Baldur's Gate 3 III: No Plans for DLC Or A Fourth Thread

[Spore]

Savvy Wyll

There is a reason origin Wyll is the best choice. Wyll makes so many dumb decisions.

[Cikomyr2]

There is a reason origin Wyll is the best choice. Wyll makes so many dumb decisions.

Literally my first character to play after my first fun is Wyll. Because i liked him, but he was oh so stupid and short-sighted so many times.

[LibraryOgre]

I am pleased to announce that, after apparently 3 months, I picked up BG3 again AND I didn't start over. I backed up about 20 minutes play time from my last save, but I didn't start entirely over.

And I loved Raphael's song. It took me by surprise, but its existence made me happy.

[Zevox]

So I've started another run. My first Origin character run, as Shadowheart.

Honestly, the big thing I'm noticing is just how natural it actually feels for Shadowheart to be the main character here. She's the one who starts the game with the artifact that's so important to the plot, after all, and it was always a touch weird when it just sort of hops over to your main character and she doesn't insist on having it back. On top of that, her having a reason to be nervous about Lae'zel gives her a natural interesting dynamic with the very first party member you run across, several major locations in Act 1 tie into her personal story (the murals depicting Dark Justiciars in the Grove, the Selûnite Temple the Goblins are hold up in and the outpost below it), and she has a similar amnesia angle to the Dark Urge but doesn't take as long to start learning things about what she's forgotten. Plus of course looking ahead, in Act 2 she plays such a major role that her personal story partly determines the outcome of the main story events there, and while her Act 3 quest is disconnected from the main one it's still a major event for her, which means her personal story continues to have major events throughout the entirety of the game, which is more than I think we can say for any other companion. Lae'zel comes closest, but even she has hers is mostly focused in two distinct places: the Creche, and the ending, with fairly little in between.

A couple of interesting things I'll toss in spoilers for anyone who wants to save learning them for their own Shadowheart Origin run:

Spoiler

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When the mark on her hand acts up and pains her, it turns out she's actually seeing flashes of her old memories. Upon interacting with Scratch and seeing his grief for his owner's death, for instance, I got one where she suddenly saw a vision of herself holding a dead mouse, with the vision distorted by tears in her eyes. They don't expand any further on that, but it seems to imply she may have had a pet mouse when she was young; either that or maybe she accidentally killed one and was just torn up about that even though it wasn't a pet. Either way, makes me pretty curious what other scenes of her life we can learn only by playing her like this.

She gets a unique dialogue option to tell other party members of her faith, but I must admit some slight disappointment in this. While it's mostly handled nice - if they don't have a high enough affinity with you already you have to make a persuasion check to keep them from reacting badly to it - you can only do it once, with one party member. I guess the idea may be that once you tell one of them the word will get around to the rest, but I really would like to be able to have that conversation with each without needing to reload (I've wound up doing that in order to see everybody's reactions). Feels like the reason for it may be more meta too: you can gain an approval boost from telling them if their affinity is already high enough or you make the persuasion check, and the devs may have wanted that to be a one-time thing. Which is fine, I just wish I could still have the conversation with the others even if I can't get an approval boost from it. Though I should also say, about a specific reaction, it's a little weird to me that Lae'zel even knows who Shar is when I tell her, given Githyanki culture's lack of caring about the gods and her own relative youth and inexperience with Faerûn. I was kind of expecting her reaction to be closer to Astarion's (he doesn't care; he just either gets upset because you kept it from him, or approves of you being willing to come out about it, that you worship Shar in itself is meaningless to him).

Shadowheart also, appropriately, is completely incapable of opening the Selûnite chest in the Owlbear cave. Even if you grab that hymn and read it by the chest, she just remarks about how it's all "empty words," and it does nothing. You can pass it to another party member and have them read it to open it, but even doing that, Shadowheart won't take the items inside, fearing that it would upset Shar. You have to get another party member to take them as well.

Oh, a couple of non-spoiler comments: the biggest problem with doing a Shadowheart Origin run so far as that first fight post-crash, with the Intellect Devourers. I literally couldn't beat them with solo Shadowheart, action economy and attack odds/damage were just too stacked again me; I resorted to sneaking past them and coming back once I'd recruited Gale and Astarion. And on another difficulty note, I was a bit disappointed to find that custom difficulty doesn't have a toggle to turn on the Legendary Actions from Honor difficulty. I kind of wanted to see those, but I am not doing a one-auto-save-only thing again after how that went when I tried Iron Man in X-Com 2. Just wound up back on Tactician as a result.

Oh, I am modifying everyone's classes - well, almost everyone. Doing:

Shadowheart: Monk (Shadows) - Dark Moon Monk, basically, probably switch to Open Palm after [Plot].
Lae'zel: Wizard (Evoker). Role reversal, but still in keeping with Githyanki culture and her aggressive tendencies.
Gale: Sorcerer (Wild Magic). Play into the instability of his powers due to his condition.
Astarion: Ranger (Deep Stalker). Because I've done Rogue and Bard, and this is the next most appropriate thing.
Karlach: Fighter (Battlemaster). Because I feel like it and need more front-liners, basically.
Wyll: Warlock (Blade), thus far. Still a bit unsure if I want to multiclass him or not. I did the Warlock/Paladin thing last time, and while it works, I wasn't thrilled with him at a lot of points along the way, so I'm a bit leery of multiclassing again. But I feel like that's the only way I can change him, because being a Warlock is just too central to his story, so I dunno, maybe some Fighter levels this time or something.

And since I'm basically down one companion due to doing an origin run, I might actually make more significant use of one of the others this time. Probably one of the Druids if I do.