"I won't give again
Because she takes so often"
Plumb - Manic
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After a grueling journey, we stride into the city as champions - a bit of creative journalistic editing withstanding. The Shadowlands lie behind us, shadowed still. The planestouched thing we dug from the depths beneath them lingers now in my camp, all jeering condescension, a repudiation of ambition. I do not shrink at robbing the darkness of its prize, but what use said prize to fall to the light and not to myself?
I worry for the changes in my companions. If the priestess will so readily turn her hair shirt between goddesses, what is her devotion worth in the coming struggle? At least the gith reaffirms her link to her kind, and we've tasted enough revolutions below to know the figurehead shapes not the vessel driving it forth. The daywalking nightwalker... it was hard enough to convince him not to chain himself to mastery over the hollow flittering parasites among which he was whelped. Had he taken such power over the minds of others to himself, I should have found myself forced to rest him alongside the rotting husk of his sire.
As for the vermin which has taken residence within my skull, the less said the better, the less thought the better, the less prepared the better. Nature will not long suffer this unnatural intrusion. Hah. And the jumped up gutter trash of this barren stone hive dare speak to me of chaos?
Fool girl. More fool for your petty flimflammery. Chaos is not a driving hunger in service to the end, not a rabid maw which does not know itself, not a slave to the lower planes. It is cold freedom, a howling loneliness, a mote in the tempest, center of the centerless, not death but the shifting infinity which encompasses it, and it will be my pleasure to correct your definitions, preening little prat.
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So, here we are in Act 3, decidedly better fleshed out than Act 2. I have both good and bad things to say about it, but for now let's segue into the alignment issue from a problem shared by both Larian with its Diablo-clone 'action' game roots, and Dungeons and Dragons with its over-reliance on over-randomization: defining 'adventure' as dropping pianos on the player. Ok, let's take it slow, just follow me on down to the beach and OMG SHARKS!
Roll for initiative.
Or just reload.
Surprises can feel rewarding where they grow organically out of other game elements, but you're perfectly justified calling bullshit on a GM substituting ambushes out of nowhere for actual narrative causality. The sharkoids there aren't a random encounter. They're a scripted pre-amble to your adventure in the depths. Problems:
1) Just as in Original Sin 2, your playthrough is gratuitously lengthened by having to save and reload constantly to map out every zone's 'random' encounters and their difficulties, to take them on in a convenient order, especially since BG3 contains some time-dependent quests you're not warned about.
2) Jump scares get shelved among the lowest storytelling gimmicks with good cause. They're not scary past the "jump" part. A smatter of druidic crowd control trivialized the encounter, with the only concern being the attrition thus incurred making me wonder whether to reload and skip it for another day. You're not thrilling me with a novel challenge. You're just forcing metagaming.
The many, many such examples of trial and error misdefining surprises and predictability always bring me back to the law/chaos axis. I have to wonder why BG3 lacks official alignments, when almost every decision in your entire campaign still revolves around trite little good vs. evil juxtapositions. The player is simply not permitted to engage with those definitions knowingly and actively.
If you kept the mutt from Act 1 around your camp, you get a chance to either:
Lawful Evil: Hand him over to the mean lady who beats puppies, but officially owns him.
Chaotic Good: Refuse, and run her off for a bonus to leave the other dogs with a kinder master.
At least the druid dialogue option allows for obliquely acknowledging the other issue of freedom and keeping animals caged, even if it is lost among the more maudlin heartstring-tugging about beaten puppies. (If you have a dog, you're probably aware it'd rather be beaten than prevented from participating in the life of the pack.) But the law/chaos issue is as usual obfuscated by hand-wringing over playing nice.
I've also polished off the first companion quest, which happened to be Astarion's and also happened to end in both a satisfying boss fight and some surprisingly good dialogues and cutscenes. I've been replaying it from a few angles just to see it again. (And not just for the gratuitous vamp titties.)
Seriously, good work writers, animators and Astarion's voice actor!
(Also, cute Interview shout-out with the "known you for two hundred years" line.)
But again, I have to note your moral quandary gets framed almost exclusively in terms of whether or not to commit mass murder. Allow me to file a complaint on the grounds of vampiric mesmerism. In a setting already choked with illithids, detect thoughts, etc. allowing the ascension to proceed would create yet another mind controlling abomination erasing independent thought with every glance. At least if you do try to take a middle road and wash your hands of the whole deal, some writer did think to frame the issue in terms of enslaving oneself to the role of mastery, which is more thought than most game designers would put into things, but it's a bit 'blink and you missed it' for my tastes. Free will should have been the central issue here, not murder.
You run into a more annoying example down on the docks.
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| I'd've done it myself but rather not waste a fireball |
Volo's been strapped to some gunpowder barrels by an angry mob. That's him getting nuked into oblivion to the right of the explosion. Good riddens. But the perfunctory presentation of the encounter bugs me. It's not a roleplaying choice. There is zero reward for not helping him. The angry mob is even led by a sinister cultist with darkened eyes, because only the most evil would ever want to hurt lovable old Volo. Even your rather grim companions like Astarion and Lae'zel encourage you to save him, with my fellow drow Minthara being the only one keeping a head on her shoulders.
Why?
The lynch mob was incensed by something he said, and your dialogue options try to frame this as a free speech issue without any details as to what was said. But there's a difference between free speech and lying, of which Volo is canonically, infinitely guilty at every single turn, day by day and year by year, interpersonally and in print. Moreover, his behavior within my adventuring party has repeatedly demonstrated him nothing but a liability, and I'm perfectly within my rights not to throw more good spell slots after bad saving this idiot from his own idiocy. Don't get between a fool and his folly as the saying goes.
In fact I looked up why anyone would save him, and it's apparently for the hefty buff he provides in the endgame, making this another example of forcing metagaming, dependent on foreknowledge of the campaign.
I've addressed this before in the case of Jan vs. Grobnar, and it recalls a particular episode of ST:TNG, Cost of Living, where we're expected to side with Lwaxana Troi getting engaged over the internet, then publicly humiliating her groom because she finds him boring, derailing the lives of half the cast so she can show off, all while using a thousand-person starship as her personal taxi. Instead of a free spirit, attention-whoring only indicates parasitic powermongering. Bye-bye, Volo, I'm with the cultist on this one. Boom. I'll do without the buff.
Which brings us back to alignments, because Volo is canonically Chaotic Good. Every game which includes a chaotic character will nine times out of ten pigeonhole it as a clueless motormouth spouting random gibberish, turning the alignment of personal freedom into single-note utterly predictable one-trick ponies rehashing Alice in Wonderland.
Chaos =/= goofy.
Even the rightly celebrated Planescape: Torment got this wrong with more characters than not. The inspiration for Law/Chaos conflict in D&D (and RPGs by extension) was Elric, a wandering, morose, haunted, cursed hero with at best a dry sense of humor, if any. Chaos is walking away from a house of horrors, ending a powermonger while refusing to become one yourself. It's speaking freely without trying to make others listen. It's thousands of other possible characters beyond clowns or killer clowns. Not that you could tell from game scripts.
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