Hexxat or Clara
RB178
Member Posts: 25
Hi all,
I know there is another discussion about this which ended in a racial debate (not good!). However, I would like to re-start this since I would like to address a different point about this.
I would like to see a clara version of hexxan which I can match with a good/neutral aligned party. I've played so many times and I am always stuck with either Yoshimo or Jan (Really don't like Nalia). Problem is that I find them both boring by now since I have heard everything they say too many times and I've played their quests way too often.
Hexxat starts out interesting as someone who is confused and when taking her along in the party, I started looking forward to helping her out (mostly good party) and finding out what was behind the obviously artificial front. I was anticipating curing her of whatever was clouding her brain and having a somewhat helpless (thus harmless) evil character, bound by me rescuing her. This could match well with the characters In my party to compensate for the evil nature. (I can also imagine her to be neutral, although that would be based on nothing since we never got to meet her sober in the game) However, after the change-over to the vamp, the real hexxat is a fullblown evil character that cannot be matched with anyone of a good/neutral party.
What it comes down to is that you simply need a thief, mage and a cleric of some kind. The fighters are easy to fill with many choices. I was looking forward to using the new npc's together, but it does not work for my party having a vampire around.
A suggestion I would like to make for this character is
that after killing the real hexxan, a part of hexxan's control is left behind in Clara's mind, so in essence she is hexxan. By taking Clara, the player should be helping Clara with slowly regaining (part of) her old character, and eventually turning neutral. With this being the main objective for a good-aligned party it is a good excuse to have her in the party, while being forced to follow hexxan's storyline as well.
Please refrain from making this a racial debate again and keep it civilized. I understand that the character was meant to be evil, but there are different ways of dealing with evil.
Maybe a dlc or mod? prettyplease?
I know there is another discussion about this which ended in a racial debate (not good!). However, I would like to re-start this since I would like to address a different point about this.
I would like to see a clara version of hexxan which I can match with a good/neutral aligned party. I've played so many times and I am always stuck with either Yoshimo or Jan (Really don't like Nalia). Problem is that I find them both boring by now since I have heard everything they say too many times and I've played their quests way too often.
Hexxat starts out interesting as someone who is confused and when taking her along in the party, I started looking forward to helping her out (mostly good party) and finding out what was behind the obviously artificial front. I was anticipating curing her of whatever was clouding her brain and having a somewhat helpless (thus harmless) evil character, bound by me rescuing her. This could match well with the characters In my party to compensate for the evil nature. (I can also imagine her to be neutral, although that would be based on nothing since we never got to meet her sober in the game) However, after the change-over to the vamp, the real hexxat is a fullblown evil character that cannot be matched with anyone of a good/neutral party.
What it comes down to is that you simply need a thief, mage and a cleric of some kind. The fighters are easy to fill with many choices. I was looking forward to using the new npc's together, but it does not work for my party having a vampire around.
A suggestion I would like to make for this character is
that after killing the real hexxan, a part of hexxan's control is left behind in Clara's mind, so in essence she is hexxan. By taking Clara, the player should be helping Clara with slowly regaining (part of) her old character, and eventually turning neutral. With this being the main objective for a good-aligned party it is a good excuse to have her in the party, while being forced to follow hexxan's storyline as well.
Please refrain from making this a racial debate again and keep it civilized. I understand that the character was meant to be evil, but there are different ways of dealing with evil.
Maybe a dlc or mod? prettyplease?
Post edited by RB178 on
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Comments
What I do think, personally speaking and realising it's more an artistic decision than a necessarily crowd-pleasing one, is that (a theoretical DLC expanded) Clara should not simply live up to the role of a victim to be saved, a tabula rasa to be nursed back to health, a damsel in distress needing a knight. She should be challenging and different than expected. Perhaps she's a very different person than the meek victim she appears to be. Perhaps instead of feeling like a victim, she ends up craving the power she briefly touched, and the charname has to deal with that desire of hers.
