Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback For the evil path, please look at Tyranny

TL;DR at the bottom



As many have already pointed out, the "evil" path in Early Access is of the psycho killer variety, with the Tieflings and Halsin offering a substantial reward over Minthara and the goblins that almost every player, good or no, would be more inclined to accept. There is room here to expand this path to be more calculatingly evil so it is more appealing. For this, I want to suggest looking at Tyranny. In that game, players are incentivised to make "evil" choices because the world around them always leaves room for nuance in player decision making and gives your character a lot of agency to make subtle moral choices. You could, for instance, sway all the primary antagonists (the leaders of each faction) to your side and unite them under your banner. The "evil" path in BG3 makes you feel like you are in for the ride with someone else's campaign, namely Minthara's, only for that to be thrown out the window at the end. Even if you talk her out of betraying you, she discards the goblins and disappears out of the story completely. Meanwhile the Tieflings are seemingly set to travel with you all the way to Baldur's Gate. Minthara also appears to not be nuanced in her evil (until you read her mind after having sex with her when you get a hint at a deeper personality for her, but then she also goes away).

You are in no way encouraged to antagonise the Tieflings in the first place. In fact, the scene where you betray Zevlor plays out like a cartoon; you stand there grinning menacingly as Minthara sends her army of goblins to slaughter Tiefling men, women and children. Nowhere is there an option for you as a character to take control of this situation. You stumble upon Minthara's plan and decide on a whim to go with it, leading to a mass killing of innocents which you gain nothing from, not even from a narrative perspective. On multiple occasions you are also told and shown that the Absolute, in so far as the player character understands it, cannot possibly be real. Tadpoles crawl out of True Souls Eodwin and Gut's eyes, Lae'Zel sees this and comments that the whole thing must be an Illithid trick, Halsin later explains that Ketheric Thorm is responsible for the corruption at Moonrise and may be involved with the tadpole's shadow magic etc. with there surely being more examples that I missed. Here we come back to the idea that only a psycho killer / chaotic neutral cartoon villain would take the Absolute seriously, let alone side with their nebulous promises even if it means aiding excessively evil people in committing senseless violence. This also makes Minthara's motivations unclear; she is "cleansing" the grove for the Absolute, but why? You, being a passenger in her story on this path, never get to question the wisdom behind this mission, considering she would just murder you for even putting it forward.

Right now the evil path needs incentives so other evil characters that are not cartoonish in their evil ways might consider it. For that, it needs nuanced hooks and more room for player agency. While there is something to be said for that the player character is a random nobody to Minthara and should not be included in her plans in any way, that begs the question why this path is even an option to begin with. In my opinion the evil path as it stands right now is you stepping into Minthara's story as a side character, while the good path is all about you actively helping a group of innocents. This is made apparent in the two different celebration scenes, where in the good path the Tieflings are partying with you and in the evil path the goblins are partying despite you, with dead bodies added for extra cartoonishness. Making the evil path more appealing would thus mean giving more agency to the player and taking that away from Minthara, the protagonist of this path. If there is no room for the player to fit into this path other than as a henchman to Minthara then there is a seriously discrepancy between the good and evil paths here, as with Zevlor you are definitely not doing his "bidding".

The main problem with fixing the evil path is that as it stands right now, bringing nuance and player agency into it like with Tyranny seems very diificult. The player in Tyranny has a very important role and a lot of tools to assert their autority over other characters, perhaps not unlike the Illithid power dialogue option. The option to use that power also seem to be limited mostly to interactions on or on the way to the evil path such as the goblin ambush in the blighted village and the path up to their camp. The difference between Tyranny and this game's evil path however is that everyone who knows about the illithid power screams at you that you need to get rid of it as soon as possible. As far as I know every dialogue option you have with your companions where you can say "I like the power, I want to harness it" only exists to piss them off. Here again Minthara is the only one who reacts positively to you embracing it, but none of the Absolute's forces you meet know about the tadpole. Gut even tries to imprison you once you tell her about it. If they are all convinced that their power has nothing to do with mind flayers and we know for a fact that it does, why would we ever want to side with them? This does not seem to be a metagaming problem either, all of your companions remember vividly how they got their parasite and are more unpleasantly surprised by the caveats that come with it than they want to see where it goes. Same with Halsin and, even more egregiously, with Omeluum. It seems like everyone knows the parasite is bad news except for the people who deny or are ignorant of Illithid involvement with the Absolute. Unfortunately, all of these people are on the evil path.

Tl;dr:

- the evil path is cartoonish (mass murdering innocents, sex reward)
- feels like Minthara's story and you are a passenger in it (no room to ask her questions about anything or she tries to kill you)
- Absolute faction appears to be ignorant of Illithids to the point where the player has to willfully ignore the Nautiloid section (You, your companions and everyone on the good path knows about the tadpole, evil character are tadpole denialists who murder you for even bringing it up)*
- To make evil better, it needs player agency and nuance like in Tyranny (this could be accomplished by a "Fatebinder" type role the player gets in the form of being a True Soul)


* I believe Kevin VanOrd said on his stream that the intro section was added very late into EA development so this could be the reason for the narrative disconnect. If that is true, the entire Absolute faction needs to be aware of Illithid involvement in their powers. I mean, they literally see the Nautiloid crash, lol