While playing through Act 3, a Baldur’s Gate 3 player finally concluded that there’s no way of fixing Astarion.
Companions in Baldur’s Gate 3 have their own trials and tribulations to work through over the course of the experience. Thankfully, players can lend a helping hand by completing companion-centric side quests.
But because the role-playing title features such a colorful cast of characters, not every companion will finish their arc as a hero.
One hopeful player learned this lesson the hard way after completing Astarion’s arc and realizing they’re “going to have to deal with him.”
(Spoilers follow for Baldur’s Gate 3.)
Baldur’s Gate 3 player “made a terrible mistake” with Astarion
In a Reddit thread, a user named Confident-Gas-6563 shared their disappointment in Astarion’s refusal to be better. The Redditor said they’ve helped their companions become better versions of themselves by “letting them make their own choices.”
And the assumption with Astarion was that he’d lean toward being “a depressed loner who wants to get back at daddy and stop his abuse.”
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Upon completing the Ascension mission, however, the user realized that Ascendant Astarion is now “a confident vampire lord who’s talking about making an army to plunge the world into darkness.”
Now the player’s thinking their only option is to “deal with him… I guess lucky for me Karlach can kill him in two or three attacks, so I got that going for me.”
Other BG3 fans in the comments don’t understand why the Redditor trusted Astarion to begin with. One response reads, “Gotta say, trusting the guy who has repeatedly spoken of taking control of tadpoles, cults, elder brains, and anything else he thinks he might be able to control to dominate masses of people is definitely a show of faith on your part.”
More people reminded the player that Astarion made his intentions clear from the very start. It seems most have accepted that there really is no fixing bad boys, no matter how hard one tries.
There is a way to prevent Ascendant Astarion from coming to power, thereby saving thousands of vampire spawn. (It takes a lot of convincing on the player’s part, though.)
And, by all accounts, the unascended version of the character is much more pleasant to be around. Ultimately, players have to decide what works best for their own story.