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Does anyone else think the Shadowheart showdown at the House of Grief ends oddly?
Talk to priestess: Does Shar know about this prism thing? “Nah”
Kill everyone. (Ok this part was expected, but a little disappointing)
Documents: Prism operatives are Totally Expendable.
Next room: Shadowheart’s parents are being personally tortured by Shar. This is right in front of the memory eraser, which seems like the temple’s money maker.
Tonally, this seems so strange. I guess it is part of the Larian design philosophy that gods must be directly involved, but it doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense here.
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Spoilers
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Use the text [SPOILER] at the beginning of your title, do not include any spoilers in the title. Use the appropriate spoiler markup to conceal that content in the body of your post.My take on this is that Shar knew about the prism, but simply just did not care. Sharran documents like to refer to the Dead Three as “godlings” which makes a lot of sense from the perspective of Shar. She’s old. Like really old. To her the Dead Three are not much more than mortals who tricked their way into a fractional amount of power, so their machinations are childlike at best and nowhere near on the scope of what Shar is capable of.
I agree though that Shar wouldn’t thematically ever make any personal appearance or have any direct involvement with any of her plots. That isn’t her style. She would whisper commands to super high level followers, but even then never divulge the why of it. You would just get orders not explanations.
That seems reasonable, they seem consistent about the ‘godling’ thing.
I think any explanation as to why Shar would personally care would tie the scene together at least a little.
My interpretation was that Shar had nothing to do with it, it was Mother Superior making a power play. If you have Shadowheart kill the Nightsong, Shar empowers her to “cleanse” the church of the unfaithful (meaning Mother Superior and her acolytes).
Huh, interesting. So both paths lead to killing everyone in the temple.
What happens with Shadowheart’s parents and the mirror of loss room if Nightsong is killed?
I killed the Nightsong, and was able to persuade most of the Sharrans in the temple to join me; only had to fight Viconia and a handful of supporters. Shar tells Shadowheart to kill her parents to cement her loyalty, after which she will take away her memory of doing it.
Shadowhearts story ending feels underwhelming compared to, say, Astarion.
I’d say it’s about on par, in that the (bad guy) endings both feel kind of unsatisfying, largely because you don’t get a chance to enjoy any of the power you’ve nominally seized. Obviously there are plot reasons for this, but it ends up making the victories feel a bit hollow.
I don’t know if Larian ever had plans to implement class-based stronghold quests à la BG2, but some of the origin character quest lines seem well suited for it. If I had my druthers, there’d be ways for players to take over and run places like the Emerald Grove, House of Grief, maybe the Circus of the Last Days. Could be good expansion fodder, but I haven’t read anything yet about whether they’re working on one.
