Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback The "evil path" needs A LOT of improvement.

Evil path is so much worse than the good path. You lose two companions



For comparison, what the Lich mythic path gives to me on Pathfinder : Wrath of the Righteous?

• The ability to reanimate dead during the crusade(HoMM3 style which is very fun).
• A undead "pet" which can be upgrated into a caster
• A Lich separated spellbook + ability to channel negative energy, healing my undead army and damaging enemies.
• Unique spells and SLA for lich which can't be obtained on normal spellbook
• The ability to change my damage type from any elemental spell into negative
• A Ziggurat where undeads are made
• Undeads roaming my city loyal to me.

I din't ascended to lich since stopped playing on ch 4 since I don't get to spoil myself that much. And a amazing adventure with a lot of side quests. Places to explore and etc but I will not spoil a game on beta here. Only say that the Demon mythic path is also amazing. I an only lv 13 exploiter wizard/4 mythic at moment on my demon path on the beginning of chapter 3, so I can't detail much more. Only say that I loved to encounter Nocticula.

The evil path on D&D games which offers that path always was great. The soul eater on NWN2:MoTB was amazing. On base nwn2, you could ally yourself with the final boss and murder your party members. My very first RPG, Might & Magic VII - For Blood and Honor allowed a cool evil path with dragon "hirelings", lichdoom and unique dark magic skills.

If you are losing 3 companions on mythic path, you should get a lot of power in return. Maybe a wand of finger of death, which can only be used once per day, at end of chapter 1. "but it is op", no, finger of death on Baldur's Gate 2 OHK anyone which fails a save. Pathfinder 1e nerfed it to mere 10 damage per caster level(200 at lv 20) and 5e nerfed that spell even more. You need to give a lot of power to the player to compensate all lost and risks of a evil path.

A D&D game doesn't need evil path to be good. Dark Sun : Wake of The Ravager is my favorite turn based D&D game and has no option to play as a evil character.

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TL;DR - Swen encouraged people to play evil. And evil path is the worst of any D&D game.

Actually you only lose Wyll and then eventually Halsin. At least in my playthrough. I also got to nail a companion on the shrine to the absolute in my camp. Cinematic didnt leave much to the imagination.


Keep in mind that if you go the Evil path that the content that mirrors the Underdark ( Good Path ) is not yet available in EA. Hopefully the next content to be released will be the cursed lands so that both paths will be complete to the towers. [/quote]



That is simply your opinion. Many like playing Evil. Many like playing good. Many like playing both simply to see all the different story arcs that exist. Having one single story arc kills replayability.

Spoilers...........

This might be language block ...
But can anyone help me locate any sugestion in that text? O_o
Since i dont see anything pointed out as wrong, nor sugested how to do it better ... just list of different games. O_o

[/quote]

So what? Pathfinder: Wrath of The righteous is in CLOSE beta and the game is amazing following the demon or lich mythic path. You can't fully ascend into lichdoom but you have a lot of cool evil content.


Not having a evil path >>>> having the worst evil path ever.

Can you name one D&D game with worse evil path than this?


"If you are losing 3 companions on mythic path, you should get a lot of power in return."

That is my point. All other games with evil mythic path, offers cool stuff. BG3 offers none.

You lose a lot on BG3 and gains nothing.

And does those other games offers cool stuff right away, or in longer perspective? :P
Since, you know, this is not even whole Act 1. O_o

I was kinda confused by messing tiefling x goblins conflict ... and tadpole x true soul.
Those are also two different stories.

Well, this games also don't start with you escaping a spelljammer mindflayer ship on prologue and finding wizards with magical netherese nukes and entering the underdark on chapter 1. Baldur's Gate 1 which is the most low level of the games, give some evil companions relative early on. And on Wrath of the Rithgeous, you can start the path of lich on chapter 2(but becoming a fully fledged lich only on ch 5)

Wich all leaves us with single certainity ... every game is different.
Therefore there isnt much reasons to point out what was possible in other games.

Yep. Every game is different but BG3 is the worst of then all.

The losing companions thing is really grim for the evil path IMO. Particularly if you are keeping some of the datamined stuff in mind:


Plus, you lose out on Gale and Shadowheart's romance options if you play evil. If you are playing evil, it looks like a distinct possibility that you could be reduced to less than a full party of characters before you even head out for Moonrise towers. That's not even taking into account that the player themselves might be playing one of the origins characters. Taking it to the extremes, if you are playing as , it looks possible that you could easily end up with only one companion, and one romance option.

And for what? The only real tradeoff you get for siding with the Tieflings is that Minthara dies, but Larian hasn't even confirmed that there will be non-origins party members yet, so we just can't take for granted that she'll be available to plug into the hole where our missing companions were.

I do find it odd that we don't have a companion here that's actively encouraging us to go with the Absolute. Especially since Larian has said that they gave us the evil companions first to encourage us to go the evil route. Yet none of the companions really seem keen on going the evil route. Based on what Larian has said, it seems fair to assume we're not going to be getting a companion that's okay with the evil route in the future, so that leaves me feeling pretty...I don't know about the choice.

