To the End of Act 1 of Baldur's Gate 3
Aug. 18th, 2023 09:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alias_sqbrThe game gives you a warning before you switch acts, something like "You are about to embark on a new part of your adventure. Make sure to tie up any loose ends". Afaict, even if you do choose to move on to the next act, you can still go back to the earlier areas and don't need to finish EVERY sidequest, but while I haven't checked I'm guessing all the characters who say "I'm leaving soon" will have left.
Anyway! If you haven't seen that warning yet, this post will likely have major spoilers, and you if you have, you're probably pretty safe reading this and all my earlier posts, except for any optional stuff you might not have encountered yet, and one (possibly optional?) level 5 quest I got partway through before deciding it was too hard for me, which I described in my previous post.
Masterpost
Content note: Bad things happening to slaves and animals.
There's so much attention to detail in this game. There's different camp areas depending on where you are, all very pretty with interesting and different layouts. The Underdark one has all these cool glowing crystals and mushrooms everywhere.
I had a dream that after fighting a dragon the next time they went to camp it had all been burned down, something like that could be cool!
I had to kill mushroom friend :( It wanted to go murder the other mushroom colony as revenge for the sovereign doing nothing to help it's people, and I understand the resentment but mass murder won't bring them back. Oh well.
Gale's mysterious condition where has to eat all my most valuable loot got bad enough that he explained his angsty backstory: he was a wizard prodigy who became the lover of Mystra the Goddess of Magic. In attempting to impress her into giving him Powers Beyond Mortal Ken he accidentally infected himself with an eternally hungry scrap of Weave, the magic fabric underpinning the world, which got broken into bits during a war where some guy tried to kill Mystra. He doesn't explicitly say she dumped him because of that but I get the feeling it's meant to be implied.
Later he talks about his...I forget the name but I get the impression she's a cat-like sentient familiar? He's all "my condition is so much more serious now" but he doesn't actually eat any more loot, I was wondering how much he'd use up but it was only like 3 pieces in the end. I have more money than I know what to do with but it's the principle of the thing!
I've heard tell of some annoying bugs but so far have just had a few conversations repeat, and had Halsin check in with Tav about the sex they very definitely didn't have. They told him they felt fine about "what they did last night", confused as to why he was worried about such a bland and brief conversation. Maybe Halsin had bear sex with some other tielfing at the party by mistake.
Even with the lowest graphics settings the cutscenes can be very cinematic. Before I went to bed there was a cool scene as Tav sailed on a boat made of bones into a military base of dwarves who have enslaved some gnome miners.
Oh my god I just had a religious/political conversation with some spiders, as a spider, and persuaded them to leave the dwarf camp and convert to following the Spider queen, leaving the dwarves with fewer allies should there be a fight.
Turns out Shadowheart has a fear of wolves so I won't be using THAT form any more. But she didn't say anything about giant spiders! So I'm just going to assume she thinks spider!Tav is cute.
Most of the dwarves in this base are cruel assholes but we met a nice scientist trader who just wanted help figuring out the history of this place, which involved multiple insight/history etc checks, each with interesting results. According to these checks and a nearby immortal ox (who had no idea why they are immortal and seemed to otherwise be a normal Underdark ox) it's an old Shar temple which got repurposed and attacked by a giant demony monster. (Underdark oxes are technically called deep rothé but afaict they're just a kind of ox)
I have ended up using animal form a bunch during my still brief explorations of this base, it's super fun, though humanoid characters sometimes express misgivings about seeing a giant spider etc wandering around, which I guess is fair. In theory animal form is for use in battle but I save it up for use in conversation instead.
You can befriend some oxen being beaten into breaking down a wall and convince them to kill their cruel masters before knocking down the wall for you then running free. Unfortunately the area beyond the wall had some fire traps which eventually got too much for my "have Astarion run ahead and disarm things as quickly as possible" strategy, I feel like there's some way to get past the last one with misty step or something (they even had an earlier quest demonstrate how misty step works as a clue) but after several failed attempts Astarion got knocked back to ground level so I might take that as a sign to just keep exploring down there for now. If I'm still stuck after running out of other things to do in this base I'll look after a guide.
