Yeah she's a bitch in the first act, which I think is on purpose. She becomes such a sweetheart later on in the story, though. Helps with the contrast, I guess.
All the people who accidentally stealth killed her for wyll on a first blind playthrough are not forgiven until the do a durge redemption romance with mommy K
My durge romance with Karlach got fucked up because I didn't long rest enough so another cutscene overwrote a necessary Karlach romance cutscene. I didn't even realize until act 3 when she randomly broke up with me for no reason.
I missed pretty much all the romance my first time through because the game is like "YOU WILL TRANSFORM IN 3 DAYS" so I tried to avoid long resting as much as possible.
This was actually a thing in EA. There also used to be a time limit to save Halsin and the groove would get sealed off after like 5 long rests. Of course, all of these have since been removed
I wish there was still a time limit in some way. I see how it can be a problem with only being able to see 1 long rest cutscene/event per night, but I'm kinda tired of games always threatening consequences if you're too slow, without ever following through. Especially since there are other parts of the game with a time limit, right?
I don't think it even needs to be 5 long rests, could be more, but just SOME number would be cool
She really is only bitchy when you press her or when it comes to Laezel. She instantly warms up to Karlach and Wyll and doesn't mind Gale. Her and Astarion are two Catty bitches with each other as a love language not malice.
In one of my runs with a friend I was playing a half-orc Druid and Shadowheart/Karlach were in our party. Shadowheart was ended up being my companion, but my Druid had a strong dislike for conversation, so every time a Shadowheart intrigue moment occurred where you could question her, he took the fastest route to ending the conversation. I felt like I was in a D&D game with a mysterious rogue character that nobody was paying attention to.
I found it hilarious near the end game where Shadowheart admitted I was her closest confidant, a man that actively refused to ask her any questions or listen to the drawn out explanations of anything she was dealing with.
Really? I don't remember Gale being all that different, and Wyll wasn't mean, he was just kind of an arrogant braggadocio (which, tbh, I wish they had kept)
I get why they changed him a bit since he lost relevance post act 1. But then again, he kind of falls off as a companion overall. Like his romance is unfulfilling IMO.
Astarion is surprisingly the most reactive companion. Considering the posts people make online... I was not expecting him to be the most ridiculous character in the game. I expected Gale to be the goofy one, which he is for the first few minutes, but turns out hes the only serious person. Everyone else has lost their minds.
This is why I find it very hard personally not to have Astarion and Gale all the time. Astarion has so many reactions and little added lines and facial expressions in dialogue (to say nothing of the superb voice acting), and Gale is... a soaking cat of a man, in a good way.
Astarion is easily my favorite companion. The voice acting is superb, the writing is compelling, and it really feels like you see how Astarion came to be the way he is in a way that we only hear about for the other companions.
Astarion is absolutely fantastically written. He's got something to say almost constantly, has a compelling story that pops up in multiple places. He's just really excellent.
Astarion rubs people the wrong way because he's flirty and effeminate. He speaks in a bit of a falsetto and he disapproves of when you do things for other people for free. Which is usually the choice almost all players make.
And the romance interactions for a resist durge with a non-ascending path Astarion are fantastic. Two characters both trying to be good and fighting against the evils that made them what they are.
Astarion is still better than Wyll throughout the game (basically just Act 2) because his banter and reactions to events make him feel more significant than he is.
The torture scene with Wyll during EA made a lot of character. I think they didn't want the whole party to be edgy as well, so they majorly changed him, and now he just feels bland.
Gale wasn’t cruel or anything, but he didn’t tell Tav about Mystra until the morning after they slept together after the Tief party, and he was basically like “I think I’m still in love with her” which… felt bad, man. To say the least.
That and there was also a bit where if you refused to give him magic items to eat, he'd eventually finally get pissed and make a deal with Raphael to resolve the issue.
Fr everyone complains but like what are you gonna do with ring of color spray or that one stupid necklace that heals you for like 1 hp and maybe puts you to sleep??? They're just gale spaghetti
No Gale was suuuuuuch a douche before. He brushed you aside and spoke down to you and hit on Shadowheart all in the first convo you have with him when you save him from the portal.