Or perhaps, in a different tack, she can't really be saved. Perhaps there is no way to gain back her memories, the person she was, and if charname quests to do so, it would end inevitably in failure and her despair and death. The only way to save her would be to teach her to accept the new person she is rather than chase the dream of the old person she can never be.
In any case, I'd be in favour of a Clara DLC - it has fan demand behind it, and I want to know more about her. I just hope it's more interesting and challenging a story than simply rescuing a hapless victim. There's plenty of that sort of thing in Baldur's Gate already. I'd like Clara to offer something different, more compelling that just filling in a role as "source of yay-I-saved-someone vibes, possible love interest and a thief for good parties if you don't wanna use Jan, Yoshimo or Imoen".
She doesn't have the time to become boring.
You are disappointed because she was not what you imagined. There are plenty of options for good/neutral thieves, but you don't want to use them, you acknowledge that. Hexxat was designed to fill up the void of an evil thief in the game. You can even have hexxat in your party and some good and all of the neutral characters.
Hexxat is designed to be the option for EVIL PARTIES. You bringing her into your party with the intent of rescuing her is very flawed. Yes she was mind controlled, but that does not equate to a good or neutral character hiding underneath. If that doesn't work for your party, roll a new character. At any rate, Hexxat is a million times less evil than Dorn, and you said you wanted to use the new NPC's together. If you can justify Dorn in your party, you should be able to justify Hexxat. Hexxat's evil comes from her drive to live, and is strictly necessary. She is not over the top evil. Dorn wants to kill everyone no matter what the situation is.
Also it's kind of gross you want to have a "helpless" character with no personality personally bound to you because you rescued her.
Clara's death was necessary for Hexxat's story. It immediately tells you multiple things about Hexxat:
1) She will do anything to survive
2) She feels remorse for those she kills, or at least some
3) She doesn't get any joy from being a vampire
What's the point of saving Clara if she's going to be essentially Hexxat? You say you don't want this to be a racial debate, but the only difference in this instance is that she's white and alive with a lot worse stats, instead of black and a vampire. If you can't handle a black and/or vampire character, don't pick her up in your party. The devs shouldn't make DLC because you can't accept that tragic death happens in the game to people you like sometimes. The world, including the in-game world, isn't fair and justice is not always delivered or if it is, not always in the way you would want.
Another person is making a mod I believe if you really want it. But you'll probably be disappointed because it sounds like you already have in your head how you think it should be done. Another persons vision will probably just disappoint you. Clara is essentially a blank slate, which makes projecting your own fantasies on her very easy.
I don't think there should be Clara DLC, mostly because it ends up bowdlerizing Hexxat. If there was however, it should go in a vein as @Ayiekie suggested. It would be less cliche, more interesting, and ultimately a much better story than just recycling quests because you didn't want to play the character provided to you.
Edit: I'd like to follow up on my earlier idea about being unable to "save" Clara's mind, which is irrevocably lost. That one really does appeal to me, on two levels. First, being faced with someone who is simply broken, irrevocably, and cannot be fixed, cannot be returned to what they are, provides an interesting moral dilemna different than others in the series. More interestingly to me, it provides a situation where the "correct" outcome is the "neutral"-aligned outcome. Good-aligned people will want to help Clara recover her memories; evil-aligned people will presumably recruit Hexxat. Neutral-aligned is the most likely to pursue the notion of "What's done can't be undone, let's move on".
I realise it's quite possible for good-aligned characters to have that reaction too, but it still feels like a a neutral reaction to me, so I like the notion on those grounds.
Being interested in Clara on her own merits would be a perfectly legitimate argument if she had any merits to begin with. @AcridSyphilis is correct on all points: she's a cipher, and as such, only as interesting as you imagine her to be. In reality, a Clara DLC would be a waste of time, because there is absolutely no consensus on who she "should" be if you save her from Hexxat.
