor in prologue. If you follow lawful evil you miss out entire tree of skills. You can be devious here and there but Crusader King beats it by a long mile for sure lmao.

Ah yes, I forgot that being in the Oldwalls was illegal. You are there for half of the game lol. The Bastard's Wound sucked, but I would still argue that basegame Tyranny has the best CRPG writing in terms of player agency.

I'll concur that writing evil is harder. Moreover, other than Kotor, I don't remember any game that had any actual evil path. moreover, properly defining an evil path is hard. Even the drow city in bg2 and Korriban were not "evil paths" per se, but a mandatory parts of their respective games that had an option for evil flavour, but playing evil in them didn't change the story drastically.

With all that in mind, I think the fact is that Larian didn't have to tell the story in the way they did. It is much more difficult to create two storylines than creating one storyline with good/evil nuances. But if they did, I expect the same quality of writing from both.

In D&D I absolutely hate Lawful Good characters because they are REALLY inflexable. It makes it a drag, cannot steal or do anything to forward your cause without some snarky whiney lecture. The "evil" route would be to kill EVERYTHING and nick all their shit. You would have figured a way to kill the Druids and Tieflings probably by setting up BOTH sides for heavy losses then killing the leftovers. Evil characters are out for themselves, tadpole or no. The second an "evil" character figured out they cannot get help off either party the gloves would have come off OR they would just move on if they couldn't be arsed.

There is no "evil route". If you pick "the path of least resistance" that makes you smart/lazy not evil.

And which path would you consider to be "the path of least resistance" in this game currently?

I agree with you about hating Lawful Good Sometimes what they do I consider evil.

I do not think you are seeing evil as anything other than Chaotic Evil however. Sometimes evil will do good things to gain benefits, sometimes they just simply don't care. Sometimes it is even better to keep people alive, most of the time someone with nothing left to lose is much more dangerous than someone with hope who you can keep in line. There are many other things an intelligent evil character would do before murdering everyone (ofc this is also an acceptable route, just pointless.) Not sure what you mean with "path of least resistance."

As a side quest - I collect all the human skulls i find in the world and on corpses and take them back to camp for decoration. The blood is still on the ground from my party - and it's starting to feel cozy.

And besides you meet evil characters in the game you don't even notice they are. Like how many players assume the flaming fist are lawful evil mercenaries after they meet them in the game?

They are? I thought they were like the Order of the Flaming Rose from TW1.

It was mentioned somewhere that the Flaming Fist extort people for a living (a book? don't remember).

But they're saving people from burning buildings in this game. Will they show up elsewhere and be evil later?

Weren't those guy lawful evil too? Pretty sure they even attack you in the neutral route, while the elves (chaotic neutral/evil) are chiller



If they are lawful evil, that's just fullfilling their contract. To be honest i imagine most mercenary groups with little qualms about their contractors would be lawful evil as organizations

I SERVE THE FLAMING FIST!

Uh Evil are they?
"The Flaming Fist is a well-established mercenary organization that brings law to the northern half of the Sword Coast." So they are mercenaries yes, but are supposed to bring law to the Sword Coast, though I gues no one said Law had to be good!

https://www.ign.com/articles/baldurs-gate-3-early-access-changes-player-data-feedback-larian

okay so this article is probably gonna pop up in more places in the forum soon, but I want to address something specific Sven talks about in it:

the bad news is that yeah, the evil path does feel like someone was forced to write it. The good news is that it seems like something they really care about and might work on improving

Ransacking the druid grove gives you tons of stuff and is easy to solo.

But yea, Minthara needs a more proper introduction and possibly a new path should be made from where we meet Lae'zel to the Goblins in the village that we can trick with our tadpole. Making both sides equally straightforward to run into and if we go straight to the goblin camp we are directed to Minthara who needs help finding her scouts and doesn't want to send out anymore of her own people.

Then you can go help the goblins kill the adventurers (who in this situation wouldn't be at the gates yet) that were with Halsin looking for Nightsong and bring back the goblins, earning their trust.

From there we have an actual starting narrative that is at least a bit more equivalent to the "good" side. I wish Larian would hire some more writers it really is needed to flesh out a game with so much choice in such a deep and established world. DM me

I think instead of "evil" people should more write "machiavellian", because Larian has a habit of writing comically crazy evil characters that no one would be sane enough to ally with. Truly powerful evil characters would abuse advantages to their own goal, that is including helping people for their own gain, murder hobo is just stupid.