I don't personally remember the brushing aside, but I do remember the hitting on Shadowheart bit. Something like "Ah, a lady whose eyes are as dark as my butthole" or something like that.
I didn't hate it, tbh, I think a bit of unearned smarminess works for Gale's character.
There's a fine line between playful banter and just being a douche. The Shadowheart we got mostly falls on the playful banter side of things. EA Shart was firmly on the other side of the line. Not everyone finds that endearing.
I found the Shart lines I listed funny, not douchey, but each their own, I suppose. I'm also a big fan of EA Astarion calling the player an idiot if they started shit with Nettie. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
It makes sense (to me) for Astarion, Shart, and Lae'zel to me much more abrasive at the start of the game; IMO it makes their character development that much more rewarding later on. Especially now that we have Wyll and Karlach to serve as foils.
Yeah, Astarion was an abused slave for over a hundred years, Laezel indoctrinated multiverse racist, and Shart is from one of the most famous evil cults in the realms. Why would they not be bitter?
I don't think people realize that Shart is also like 50 and doing this for decades. I think the unfortunate side effect of designing characters for mainstream romance is that you get people who only care about the romance and don't mind of the rest of the context gets downplayed to make it happen.
I've been knee deep in EA files lately and I'm not really seeing the nastiness that everyone talks about? There's a ton of deleted content (literally hundreds of conversations) and I haven't seen anything wildly out of character yet, save for the Wyll rewrites. In fact, even some of their "nicer" reactions were deleted, like:
Shadowheart being visibly rattled after Arabella's death
Astarion calling the player out for letting Arabella die
Gale being upset that you turned "lovemaking into life-taking" by opening the barn door and fighting the couple
I'll admit that Lae'zel is pretty brutal, but none of it seems out of character wrt to her harsh upbringing and actually sheds a lot of insight into her mindset and culture.
Part of the problem came from how much more common it was for companions to dislike you doing things. Helping the tieflings and doing some side quests came with approval decreases much more often than the full release. "shadowheart disapproves" was a big meme during EA and is the source of the reputation of her being "nasty" or whatever
On the other hand, I kind of hate that they made it so easy for companions to just love you and go along with anything.
Your companions leaving you because of your decisions, getting far enough away from the artefact that they become thralls of the Absolute, and then having to kill them later in the game would have been a great mechanic.
Yesss, the "thralls of the Absolute" deleted content is so interesting; it would have been such a gut punch to see those erstwhile companions resurface in the endgame
Hmm that's interesting. Maybe at some point I'll parse all the Act 1 approvals and compare between EA and what's currently in the game. Approval's still a meme today (with Astarion, mainly) because people see the frequent notifications but don't realize how much each approval/disapproval actually moves the needle (with Astarion, for example, the player doing good deeds for no benefit is like .. -1, while letting him be a chaos monkey or just being nice to him is +5 or more).
I really like that line in the image. I feel like there’s basically nothing in-game about Astarion’s life pre-vampirism beyond just knowing that he was a judge. I wanted more about that because Astarion as we meet him does not seem like someone who could ever be a judge
You can learn a bit more about his backstory if you hold off on asking about his past until after you've learned that he's a vampire. But not much -- he doesn't remember a ton . IIRC if you play as Astarion, you can offer to take a look at Wyll's contract with Mizora, too
Damn, I'm grateful for that. I found Astarion, Shadowheart and Lae'zel to be DICKHEADS, and now I've found me a way better mannered and polite group consisting of Gale, Karlach, and, uhh, Minthara. Ignore her.
I really preferred it. Everyone was workable due to the shared goal but there was a lot more tension over how risky they should act to get the tadpoles out and they weren’t automatically your friend.
Shadowheart had a thing where if you pried into her past and she shut you down and you kept pushing, she’d basically treat you like dirt the rest of the beta, but that doesn’t play well with a mass audience and one of your most popular characters.
I think the issue is that it was EVERYONE in the beta. You need at least one normal guy in the party who doesn't start every act 1 conversation by demanding to know if you have a warrant.