I definitely am not a fan of the evil route's execution, but in terms of the way it interacts with companions, it feels weird to me and seems like a poor choice on their part not to have a companion advocating for this route. They don't even have to know anything more about the cult than we do, they could just look at it and think "yeah, those guys have the right idea." Instead all our most evil companions seem like they would range from against allying with the cult to just ambivalent about it.

that is simply your own opinion on has absolutely no factual information. If you think the game is so superior to BG3 then I feel I must ask why are you here bragging about how cool another game is?


I for one felt that the Evil path was great albeit unfinished. As I pointed out not all content for the evil path has been released yet so doing full scale comparisons is unfair at this point. I also pointed out that depending on the choices you made the losses are not as much as you stated. I for one only lost Wyll and Halsin but gained another that is not yet implemented into EA. so overall that is really a -1 to total companions not a -3 that you are trying to suggest but again that may be because of your choices.


So if I understand this correctly, you are comparing a game that is in Early Access to a game that is in full on Beta and has immensely more content opened...... and complaining about the lack of content?

And before you keep regurgitating your same complaint about losing 3 companions please actually read carefully what others are trying to say. As I have pointed out multiple times now you lost 3 because of the choices you made. I lost 1 essentially because of the choices I made. So stop blaming the consequences of YOUR actions on the game. If you want to discuss this then I am sure the community is all for it, but if you are just going to argue and trash the game because of the actions you are choosing then... well... I wont have much else to say and I am willing to bet not many others will either.

Actually if I recall correctly I believe it has been said that there are several more companions yet to be implemented. I am guessing at this point they are not Origin Characters?

Yeah, I'm kinda getting Fallout New Vegas 'Ceaser's Legion' vibes from siding with the Goblins right now. That game also had a problem with it's 'evil route/faction' being ostensibly equal to the NCR, but in practice not so much. There really wasn't much reason to join them compared to the other options to begin with, and none of the companions would advocate for them (hell, most of them hated the legion)...which didn't help to present them as a viable option to the player, outside the novelty perhaps.


There are three more origin characters yet to be added. That's probably what you are thinking of-Larion hasn't said that Minthara, for ex- or any of the other npcs we meet will be recruitable. It's important to note that (as Gray Ghost pointed out) The five companions we have now are the evil and neutral ones. We know exactly who two of the three remaining ones are-and from what we know, they aren't naturally the sort to join up with goblins and drow to massacre civilians (and it's seemingly confirmed that one of them will leave if you fight for the goblins....consider that the other is noneother than . However lopsided things seem to be playing through CH1 as an evil character right now-in terms of losing out on companions and romance options, it's only going to get more lopsided as more content is released if Larion stays on its present course.

Just here to nod in agreement that Evil path needs testing. :]

Would you really expect some companion to say something like:
"Ok look ... i know that we dont agree with each other allways, i know that one of us is offended by the very existence of litteraly anything else than herself, and i know that another one of us is zealot that sworn to destroy anything that is anyhow tied to Mind Flayers and allready tryed to attack us bcs we have this tadpoles in our heads ... but how about join this odd cult of Absolute, that you all just agreed to wipe out?
They seem to do the right thing."

Of course all this is purely based on the fact that we do not know where the story is going, on either side, more so on the evil side. Right now Larian could be sitting back and giggling because they know what twists and turns are awaiting us and we are over here beating war drums about something they have already planned for.

Completely agree with this. Astarion as a companion comes the closest to this, as he likes the perks of the tadpole and therefore would rather keep it and control it, but I don't believe he speaks to the Absolute route directly. Even then, he is only one companion.

Right now it feels like they made the evil characters before or without thought towards how the evil path is set up. We really should have a more even split not just along the good/evil axis but also between companions interested in removing vs using/controlling the tadpole, considering the evil path seems to be focused on the latter.

Yeah, I totally would. They thought that this path was worth encouraging players to follow, and you can still follow it with Lae'zel in the party it seems. Astarion has voiced his desire to learn to control the tadpole while-theoretically-in Lae'zel's presence. And on a meta level, this is a major branch of the story, as far as I can tell, and to have no character advocating for it is really weird. In games like this, you always have at least one character actively in favour of the evil route. Astarion is close, but seems he has at least some degree of disdain for the group, from what I've seen. If they really want to be concerned with story cohesion then just have the character approach you privately in camp or something like that. Larian is not afraid of having companions not like each other, clearly. And it could be a case of making the character who advocates for the Absolute (who doesn't even have to already be a member) and Lae'zel mutually exclusive party members. Despite your cartoonish example, within the logic of the game making this very obvious suggestion work is about as easy as anything else they could implement.

I always found the original Larian claim that these were just the "evil" companions dubious at best. They seem to be "morally grey" at worst.
Most likely just a last minute attempt to throw the fanbase a bone, because they wouldn't quit bitching about how their companions were being mean to them.
"Yeah, yeah, those guys are totally evil. Don't listen to them. The nice ones are coming someday".

That said, maybe being evil does not need to overlap with being a psychopath and a self-harming idiot? Because these would be the only reasons to "join the Absolute side" currently.