I wandered around and realised that while the dwarves technically work for the Absolute most of them think it's a creepy cult whose drow representative refuses to pay his bills. Tav decided it was probably still a bad idea to say "Oh yes I hate him too, in fact one of my current goals is to trade his head to a giant mushroom for some loot". Said drow is trapped in a cave-in with a bunch of slaves, a lantern which makes it safe to pass through the Shadowlands on the way to Moonrise Towers, and increasing amounts of poison gas. Tav promised the worried gnome slaves fruitlessly digging at the cave-in that they would rescue everyone.
After even more wandering around I figured out that the reason I couldn't get past that last firetrap is that the entrance to the Hidden Forge I'd been looking for is a small ladder next to it. Oops. There were some tricksy but doable puzzles involving moving levers and platforms but I don't mind jumping puzzles when you can pause the game and click on the precise spot to jump to. And then I was at The Mysterious Forge! I've picked up some moulds to use with it but not the right metals, so I went to get the explosives to fix the cave-in, healed up after all the monsters I'd stumbled across, and went to save the slaves.
Except the moment I went to sleep the game told me they'd all died because I'd taken too long. Oops.
I went back to a save just before I healed, and fixed the cave in. The slaves stumbled out, and were hugged by their happy friends and family.
Then the drow came out and immediately started murdering slaves for not getting him out fast enough. When Tav objected, he called for the many dwarves around to kill Tav, and my unhealed team were quickly killed.
I looked up a walkthrough and it said to persuade the dwarves that I was an enemy of the Absolute, then they wouldn't join the fight. Except oops, I had already talked to them all and said I wasn't!
Just to see what would happen I tried having Tav NOT object to the slave murder, and the drow killed all the slaves and then said Tav needed to die anyway, just because.
I checked and the last save I could find before I talked to the relevant dwarves was THREE HOURS earlier (I got...very lost for a while >.>)
I sighed and let my party sleep. Then went to the site of the cave in and looted the body of the drow who'd died, along with all the slaves, during the night :( I find I enjoy this sort of game more if I let my characters fuck up sometimes, it makes it more satisfying when they don't, and adds some texture to the narrative. But it still feels kinda bad!
I did enjoy getting to cut off the bastard drow's head and hand it to the mushroom sovereign, whose people he had killed. The sovereign infected the head with spores and put it next to it's throne, to grow into a new servant.
The lantern from the drow was broken, but since I'd explored the whole dwarf base at this point I decided to try travelling towards Moonrise Towers to see what would happen. I got the "end of Act 1" warning I mentioned at the start of this post, and decided to tie up some more loose ends first.
Most importantly: I HAD MISSED RECRUITING THE DOG. It came up in the guide I checked, and obviously I had to rush back to find him as soon as possible. The poor little guy, Scratch, is sitting by his dead's master's body "waiting for him to wake up" ;_; Outright saying his master is dead means he becomes hostile ;_; So I (in badger form, so as to not scare Shadowheart by being a wolf) told him to come visit my camp if he ever decided his master is not going to wake up. He hasn't shown up yet :(
I explored further into the Underdark, ending up back at the section I got to via Auntie Ethel's house, and was reminded why I'd stopped: LASER TURRETS. But after some experimenting I managed to figure out how to take them out without too much trouble. I'm slowly getting the hang of actually examining enemies to see what their weaknesses are instead of just hitting them with whatever. But then there was some puzzle with magic braziers I couldn't figure out at all so I decided to leave it there for now.
I finally got around to following up Lae'zel's quest to talk to some scary looking Githyanki soldiers with a bigass dragon. Lae'zel has constantly been saying we can get rid of the brainworms easily if we just found a Githyani creche, but when she asks the leader he says "the way to 'cure' this infection is the sword! Kill them!". I got an insight check saying he was lying about where he's going, then he flew off on the dragon (phew!)
And then the remaining Githyanki killed us! Three times! I even tried using my usual party, since I don't really have a good grasp of how to use Lae'zel in battle, but they killed us just as quick.
And then I decided I didn't really need to finish Lae'zel's quest right now, went back into the Underdark, and clicked yes to ending Act 1. I've played a little into Act 2, but will talk about that in a new post!
Anyway! If you haven't seen that warning yet, this post will likely have major spoilers, and you if you have, you're probably pretty safe reading this and all my earlier posts, except for any optional stuff you might not have encountered yet, and one (possibly optional?) level 5 quest I got partway through before deciding it was too hard for me, which I described in my previous post.
Masterpost
Content note: Bad things happening to slaves and animals.
There's so much attention to detail in this game. There's different camp areas depending on where you are, all very pretty with interesting and different layouts. The Underdark one has all these cool glowing crystals and mushrooms everywhere.