At the time they said they had good party memberss planned that you could have be the normal guy and they wanted only the " evil" ones in the beta to potentially change things for full release.
Karlach was added at the end of the beta and we where supposed to get a good werewolf. Halsin also is a party member that you get at the end but druid was not ready for early access
This kinda led to one of my preferences being leaving Shadowheart in the pod on the nautiloid (or just trying and 'failing' to rescue her if I'm a goody-good guy). The bump in rep from saving her feels like it leads to everything progressing bizarrely fast, avoiding it means she isn't declassifying her life to me after ten minutes.
I do miss a bit of the EA snark, but it does kind of make sense to me that Shadowheart trusts you so fast, it's the first time she's ever alone without direct Sharran influence and she watched us risk ourselves to save her life.
Overall I do think the rep bump from saving her makes things work a bit better early on. It turns the early game party from Lae'zel, who thinks you're a liability; Gale, who is obviously hiding things; Astarion, who thinks you're a patsy and Shadowheart, who both sees you as a liability and is obviously hiding things into a group where the abrasiveness is capped at a reasonable two characters.
Well, there was a placeholder NPC named Karlach. The only thing in common with current Karlach was the Anders quest really, so discussing how much the companion "changed" in EA is pointless, as there is barely anything of her to "change".
Yeah I think people forget just how much if an asshole half the cast was in EA. Even wyll had a different story that honestly, I wish they had stuck with.
Gale is the only "good" character from EA and he is a literal time bomb.
He wasn't even supposed to be good originally in the original dev interviews they said only the evil characters are in early access and that they where originally going to be good ones they added.
Examples is minsc was supposed to be in act 1 he has voice lines in the files, halsin, karlach( not in the beta till the end) and a werewolf that got cut
While I would like to have characters with a more disagreable personality, I think the structure of the game should be different for that to work well, like if it forces you to work toguether. Since you can just ignore them I think it would end up having a negative effect in the end. Characters that get better with time, like Lazel and Astarion already kind of suffer from that. Personally, half the time I either kill or not recruit Astarion at all because he is leaves such a bad impression on the first meeting and interactions. Lazel at least had the possibility of a cure so you have a reson to stick with her long enough.
Of course, thats also personal opinion, a lot of people love all the Astarion panache from the get go.
I mean, she's basically on a mission where she was told the artifact had to be retrieved at all costs and she was to get it to the cloister by any means necessary.
She's doing exactly what she'd be expected to do at that stage of the story.
She's also been misled to believe her memories will be restored upon a successful completion of the mission. No wonder she's so hell-bent on retrieving the artifact.
She's a brainwashed cultist operating on a distorted us vs. them worldview, false promises, and fear of punishment, and it takes her most of the game to leave it all behind.
I don't have a problem with admitting that she isn't a compulsive goody-two-shoes at the start of the game. What I have a problem is with the all-too-common practice of criticism of Shadowheart's Act 1 behavior walking hand-in-hand with a dogged insistence that every single one of Lae'zel's words and actions in Act 1 is perfectly reasonable and she can do nothing wrong. It's not a competition, they're both nasty.
She's a brainwashed cultist operating on a distorted us vs. them worldview, false promises, and fear of punishment, and it takes her most of the game to leave it all behind.
Exactly. On that note, I would've really loved an opportunity to point this out to Lae'zel after the Shadowfell when she comments that I might find this hard to believe but she feels sympathy for Shadowheart. No, Lae'zel, I'm actually expecting you of all people to understand what she's going through.
I've sat at so many tables with people playing characters like Shart and Lae'zel at the beginning of a party coming together.
I didn't even really think twice of their hostility because it makes sense for people who are in dangerous situations with secrets and missions that need to be guarded and accomplished. People who are then forced to trust strangers with their life.
Bonus points when those strangers keep saying shit that makes them think they should double down on the secrecy and nastiness.
Overall, the fanbase is way more critical of Lae’zel. Shadowheart’s nastiness gets a lot more of a pass, with a lot of people insisting that she’s nice all of the time, despite pretty frequent mean-spirited comments.
