Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Story & Character Discussion Finally able to articulate one of the biggest flaws with the main story/writing

...apart from them falling apart (pun intended) in Act 2, that is.

It's the inability to stick to the theme it's trying to embody, and even downright contradicting it.

At least in EA and from what can be seen with the companions in the main game, it can be argued that the throughline the game was probably intended or at least attempted to go with were it not watered down in the end is the loss of self and the fear of that happening. The idea that you are a host to something that will, if untreated, erase you as a person and remove you from existence while your body continues on, now hosting a cosmic aberration. At least that is what the Early Access Daisy interactions and the comments by the companions on their illithid powers, together with the implications that using tadpoles "takes something from you that you'll never get back" have been implying.

As for the companions, we have:

- Lae'zel whose entire worldview crumbles as she discovers the truth about her people (combined with the tadpole),
- Shadowheart whose past has been forcefully erased and whose whole persona is an implanted lie (combined with the tadpole),
- Gale whose pursuit of Mystra and magical omnipotence turned him into a walking disaster waiting to happen (combined with the tadpole),
- Wyll who took a pact which turned him into an exile from his own city and family (honestly, his plot was framed a lot better in the EA, what with him actually having a lot more meaningful conflict with Mizora seemingly, and yes, combined with the tadpole),
- Karlach, turned into a living weapon and forced to fight for her archdevil mistress (combined with the tadpole),
- Astarion, effectively enslaved for two centuries and his live self all but dead (combined with the tadpole),
- Minthara, whose memories were deliberately suppressed so that she follows Orin's and the Absolute's commands without question (combined with the tadpole),
- ...and Jaheira, Halsin, and Minsc, mostly for fanservice. Ahem.

The problem arises with the whole "combined with the tadpole" aspect of it. Instead of it being a threat and a risk to use and something to remove at all costs, it's ultimately presented as... a source of cool superpowers. Rather than have the characters either hang on to what they know they are and maintain every last aspect of their selves - or give up and allow their being to be overwritten by the combination of a tadpole and Netherese magic, they instead have a single rough night and any threat from the tadpole is otherwise neglected. And then comes the Emperor, who basically represents the contradiction in the flesh:

- No, apparently becoming an illithid isn't an irreversible erasure of a person who was the host for the tadpole, despite the game itself mentioning that very fact at several points (Lae'zel and Withers come to mind right away). You get even more cool superpowers!

- No, you don't cease to exist as soon as you transform, if you have a "strong personality(tm)", you get to keep your memories and your self, now with a "superior(tm)" physical form to boot!

- No, why would you shun becoming a mind flayer, never mind the fact that you will have to conceal yourself if you hope to interact with the surface society in any way and sustain yourself on brains (obviously ethically harvested from "criminals", forget about what makes the criminal in the first place) while no longer having neither your mind (no matter what the Emperor says) nor your body!

- Apparently tadpoled people can just change at the drop of the hat by really wanting to, and even non-tadpoled ones (Orpheus), even though the process was supposedly suppressed! Hell, the plot point about "only a mind flayer can counter the Netherbrain" would have worked so much better if the game actually presented becoming a mind flayer as a genuine horrible outcome and clearly displayed your character no longer being themselves when they do transform, being an actual sacrifice for the greater good that you either make, or let the Emperor manipulate you to the bitter end. Or make unwillingly transforming an actual risk and an actual threat when facing the Netherbrain, having the "strong personality(tm)" be a way to offset changing in the first place, either through power or through all the bonds you are allegedly building with your companions throughout the game. Have Daisy back and make his/her pull (and through it, the Netherbrain's) ever stronger the more you succumbed to the tadpole, offsetting the powers you got with having to reap the consequences of abusing them... but also giving you a way to actually overpower the leash if you well and truly commited to being an illithid hybrid or something.

This risks turning into a rant more and more with each sentence, so I'll stop here, but I am curious as to what others think regarding this point and what their ideas for fixing the plot might be.

