I’m not a big ‘goodie two shoes’ type when it comes to RPGs. I ran Renegade on my first 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Mass Effect playthrough, sacrificed my real-life dad’s not-real-life wife to the devil in Fable 2 when I was a kid, and blew up Megaton the second I could in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Fallout 3. But 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Baldur’s Gate 3 has companions I actually care about, so I stifled my inner demon and walked the good road, helping to save the Druids and the Tieflings alike, rescuing a kid’s parents, undoing the shadowy magic of the forest, and resisting the urge of the tadpole at every turn. I was making a concerted effort to leave the world ♏better than I found it.
Then I hit the ending and realised I’d ****** up at eve🀅ry turn.
Warning, spoilers for Baldur’s Gate 3.
For context, my party at the end of the game consisted of Lae’zel, Jaheira, and Astarion. I was playing Karlach rather than a custom character. However, I also had 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:a party extension mod, so Gale and Shadowheart taggeꦐd along. Mostly because I’d invested so much time in each of their stories and didn’t want to leave all my hard work behind in♍ a camp.
And as ‘good’ as I was trying to be… I may have cheated on Shadowheart with Gale, and on Gale with the demon woman who held Wyll and his dad’s life in her hands, and on her 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:with a mind flayer. Safe to say, my party fucking hated me.
They were committed to saving the world, anyway, and I’d helped Astarion overthrow his vampir🏅e lord and free himself. So, they stuck around. The trouble is that I’d set up the quest to betray Lae’zels queen and overthrow her too, which I forgot all about. The Emperor–AKA the Gu♔ardian, AKA the mind flayer I boned—asked if they could consume a certain githyanki that would prove pivotal to taking down the queen so that they could take down the Netherbrain. I said yes, Lae’zel nearly murdered me there and then, and then I killed all her friends. My grip on being good was slipping, but The Emperor didn’t even need to consume him after all, since I did something even worse not long after.
We were at the brain stem of the mind flayer hive, ready to finally put an end to the Absolute in its evolved form. But I’d just dragged my party through a missile bombardment and three lengthy battles with double-digit enemies piling on non-stop. I was tired. I should’ve shut the game down and come back with a more willing can-do attitude for the finale, but instead, I let the selfish “why not?” voice creep in that I so often enjoy in RPGs. Go on then, Gale, climb the stem and blow yourself up. And he did. I’d cheated on the man, stopped talking to him, turned him into my pack 𝔍mule, and then told him to go and kill himself in a glorious and entirely unnecessary sacrifice.
Lae’zel was unbelievably mad, Gale was dead, and the rest of my party was completely disinterested in me. I wasn’t evil enough for Astarion, but I was an arsehole in the eyes of everyone else. When we got to the dawn of celebrations, when I should’ve been ecstatic at having saved the world, I was instead presented with a bleak and depressing display of my failures that rolled out in front of me like a blazing red carpet. And yet there was still more disappointment to come.
Jaheira stayed in owlbear form and broke much of the cutscene, clipping through everyone and often turning the entire screen into a wall of feathers; Lae’zel told me to fuck off and left; Astarion started burning to death in the sun and scurried away without a word; Gale was just dead; Sh🌳adowheart disappeared, and then there was Karlach. I hadn’t just forgotten Lae’zel’s questline.
I used infernal iron to calm the explosive device inside of Karlach’s chest that made her touch burn, but I hadn’t pursued it any further despite slaughte💧ring the steel watch and pilfering enough of their infernal iron to amass a hoard. Definitely enough to find a solution and defuse the thing, so I could claim my victory and live long enough to see the world rebuild. By the end, that hoard ended up as part of the ash pile we used to call Gale.
Karlach walked out onto a pier after everyone left to take in the view one last time, dying with a wh▨imper…alone. Poetic, really, given that I sent Gale to a completely avoidable death. But it meant that, after my 50 hours of adventuring, not one person stuck by my side to the bi🌌tter end. It was lonely, uncomfortable, and heart-wrenching. Next time, I’ll do it right. I’m going back to villainy. At least then I’ll have Astarion.