the player character’s connection to the dead three and the whole tadpole plot
no, they explain all of that in a custom character game, the dark urge just ties into those plot points more closely than the other origins
The general consensus seems to be that Act 2 is a bit of a let down compared to Act 1. It feels a little incoherent and murder hobo-y at times… I mean Gauntlet of Shar just kind of sucks, which is pretty inexcusable considering that this is D&D and you have almost 50 years of modules to steal good ideas for dungeons from!!
It’s still my goty but Act 2 is what keeps this game from legendary status for me.
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I think Act 2 feels too relentless, it ends up almost monotonous because everything has an equal sense of terrible urgency. That said, the lift the shadow curse quest was well written and compelling.
The problem with gauntlet of shar is that it is perhaps the most true to the design of earlier Baldur’s Gate dungeons; BG1 and BG2 dungeons are either inert corridors filled with endless waves of monsters or shitty little puzzle rooms with simplistic but fiddly puzzles
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one thing I will say for act 2 is that a lot of the gimmick battles (the portal, the act boss, etc) are actually really cool and make you strategize in consistently interesting ways around crowd control, it’s just a lot without a change of scenery, and because it’s D&D, the equipment power curve gets boring for a while too
I finished it at just under 40 hours which objectively seems quick and I was still really flagging
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but this is what i liked about act 1! this actually motivates me to return to the game. i enjoyed the aspect of baldur’s gate 1 that was wandering across flat empty maps running into pop culture references. and also the banal nature of the iron crisis
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We are probably like halfway through act 2 and I think having just as much of a blast as we always have but coop is such a huge force multiplier I can’t really be objective
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I also kind of get why act 2 is so relatively linear and such a thematic drag because act 3 is immediately super indulgent – you finally get big bustling cities, and 80% of it is structured in terms of you resolving all your various friends’ and earlier acquaintances’ quests and getting at least one legendary piece of equipment from each of them, like it’s almost pure late game sidequesting from the minute the act 2 boss and all the plot reveals are out of the way
and larian has always had a jRPG developer’s sense of that anyhow
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We haven’t played in a little over a month now. I’m dreading going back to it because we decided to kill all the goblin leaders with Halsin. We’ve got one down, and without raising any alarms. I think we can do it, but the idea is intimidating for sure.
if the one you killed wasn’t minthara make sure you knock her unconscious instead of killing her! she’s a really fun and interesting optional party member (and they only recently patched the game so that you don’t need to go full evil in act 1 to recruit her) but they don’t telegraph it much
In every playthrough I did, I threw her down a chasm instead of fighting her
Shit! She’s the one we killed.
So it goes.
Good news, one of the other goblin bosses is very easy to kill without alerting anyone too
it’s fine, that’s what other playthroughs years down the line are for
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unfortunately I feel they did not really commit to the idea that you can’t do it all in one playthrough… which considering this is a 60+ hour game even for me is not unreasonable… but that’s why as I’ve neared the end I’m recommending a bit more enthusiastically that people play as dark urge and try to get every companion. it’s a matter of missing out on like 15% of additional flavor and narrative beats or simply not.
Definitely disagree, dark urge itself cuts off so many questlines and subplots, you’re probably missing like 30% of the game by doing DU first
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oh shit did they do that, what you gotta do now
just gotta leave her unconscious rather than dead and then she turns up in Act 2!
You can avoid anything with sufficient spoilers, that doesn’t change that choosing DU is still going to cut you off of many choices and routes if you don’t have foreknowledge. My DU straight up cut off gale’s hand and gale subsequently never appeared in our game and I did not choose anything more evil than “think about it” when that happened. And that’s the least significant surprise
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