You only get to see their conversation if you choose Gale as your origin character.

There is a surprising number of options for what he does. You can find them all on YouTube, I couldn’t be bother playing through as him.

I feel like he’s a well written character, and people underestimate how much he changes based on player choices.

When you first meet him he’s desperate and clearly hiding something, but a nice enough fellow. Then you learn he used to be a REALLY big deal (ie. Level 20 Wizard) but flew too close to the sun. Fair enough, a megalomaniac who has learned his lesson.

Then he’s offered a deal: sacrifice yourself to save the world, absolve yourself of your sins, die a hero. The the thing is at first he’s ON BOARD with this. The first time this solution is proposed, he can totally see the logic of it. And on face value, blowing up the Absolute right there in act 2 is the best case scenario for everyone. The enemy and all their army wiped out in one hit, without risking it all trying to fight them one by one. He has a chance to die a hero and save literally thousands of lives with his own.

But what happens is that players want to play the game. They want to see Baldur’s Gate. So they convince Gale not to sacrifice himself, to make the selfish choice and choose to live. So they miss their chance to kill all three and the brain in one spot, and have to traipse around the city gathering allies for a super risky final battle.

In the process, the players turn Gale BACK into the megalomaniac he started as. Because we coached him into ignore the advice of his (very wise) peers like Mystra and Elminster, he starts thinking he’s God’s gift all over again. Starts coveting power, first to save his own skin, but then just for power’s sake. And in the end, if you let him, he learns absolutely nothing from his whole saga: he’s the same power tripping manchild he started as.

I think if theres poor writing, it’s having the choice of blowing himself up in act 2. That’s way too soon: if you want to see a third of the game, you HAVE to convince him to ignore him most treasured mentors and be selfish. It feels very railroady and the only version of Gale you can play as/with in act 3 is someone who has turned completely away from the path to redemption

Ah that’s it, thanks.

That being said my other complaints still stand: the whole thing is incredibly tedious for an animation you are going to see hundreds, possibly thousands of times over a standard playthrough.

I feel like this is an example of singular testing: they designed an experience that looks great when you look at it once, but forgot that it’s going to be seen hundreds of times

I used a third party app so I haven’t noticed so much, but j do like the idea that my lurking is not being watched and sold to some corporate entity.

Not just OSX: anyone using WSL on windows is an offender too

But as a WSL user, dockerised Dev environments are pretty incredible to have running on a windows machine.

Does it required 64 gig of ram to run all my projects? Yes. Was it worth it? Also yes

The only way the liberals would ever give an inch on this issue is if they know there’s a smoking gun.