I had a dream that after fighting a dragon the next time they went to camp it had all been burned down, something like that could be cool!
I had to kill mushroom friend :( It wanted to go murder the other mushroom colony as revenge for the sovereign doing nothing to help it's people, and I understand the resentment but mass murder won't bring them back. Oh well.
Gale's mysterious condition where has to eat all my most valuable loot got bad enough that he explained his angsty backstory: he was a wizard prodigy who became the lover of Mystra the Goddess of Magic. In attempting to impress her into giving him Powers Beyond Mortal Ken he accidentally infected himself with an eternally hungry scrap of Weave, the magic fabric underpinning the world, which got broken into bits during a war where some guy tried to kill Mystra. He doesn't explicitly say she dumped him because of that but I get the feeling it's meant to be implied.
Later he talks about his...I forget the name but I get the impression she's a cat-like sentient familiar? He's all "my condition is so much more serious now" but he doesn't actually eat any more loot, I was wondering how much he'd use up but it was only like 3 pieces in the end. I have more money than I know what to do with but it's the principle of the thing!
I've heard tell of some annoying bugs but so far have just had a few conversations repeat, and had Halsin check in with Tav about the sex they very definitely didn't have. They told him they felt fine about "what they did last night", confused as to why he was worried about such a bland and brief conversation. Maybe Halsin had bear sex with some other tielfing at the party by mistake.
Even with the lowest graphics settings the cutscenes can be very cinematic. Before I went to bed there was a cool scene as Tav sailed on a boat made of bones into a military base of dwarves who have enslaved some gnome miners.
Oh my god I just had a religious/political conversation with some spiders, as a spider, and persuaded them to leave the dwarf camp and convert to following the Spider queen, leaving the dwarves with fewer allies should there be a fight.
Turns out Shadowheart has a fear of wolves so I won't be using THAT form any more. But she didn't say anything about giant spiders! So I'm just going to assume she thinks spider!Tav is cute.
Most of the dwarves in this base are cruel assholes but we met a nice scientist trader who just wanted help figuring out the history of this place, which involved multiple insight/history etc checks, each with interesting results. According to these checks and a nearby immortal ox (who had no idea why they are immortal and seemed to otherwise be a normal Underdark ox) it's an old Shar temple which got repurposed and attacked by a giant demony monster. (Underdark oxes are technically called deep rothé but afaict they're just a kind of ox)
I have ended up using animal form a bunch during my still brief explorations of this base, it's super fun, though humanoid characters sometimes express misgivings about seeing a giant spider etc wandering around, which I guess is fair. In theory animal form is for use in battle but I save it up for use in conversation instead.
You can befriend some oxen being beaten into breaking down a wall and convince them to kill their cruel masters before knocking down the wall for you then running free. Unfortunately the area beyond the wall had some fire traps which eventually got too much for my "have Astarion run ahead and disarm things as quickly as possible" strategy, I feel like there's some way to get past the last one with misty step or something (they even had an earlier quest demonstrate how misty step works as a clue) but after several failed attempts Astarion got knocked back to ground level so I might take that as a sign to just keep exploring down there for now. If I'm still stuck after running out of other things to do in this base I'll look after a guide.
I wandered around and realised that while the dwarves technically work for the Absolute most of them think it's a creepy cult whose drow representative refuses to pay his bills. Tav decided it was probably still a bad idea to say "Oh yes I hate him too, in fact one of my current goals is to trade his head to a giant mushroom for some loot". Said drow is trapped in a cave-in with a bunch of slaves, a lantern which makes it safe to pass through the Shadowlands on the way to Moonrise Towers, and increasing amounts of poison gas. Tav promised the worried gnome slaves fruitlessly digging at the cave-in that they would rescue everyone.
After even more wandering around I figured out that the reason I couldn't get past that last firetrap is that the entrance to the Hidden Forge I'd been looking for is a small ladder next to it. Oops. There were some tricksy but doable puzzles involving moving levers and platforms but I don't mind jumping puzzles when you can pause the game and click on the precise spot to jump to. And then I was at The Mysterious Forge! I've picked up some moulds to use with it but not the right metals, so I went to get the explosives to fix the cave-in, healed up after all the monsters I'd stumbled across, and went to save the slaves.
Except the moment I went to sleep the game told me they'd all died because I'd taken too long. Oops.