This reads like a sound analysis. But I fear 'fixing the plot' is out of the question at this point. What should be possible is for Larian to learn from their mistakes, for their next games. They should make damn sure that they have a good backbone for the story in place, next time. It should be good enough to withstand and enable all story branches that are added, changed and removed later on.

Nothing will change in their next game with all the simps praising BG3. What BG3 has shown is that you do not need a good story for RPGs. Just pack waifus and genital customizations in and you are done.

Don't forget bestiality. What a world we live in today!

While I agree with your conclusion at many levels I think it is a bit harsh. BG3 has a decent story, the base premise is actually kind of interesting, The issue is they abandon that base premise by the end of act one. This is a lesson they should take to heart going forward, stay with the plot. Throwing curves is all well and good but outright ignoring or abandoning the basic premise of the story is not a plot twist, it is just bad writing.

BG3 did get me back to my first love in computer gaming, RPGs. Not the new single character first/third person crap, but the group dynamic deeper game. This has been wonderful for me to enjoy but has really shown the flaws of BG3 glaringly to me. Right now I am knee deep into Kingmaker. BG3 wins on pure polish no doubt. However when directly compared to Kingmaker I feel like BG3 is a mile wide and 1" deep. So much effort was put into "relationships" that the story feels like it suffered for it. While Kingmaker might not have the romancing of BG3 I still find myself invested in some companions. Linzi is the little sister always following you around, getting in the way and yet you love her dearly. Valerie is a steadfast friend that you know will ALWAYS have your back, so you make sure you always have hers. Tristian is the eternal optimist that annoys as much as he uplifts you. Just looking at those three you might not see any sex interests but you already see way more depth of relationships.

Larian, it appears with hindsight, took the easy way out for this. They made use of the Baldur's Gate name and used the existing successful game mechanics and then crafted around those things. Instead of delving deep on the main storyline they use distractions with relationships (sexual not deeply meaningful) to try and gloss over the story inconsistencies.

Even thought I am going hard at them, I think Larian crafted a solid game. Was it worth of GOTY awards, well look at what it had to go against. Let's face it they did not have stiff competition this year. Starfield and Diablo both FLOPPED. In context of this year I think yes they deserved the awards they go.

My hope and prayer however is that Larian is self aware enough to know they can and should do better. That they can move forward and take this attention and yes cash to craft better. My concern is that you, Ixal, have summed up the lesson Larian and others will take from this and we will see our beloved genre damaged as others pile on the easy street bandwagon to create tripe.

No imo its not harsh. I do not look at the basic premise but at the final, complete product and it is lacking. Especially as story and writing are the most important components of an rpg.
And I do not think BG3 is solid either with the bugs, the unfinished act 3 and the cumbersome mechanics and imo should not have gotten GOTY awards.

I agree with a large majority with what you have said, however I would argue that while the tadpoles potentially represented much more of a threat in EA, due to the nature of being unable to see the outcomes of our actions past Act 1, I can’t really agree that that was compelling evidence to support the tadpoles overall as a better narrative device back then simply because we had no clue where the plot was going (and likely never will). I feel that it was equally flawed in part because Daisy had just about as many problems as the Emperor, but simply in a different vein.

Did it feel more compelling? Perhaps, but I think that was simply because we don’t know what would have happened. It did feel a lot darker and more foreboding in regards to a loss of self, but again, not knowing the outcome of the story overall allows us to speculate to heights that would have still likely been unachievable. Obviously I’m not saying what we got in the end over EA was an improvement in this specific regard, merely that we can only really speculate with what we did get and cherry pick the potential that EA represented.

Also, and I could be reading the plot and writing entirely wrong (my memory is a little fuzzy due to losing a large majority of my save files by accident), so feel free to correct, but isn’t it suggested or outright mentioned that Mindflayer Tav is merely a facsimile of the original? Isn’t it just a copy that happens to have their memories? I guess that’s another argument of whether someone really is still themselves after such a transformation, but still.

