"They'll
never be
good to you
bad to you
They'll never be anything, anything at all"
Marilyn Manson - Mechanical Animals
Y'know, it's a bit telling that the top search engine hit for "Owlcat Games" is their bug report forum. The last patch for Wrath of the Righteous deleted my Witch of the Veil's stupidly overpowered Shrouded Step ability. Now, as a point of contention this class should not even exist but by level 15 I've already built my entire progression around that core feature and find myself loathe to retrain. (How else am I supposed to perfectly angle those banshee blasts and crushing despairs?) Given my class description still reads the same and there's nothing about it in the notes, it's probably a bug. But until they patch the patch I'm hitting pause and taking some time to bitch about a roleplaying matter.
I am Chaotic Neutral. I occasionally dabble in other alignments (because, hell, it wouldn't be very CN to not be CN once in a while (can you see why this alignment so often gets confused with insanity?)) but generally speaking I neither kick puppies nor feed them treats, or both as the mood strikes me. Kingmaker seemed to understand freedom-loving alignments. One quest even let you refuse to help an itinerant posse chasing some desperados, then follow them on their quest anyway, then help one group wipe out the other, then switch sides to help the last survivor wipe out his enemies, then for good measure kill the last guy as well, adding up to a quadruple or quintuple-cross by the end. Your last victim's confused last words to the effect of "but... WHY?!" even underscored how glorious this was. Kudos to the writer.
For Wrathing and Righteousing purposes, I opted for the Lich mythic path only to find myself forced to tank my cherub score in order to proceed. And, though I've been trying to perform good actions since then (conveniently, manumitting also suits my chaotic leanings) it seems nothing I do matters anymore. Liches are by definition evil. I take exception to that.
"Be a vampire, or a ghost, or an immortal with a paint-by-numbers portrait in the rec room. Hell, even a brain-in-a-jar, in a pinch. Anything to avoid the Big Fire Below."
Non-good, fine, I'll concede the point. Personally escaping death is a mindset that excludes beneficence, an either selfish or recklessly fanatical outlook on (un)life. But indifference is not malice, or rather not-malice by definition. In fact, the same argument could be made along the chaos-law axis, since enslaving others as sentient undead should probably count as a lawful act in an "I am the law" sort of way. WotR even predicates one of your undead companions' personality on this assumption, but overall the devs didn't seem to feel the need to restrict liches to lawful or even non-chaotic so that being restricted to evil instead of non-good comes across as even more forced.
This Quora answer by one Sean Sanders makes a nice point on how well neutrality meshes with the concept of lichdom:
"Generally,
chaotic neutral characters tend to be very self-centered but not to the
point of aiming to harm others for their own benefit. They often have
selfish goals like gaining fame, power, wealth, pleasure, etc. They
don’t try to stop others from achieving those same things but also don’t
actively do much to help others, at least not for selfless reasons.
They value their personal freedom and are not big on following arbitrary
rules created by others.
All of that seems very much in line with the mentality that would lead someone to seek lichdom in the first place.
The
chaotic neutral lich is probably just someone that wants to live
forever. He likely has no desire to destroy the world and might not even
care to rule it. He will gladly let others live out their lives without
his interference but will not hesitate to go to nearly any length to
protect his phylactery."
Given your log for the lich quest chain in Wrath actually reads "evil or neutral" the decision to limit players to evil only may have been taken frivolously, late in development. If I had to guess, the devs probably noted their shallow, politically correct writing was a bit light on inferior plane influence and therefore rashly amped up one of the neutral choices to evil. Also, there's more than a little of NWN2's infantile take on roleplaying reflected in Wrath's campaign (especially the infuriating companion roster) so many of the nominally evil influences are on closer inspection shallowly defined in terms of their ookiness. Just as bugs are ooky, therefore evil, necromancy fills its classic role as evil by dint of transgression of simian instinct.
I'm even more annoyed at good choices no longer having any alignment
effect. Not only is it a bad idea in general to invalidate roleplaying,
but it flies in the face of one of Wrath's loading screen plot hints
asking if it's possible for the evil to ascend, not to mention
inexplicably running across one after another drow/succubus/kobold/etc.
characters who've renounced evil. I could see the one big choice of
lichdom tanking my score halfway down the evil scale if it were then
possible to slowly, painstakingly regain neutrality via RP choices. Again, just neutrality,
not goodness.
This isn't me, I'm not mechanical. I'm just a boy playing the suicide... kiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing!
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