I went back to a save just before I healed, and fixed the cave in. The slaves stumbled out, and were hugged by their happy friends and family.
Then the drow came out and immediately started murdering slaves for not getting him out fast enough. When Tav objected, he called for the many dwarves around to kill Tav, and my unhealed team were quickly killed.
I looked up a walkthrough and it said to persuade the dwarves that I was an enemy of the Absolute, then they wouldn't join the fight. Except oops, I had already talked to them all and said I wasn't!
Just to see what would happen I tried having Tav NOT object to the slave murder, and the drow killed all the slaves and then said Tav needed to die anyway, just because.
I checked and the last save I could find before I talked to the relevant dwarves was THREE HOURS earlier (I got...very lost for a while >.>)
I sighed and let my party sleep. Then went to the site of the cave in and looted the body of the drow who'd died, along with all the slaves, during the night :( I find I enjoy this sort of game more if I let my characters fuck up sometimes, it makes it more satisfying when they don't, and adds some texture to the narrative. But it still feels kinda bad!
I did enjoy getting to cut off the bastard drow's head and hand it to the mushroom sovereign, whose people he had killed. The sovereign infected the head with spores and put it next to it's throne, to grow into a new servant.
The lantern from the drow was broken, but since I'd explored the whole dwarf base at this point I decided to try travelling towards Moonrise Towers to see what would happen. I got the "end of Act 1" warning I mentioned at the start of this post, and decided to tie up some more loose ends first.
Most importantly: I HAD MISSED RECRUITING THE DOG. It came up in the guide I checked, and obviously I had to rush back to find him as soon as possible. The poor little guy, Scratch, is sitting by his dead's master's body "waiting for him to wake up" ;_; Outright saying his master is dead means he becomes hostile ;_; So I (in badger form, so as to not scare Shadowheart by being a wolf) told him to come visit my camp if he ever decided his master is not going to wake up. He hasn't shown up yet :(
I explored further into the Underdark, ending up back at the section I got to via Auntie Ethel's house, and was reminded why I'd stopped: LASER TURRETS. But after some experimenting I managed to figure out how to take them out without too much trouble. I'm slowly getting the hang of actually examining enemies to see what their weaknesses are instead of just hitting them with whatever. But then there was some puzzle with magic braziers I couldn't figure out at all so I decided to leave it there for now.
I finally got around to following up Lae'zel's quest to talk to some scary looking Githyanki soldiers with a bigass dragon. Lae'zel has constantly been saying we can get rid of the brainworms easily if we just found a Githyani creche, but when she asks the leader he says "the way to 'cure' this infection is the sword! Kill them!". I got an insight check saying he was lying about where he's going, then he flew off on the dragon (phew!)
And then the remaining Githyanki killed us! Three times! I even tried using my usual party, since I don't really have a good grasp of how to use Lae'zel in battle, but they killed us just as quick.
And then I decided I didn't really need to finish Lae'zel's quest right now, went back into the Underdark, and clicked yes to ending Act 1. I've played a little into Act 2, but will talk about that in a new post!
no subject
Date: 2023-08-18 06:48 pm (UTC)Oh no, poor mushroom friend!
Gale should find himself his own magical items to eat. :c His backstory seems fascinating, and totally fair of Mystra to dump him, honestly.
Halsin check in with Tav about the sex they very definitely didn't have. They told him they felt fine about "what they did last night", confused as to why he was worried about such a bland and brief conversation.
AWKWARD. ;D This is beautiful.
All the animal things sound really fun!
Did the game never tell you why the ox is immortal? I feel like that's important information!.
Aww on the thing with the dwarves. :c
And the dog! Does this mean you're not going to get the dog?
I also think it's so sweet that you're avoiding the wolf form for Shadowheart!
no subject
Date: 2023-08-19 05:45 am (UTC)Yeah I think I'm 1/3 through act-wise, but I don't know about playtime. And not counting character creator time ;)
The game never tells you why the ox is immortal afaict, but I do wonder if it's related to the Strange Ox at the druid camp. I will definitely be keeping an eye out for further ox related developments.
The dog hasn't shown up yet but I'm wondering if he'll show up next time I'm in that area in act 2. Right now I'm in the middle of the shadowlands which isn't very dog friendly.
no subject
Date: 2023-08-19 06:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-08-19 07:03 am (UTC)There is actually one I am writing up RIGHT NOW. Maybe the bears were a red herring to distract us from the actual big fish...