I agree with @Ixal, and certainly also the OP's analysis. Not only is BG3 such a poorly made game, but even worse is that Larian will not improve/change it's game-designing ways ever now because of all the utterly un-analytical accolades heaped upon them by a sycophant gaming news media. The lesson from BG3 is: 40% pretty cinematics, 40% gratuitous sex and nudity, 20% everything else. This is the game-making formula that sells. But I remain hopeful that at least some of the more serious RPG makers will decline to follow this model, even if that means making RPGs that sell to only a smaller (and more discerning) audience.

Not necessarily. I would argue that the core of a RPG is role playing, as it says on the box. In my opinion, immersive world building and character building are the most important elements. In theory, an RPG could do without an overarching story, if it weren't for the game needing to end at some point. I greatly enjoyed some of the Fallout games, just because of the superb world building. I remember roaming about and shooting things, but I don't remember much of the overall story arc.

That said, if there is to be an overall story arc, it is the developer's duty to do it well.

Look, we got bear sex, brothels and the horniest companions Faerûn has to offer -- what else do you want?!? /s

Kidding aside, I appreciate the analysis of these posts. I disliked the Illithid/Tadpole plot from my very first play, but I couldn't quite explain why; I just hated it. Threads like this actually help illuminate where some of the problem areas can arise.


It seems like this goes along with the random shifts in tone as well. Is this a fantasy story? Science Fiction? Comedy? Cartoon? BG3 never made up its mind. You can mix these elements, certainly, but if there is no core 'feel' or theme to anchor the proceedings, then you end up with a junk drawer of misaligned plot moments that won't feel as meaningful or coherent as they could.

Forty percent sex and nudity? Really? I would estimate the time spent on sex in my playthroughs at a few minutes. Less than one percent. And that small time happened to be nature calling, so not gratuitous at all.
The amount of nudity … well that can vary. It is possible to have a high percentage of that, if you choose to display camp clothes and then remove the camp clothes. But that is up to the player.

Agreed. I think @Brainer's analysis is a good one but I feel uncomfortable when the conversation shifts into sex negative territory. I liked the romances - indeed I think the romances are the reason to play the game the main plot just is deeply flawed. And yes, I even liked that you could modify genitals. I mean my toon hasn't bathed in a month why would she take time to shave her nethers?

The sex is not to blame for the problems in the end game.


I fear you may be right but some small part of me hopes for a definitive edition or a director's cut.

Another optimistic part of me hopes that other companies will the real lesson BG3 - if you pack it with content, if you deliver everything but the kitchen sink fans will forgive anything. Even the deeply flawed "Orpheus is free" moment.

And, yes, if I'm being honest I never liked the whole mind flayer hook because I came to the game with prejudices from table top. I played lots and lots 2e and a little 3.0 and I never liked that that one type of save or suck monster needed expensive supplements to play properly and that they had powers that couldn't be countered by spells. And I just don't like body horror - extracting US makes me sick to my stomach.

I remember when I first saw trailers for this game and saw mindflayers involved, one of my thoughts was "A Baldur's Gate game is going to focus on the illithid? That feels... strange. What about the Bhaalspawn plot?" and that feeling definitely came back big time in Act 3.

During the early game (early Act 1), I was actually starting to get into the illithid plot. Having only met Shadowheart and Lae'zel, both of whom had personal objectives closely tied to the illithid and the strange artifact related to them, on top of the shared goal of getting un-infected, it felt like maybe this game did actually have a focus, and the BG brand was just going to be about this being a new threat to the city and familiar locations, not a continued storyline. I even liked the way the party's attempt to seek out a healer for their own problems led to tripping over the tension of the Emerald Grove, which itself turned out to partly be because the cult of the unknowingly infected were being drawn to nearby ruins. Back at this stage of the game, I was genuinely very into it. (For one thing, the fact that our characters, thinking they were of sound mind, were going to head to the exact same place as the clearly-influenced cultists, was what I thought would be a nice little touch of ambiguity about how "in control" our characters really were).