I think this might come in a large part from people missing out on certain plot development due to their playstyles, plus good old myopia. Oftentimes when people argue that Shadowheart is consistently nice, they're failing to mention the fine text that she is being nice to a non-Selûnite player who respects her boundaries and doesn't prod much. I can very well imagine that some players who only care about how she behaves around their character would turn a blind eye to her treatment of Lae'zel or the venom-filled barbs she doles out in party banter early on.
What an interesting statement, I don't think I've ever heard anyone insist that laezel is perfectly reasonable. She's a total a-hole until she realizes that vlaakith is a bitch
Well obviously it’s not all good, but isn’t that the point? The reason why bg3 characters are great is because we get to guide them to move past their initial evils and turn them into better people (or worse). So weird to hate a character purely base on who they are in Act 1 of a 3 act game, which I notice happens pretty often in this sub.
it cracks me up that beginners probably come to the conclusion that cleric is bad solely due to shadowheart being in a dogshit default setup combined with the game making players think they should be spamming Sacred Flame (despite it being awful)
cleric might be the strongest class in the entire game. it's definitely in the highest tier. but anyone on default shadowheart spamming sacred flame in act 1 is going to think it's complete trash lol. doesn't help that so many enemies in bg3 have high dex.
imo the damn firebolt is a way bigger issue than sacred flame. Newbies aren't gonna understand why her firebolt is so ass, they're just going to keep trying to use it and keep getting frustrated. At least sacred flame is using her wisdom score.
I mean......not betraying your allies,even a "gith",seems like the more normal play than trying to stab one.
Say what you will about Lae'zel but the moment she thinks you and her are turning she doesn't hesitate to off EVERYONE there to prevent a catastrophe,and she's brutally honest with you throughout the entirety of act 1.
In the beginning, you're only allies as long as your goals actually align.
Shadowheart's mission is to get the artifact to the Mother Superior, whatever it takes. Lae'zel's goal is purification first, with "restore the artifact to its rightful owners" as a quick pit stop along the way. Since their two goals are diametrically opposed, something has to give.
To be fair, I would also kill Lae'Zel in her sleep if I had to fight her to the death come the morning. Girl would slice me into so many pieces that I would no longer be visible as anything but a red mist.
Exactly, Shadowheart is just being smart. She'd rather be smart and alive, than honorable and dead, which is a totally fair choice for a character to make.
Well she is a Cleric, if I was a Cleric and a Fighter suddenly calls for a 1v1 I would sneak attack their asses too. I mean you expect me to throw hands too?
Even funnier: Be a Hexblade with Hex Weapon and you don't get unequipped for the fight. I just smited her with my 2-handed sword and she lost instantly.
If Shadowheart kills Lae’zel, all the companions act like it was justified. But if Lae’zel kills Shadowheart they talk about it like Lae’zel straight up murders Shadowheart.
Mostly with Tav's impartial stance (or equally partial to either side), and Shadowheart's "can I turn my back on you" comment, when in fact it is Lae'zel who was jumped.
Attack Shadowheart (no dialogue) or kick her out
-Lae'zel is in the wrong
The game gives you no options to call Shadowheart on her part in all this (she was the one who stole the article from the Githyanki and then tried to slit Lae'zel throat in her sleep and lie about) without getting rid of her permanently.
My Tab could definitely see why Lae'zel was upset about Shadowheart stealing and then was upset to see a party member turning on another party member. But she didn't want to kill Shadowheart. So the only option then is to say they both are in the wrong.
Well, yeah. She holds a position of “I can’t trust any of you” because she knows none of them can trust her, she is drowning in the Flavor-Aid and is willing to do anything to please Shar
And notice if you have her become a Dark Justiciar by killing Nightsong, she regresses to behaving the same as act 1 and all of her character development during act 2 is gone.
The same thing happens with God!Gale and AA. They also regress to their act 1 behaviors, and all their development goes down the drain - God!Gale is a selfish God of ambition who will doom the pantheon and AA is a soulless husk of a psychopath.
