Companion Morality and Player Choice in Baldur's Gate 3
When playing RPGs for the first time, the temptation can be to play somebody blandly pleasant. Before you know your way around the world, it’s often the easiest way to avoid locking off content you haven’t seen or companions you haven’t recruited. (Plus, we know an overwhelming amount of players simply prefer to be altruistic in their roleplay.) There are ways to encourage players to roleplay in specific ways from the start, but it’s tricky. What’s interesting is that one of the ways Baldur’s Gate 3 does this is… partly by accident.
Baldur’s Gate 3 does not currently have all of its companions, being in early access. What is interesting is that all the current companions are either neutral or evil-aligned, according to the D&D morality matrix. This wasn’t an intentional decision by Larian Studios, but it’s notably had an impact on players.
My character (despite his excellent hair) fits in terribly with this lot. Shadowheart is prickly, Lae’zel is aggressively single-minded and Astarion is a magistrate. They’ve been my main party so far, and every time I’m polite to a potential quest giver, I can hear them rolling their eyes. It prompts the question: do I actually want to play things safe for maximum access, or do I pick a side in whatever rivalry it is that Shadowheart and Lae’zel seem to share?
If I had enough ‘good’ companions to travel around with, I’d likely populate my party with them, and blandly-pleasant my way through the Forgotten Realms - at least until my second go round. As it is, it’s hard not to reconsider my character’s choices in the face of such strong influences.
Oh, Also
I love that Mass Effect is news-y again, because it means new reporting on things that might not have had an answer. Like The Gamer finding that yes, Jack was originally written as pansexual, but the studio was pressured to “focus the relationships on a more traditional kind of vector”.
Now have a fluffy cat with giant paws, to help scrub moralising about “traditional” relationships from your brain.
Ruth Cassidy is a writer and self-described velcro cyborg who, when not writing about video games, is probably being emotional about musicals, mountains, or cats. Has had some bylines, in some places.
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