But then... cracks started forming. All of the companions being double-cursed in various ways (Astarion is a vampire, Gale has his orb, Karlach has her engine, Wyll has a pact) seemed a little... distracting. Not too much, maybe, but aside from Lae'zel and initially Shadowheart, I had a big feeling of "Wait, but how did this bring you on a collision course with the tadpole plot?" Silly me, I guess -- I thought each of these characters had a reason to already be seeking out the illithid, or the same ruins as the cult, etc., and had happened to get captured in the process. But I did enjoy most of the companions, so it if their connection to the main plot was a little tenuous... fine. Honestly, I sometimes feel like being too focused can make a story feel tiring, so having some elements designed to add variety and make the world feel a bit larger than just the main plot isn't the worst thing (It still didn't feel like the right way to set it up, but not everything has to be perfect).

Once the plot involving the Dead Three came into play, though... It honestly just feels like a mess. Suddenly the Absolute doesn't feel like the grand villain they were made out to be, but we have so little time invested into setting up the Dead Three that they don't, either -- -especially since the final boss fight is against the brain, and the two Chosen in Act 3 are sort of just like side plots you have to work through to get to the brain... And then Orpheus was maybe supposed to be a big deal, but I mainly just associate him with a single companion (Lae'zel)?

I still enjoyed the game, but the longer it went on, the more it shifted from "Actually invested in the main story" to a bit more of "bag of little substories, some of which I greatly enjoy and some where I just kinda shrugged and moved on."

Using tadpoles / becoming a mind flayer is strongly advertised by the story but contradicts role playing: you build up a character just to erase it again later. This is a very risky approach for a RPG and you'd need a strong story to hold this together.

Yeah, I'm very much the same. It's amazing how this game manages to succeed with me in spite of the main plot and the various other elements I really dislike. (Haven't gone near Us since that first terrible experience in Early Access...)

The Absolute is more interesting than the Dead Three.

I maintain that the biggest issue in Act III is that the feeling and mood falls away. The city, while great in a lot of ways, doesn't manage to come alive in a cultural sense.

But that said, the game does seem to lose something once you're confronted with the truth about the Absolute. I almost wish the Dead Three were the pawns, were the ones who had been initially tadpoled and were now being controlled.

I would posit that anyone who has ever had an animal infected by parasites will be automatically turned off by the use of any tadpoles. I've also had the misfortune of being infected with parasites myself in the past. It is nothing but a disgusting business.

I will always play through as not wanting to touch those things with a ten foot pole. (I even kill the one running away from of Edowin's body.)

When I found out about the game in EA I wrote it off completely once I saw the cinematic. I'm only here becaue the game was gifted to me and yes, I am still enjoying it. But yeah, the illithid storyline was incredibly risky and it needed a very skillful writing team to pull off. I do not feel that Larian has this team. My hope is that they will in the future and that the success of BG3 does not make them lazy.

People do know there are more gaming companies on this planet than just Blizzard, Bethesda and Larian, right? Because I keep seeing this and it always looks like a very, very weird thing to say with a straight face. Octopath Traveler 2, Spiderman 2, Alan Wake 2, RE4R, Dead Space R, Hi-Fi Rush, the list goes on. 2023 has been a record year for the most top rated games in twenty years: https://www.axios.com/2023/10/31/2023-best-reviewed-games. The main difference is the same reason why I shrug and give the lion's share of the 'blame' for GOTY on IGN who created the 'underdog showing AAA how it's done' story out of thin air with misleading and at times falsified reporting, which is one of if not the biggest reason the game got the attention it did.

Thread tax: Yes, but also no and also kind of. Multiple themes, switching themes, transforming or subverting themes are not in and of themselves hallmarks of poor writing. It takes time and has to be set up. As with most things, it's not the premise, it's the execution. Sticking to a theme still won't help cut corners, lazily written outs, retcons or plot holes. It's the symptom of the disease, and the disease is everything regarding the main plot was not planned out very well. What you are describing is 'set up with no payoff' paired with 'attempting to pay off on zero set up.'