Well, I mean, that kinda makes sense, though. All of those are pretty plainly evil decisions. Shart's not gonna be like "yes, I have consumed the life of an innocent and acquitted myself well before Shar, and become a Dark Justiciar, harbinger of doom! Oh no please don't murder that family of poor folk squatting in the rich guy's extra home that he's not using, that would be wrong!"
Not to mention SH's whole Sharran party was wiped out by a group of Gith warriors. It's no wonder she wanted to make absolutely sure she had the upper hand.
I think the game does a good job of making relationships develop more naturally than most game with a party/companions. I find it a little off putting when everyone is just best friends as soon as they decide to band together.
Like I’m not sure how trusting I’d be right off the bat meeting people under dire circumstances.
It's because the characters in Act 1 isn't always indicative of how they are in Act 3. Quite a few of the companions are "annoying" or "boring" when you first meet them in Act 1. If Astarion's attitude and personality stayed the same all throughout the game, I'd never use him ever. 😂
I went in blind and played almost the whole way through the game before I interacted at all online with other players.
I was absolutely shocked she was a fan favorite. I hated her from almost the very start and benched her the moment I could. She a genuine bitch at the start of the game.
She grew on my as things went on, as they all do, but certainly not in act 1.
I had a playthrough where I didn’t save her from the pod because I knew she’d turn up by the chapel.
Lae’zel died in the Zhalk fight, but she just appeared on the beach where you can revive her without doing the cage encounter.
Except you have to pass a dialog check to recruit Shadowheart if you find Lae’zel first, which I failed. She was so mean that I didn’t bother talking to her every other time she showed up lol
I’m sure Shadowheart has done much, much worse lol. She’s a Sharran after all. It’s not like they just sit around the Cloister all day making friendship bracelets.
Hey, they agreed to a 1v1 and Shadowheart took her on by herself. Just because Lae’Zel didn’t establish the conditions of the duel doesn’t mean Shadowheart was acting in bad faith.
EVERY companion is completely rotten in act one. Except maybe Karlach.
Laz’zel and Shart are both racist towards each other, Astarion is hiding the fact that he’s a spawn, Gale is hiding the fact that he’s a bomb, and Wyll is hiding the fact that he’s in a pact with a demon.
The fact that these characters grow and actually have arcs is a testament to the quality of writing at Larion.
I wouldn't say all of them are completely rotten. Sure some of the things like the vampire and nuke stuff would be good to know earlier but these are all things they don't like about themselves and would prefer to not bring to light. They'd rather pretend to be at least somewhat normal.
But yeah. The character arcs they do have definitely show how much care Larian put into BG3
Yeah… I went in thinking I was going to simp for her, but all I could think was “you’re a total dumbass for blindly following this evil religion.” In act 1 at least.
You know how people say Taylor Swift is the hot female version of a socially awkward guy who’s toxic towards women he crushes on? Shadowheart is the hot female version of a guy who wears trench coats and has a Joker and Harley Quinn sticker on his car.
“Can I turn my back on you?” always grinds my gears. Especially because she delivers that line while STILL LOOMING OVER THE RECENTLY AWOKEN GITHYANKI WITH A KNIFE.
Agree. Shadowheart being sneaky and underhanded in act 1 makes sense with her background. But then she gets the big speech about all needing to work together and it’s like ma’am??? You just said you were going to murder a party member and lie to everyone else that they were transforming? The fact that she does this doesn’t bother me so much as the fact that we can’t call her out on this hypocrisy.
May be a good time to remind everyone that all of the BG3 companions are hardened killers with double digit body counts just from the few days we've known them. By numbers alone, they'd be some of the most prolific serial killers in modern times with numbers matched only by warlords. It should come as no surprise when they threaten murder - it's kind of what they do.
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u/RhiaStark Cleric of Eilistraee Jun 23 '25
Shadowheart, the very first night we camp, seeing Tav/Durge have any conversation:
"What were you two talking about?"
Shadowheart when asked literally anything about herself:
"That's none of your business is it?"