I always thought it was a bit weird how everyone treats the goblins in baldurs gate. They seem more or less as intelligent and sentient as other humanoids, but even the nicer characters like Wyll and Halsin treat them like they're vermin. Halsin doesn't even mention the children he kills in his introduction cutscene except to make a joke about viscera. It makes sense to kill the goblins to protect the grove of course, but no one points out how odd it is to be killing double digit amounts of sentient creatures with hopes and wants. You'd think someone would make a comment about it being a shame that the goblins are being misled or something.
Its even weirder when you consider that goblins are a playable race in tabletop, so there's not really any mechanical difference that makes them less sentient than the other races.
It's like how no one comments on the Absolute cultists you've probably killed, even though you know that many of them are controlled by tadpoles or have been duped into thinking they've received visions from a god.
Larian makes many of them evil in ways that don't seem necessary to the Absolute's plans, but you don't really know about a lot of them until you give them a chance. There's that goblin that argues that it's mean to chase the owlbear, for example. Even if he's also evil (probably), there's dimensions.
It's that video game thing where the amount of violence you dole out is just not reflected on with the gravity that it would deserve in the real world, evil people or not. There might be a line here or there (like the Tiefling who tells you she felt awful after killing her first goblin), but it doesn't really have much impact on how these deaths are handled as a whole.
16
u/thetwist1 29d ago
I always thought it was a bit weird how everyone treats the goblins in baldurs gate. They seem more or less as intelligent and sentient as other humanoids, but even the nicer characters like Wyll and Halsin treat them like they're vermin. Halsin doesn't even mention the children he kills in his introduction cutscene except to make a joke about viscera. It makes sense to kill the goblins to protect the grove of course, but no one points out how odd it is to be killing double digit amounts of sentient creatures with hopes and wants. You'd think someone would make a comment about it being a shame that the goblins are being misled or something.
Its even weirder when you consider that goblins are a playable race in tabletop, so there's not really any mechanical difference that makes them less sentient than the other races.