Establishing the rules the setting runs on, or on having some kind of authoritative knowledge fails because the game doesn't know what rules its running on. The mindlfayer question, does it erase you or not? Setting up logical through lines fails because the story feels like it was written by the seat of someone's used underwear. You can't follow your progress on a map, who did what when is confused, why doesn't X know Y person, why didn't Z do F, etc because no one was interested in building a *world.* It's all handwaved at whim, often defaulting to Rule of Cool to get out of hard questions. Which leaves the pay off falling flat with the slightest bit of critical thinking. It's not a theme problem, the story as a whole is not *coherent* which is much bigger, imo.

Let's not forget System Shock Remake which every big outlet seems to have forgotten about the existence of...


It's not that, it's specifically that the game seems (seemed) to have an idea behind the plot but it's not even subverted but outright flushed down the toilet because they couldn't bother with how they've handled the Emperor and the tadpole powers. A really sloppy mechanical implementation has managed to heavily cripple the plot, or vice versa. It's like if the whole spirit hunger mechanic from NWN2: MotB was just a source of flashy abilities and not a terrible curse that would irreversibly corrupt the PC if they gave in to it.

To add: there is a fundamental problem regardless of the sauce it's under, and it's that the tadpoles as an issue are completely divorced from the companions' storylines and really the entire plot outside of moments it remembers that they exist. We have plots like, again, NWN2: MotB where every character embodied some aspect of what it was about (dreams, mechanics of souls, spirits and their way of existence, faith or lack thereof...), and Torment, and, hell, even Larian's own previous game to some extent.

In EA every companion's dream person was allegedly deeply tied to them and their insecurities, weaknesses, and hidden desires (for a custom PC those amounted to power and hanky-panky, with any hopes that it gets in any way developed dying together with Daisy). Lae'zel's was Vlaakith, Shadowheart's was her old (boy)friend (who in the main game seems to have been turned into Nocturne...?), Gale's was Mystra and so on. Given the premise of the "loss of self" and everyone having a moment where they are inches away from their worldview or their grasp on themselves falling apart, wouldn't it have made perfect sense for said desires and weaknesses to be used as a way for the tadpole/Absolute to try to sway them over? Lae'zel could become the ultimate warrior of her people, Shadowheart could get revenge on Shar's cult and Shar herself... Cue having to convince them otherwise or watch them succumb, and it resulting in a split of loyalties down the line when the time comes to pick the side.

As for the lack of planning, it's hardly the first time in the past 10 or so years that Larian seem to rewrite their games almost from the ground up rather late into development. Dragon Commander was supposed to be a sequel to Flames of Vengeance originally, and its final form suffered from a lot of cuts and awkwardly stitching together what was there (the final act and the endings were VERY underwhelming and underdeveloped). D:OS1 was meant to be about the origins of the Black Ring and Zandalor (and, I assume, delving into the mage wars described in the older games' lore) before effectively becoming the reboot for the setting and turning into Source this, Void that. The second game's Eternals were orignally the Raanaar from Beyond Divinity according to some concept art, and Damian was likely intended to be the disguised antagonist, actually making it a direct tie-in between BD and Divinity 2 instead of being half that and half a direct sequel to D:OS1. Despite all that, I loved all three of those (Dragon Commander too, despite its shortcomings), but BG3 teeters on the edge of being the equivalent of DA: Inquisition for me as far as the studio's one overhyped but ultimately underdelivering outing goes.

BG3's just the latest in the line, and I imagine decentralized writing didn't help matters much. Before Larian's writing could be hammy and awkward, but at least it was genuine and didn't take itself too seriously. It had a Pratchett-esque quality to it with an overall humorous setting with an occassional heavy theme (albeit handled with a lot less finesse and depth than Pratchett). BG3 is a mess that is now being retroactively explained as allegorical / "always intended as such", with headscratchers like Halsin making it all seem like a melting pot which nobody really cared to bring up to a standard of some kind.

The percentages are meant to represent the importance of these things to most players out there, not necessarily you or anyone specifically in this forum. I'm talking about the 99.99% of BG3 players *not* here in this forum.