You yourself aren't immune to this: you've imagined a whole elaborate scenario where Clara's character arc has to do with accepting the loss of her past and trying to reestablish her own identity. Even if I agreed with you that on paper it might make for an interesting story - and I do - the devs could just as easily make her a victimized damsel like Aerie, or something else altogether. She could turn out to be Evil too, to make up for the loss of Hexxat, what will the Good RPers do then?
The only way to accommodate the many, many, many directions people want Clara to go is via mods. An official DLC will offer one story, one possibility, and that will be the end of it.
In case anyone was unaware, there is a feature request with a poll asking for Clara to be made an npc. She is easily winning right now. Maybe there will be a strong enough push one way or the other for the devs to make a statement as to whether it's a possibility or if it will (n)ever happen.
I also agree with Ayiekie's idea. Doesn't really matter how it would be addressed, the possibilities are limitless. Anyway, it seems such an interesting idea to give two directions/storylines to hexxat, depending on the player's choice (ie save clara or hexxat). It could be a cool way to expand on the way that BG2 incorporates different storylines based on player's choices while at the same time bringing in an extra variation for the thief.
People discussing the matter does you no injury. Why try to harass them and stop it? What does it hurt you if people find the idea of a Clara DLC interesting? At worst you can say it may lead to the creation of a DLC you don't want to buy. That's hardly a good enough reason to go around threadcrapping legitimate discussion. I disagree with you on both counts.
On Clara not being interesting: First, that's subjective. I find her interesting as she is, and who exactly are you to tell me I shouldn't? We do know things about her. Not much, sure, but we actually know as much about her as we do half the characters in Baldur's Gate 1 and nobody had any trouble finding them interesting. More to the point, however... the Clara character as it is: a totally normal girl with no future caught up in events beyond her comprehension or control, and then cruelly used and her mind violated by a supernatural being, is already interesting. The totally normal person caught up in events beyond their control is a very well-worn archetype in fiction, and for good reason.
On a Clara DLC being a waste of time: If a Clara DLC is interesting and worth the money to purchase it, it isn't a waste of time. There is never any full consensus on what any character "should" be - that does not mean it's a waste of time to have characters and we should all play Icewind Dale instead. You misunderstand. I proposed two possible scenarios giving a direction for Clara's character beyond her simply being a victim to be rescued and to feel good about rescuing (I elaborated more on one, but I still proposed two). Neither of them are canonical, I am under no illusions they are, and I am not insisting Beamdog use either of my ideas should they make a Clara DLC. They're simply ideas forming the germ of a scenario I'd personally find interesting, nothing more. Sure, but why is that a problem? I'll evaluate a hypothetical Clara DLC on its own merits, not on the merits of what a Clara DLC would be if I'd written it.
No character will ever satisfy everyone. No DLC will ever satisfy everyone. I'm personally not at all certain I agree with how Neera was characterised in BG2EE (that's tentative; I haven't played through her whole story yet). If it turns out I am dissatisfied with Neera, that does not equate to an argument that Neera should have never been put in BG2EE to begin with.
1. You assume Clara was "totally normal" before getting involved with Hexxat.
2. You assume she had "no future" just because Hexxat dismisses her as a subpar thief (like there aren't a million of those running around the Sword Coast anyway).
3. You assume that Clara would be traumatized by Hexxat's mind control; that would only be true if she were aware of the control and remembered what happened in the interim. If breaking free is more like waking up from a deep sleep, she wouldn't have any reason to agonize over those events. (You never see the real Clara - even in her last moments, she still refers to Hexxat as "Mistress").
You have constructed a version of this character which you find interesting - and that's all well and good, except it's your subjective projection of qualities Clara may or may not actually possess. So for you to claim that she's a universal archetype is problematic at best. That, or accept the story for what it is and use mods to accommodate your personal preferences. There will be Clara mods, it's inevitable; better to use malleable tools for a malleable character than have the devs create a DLC that cannot, in any way, meet the varied and variable expectations of the people who are actually calling for it. If Beamdog decides that Clara is a Neutral Evil human with subpar thieving skills, a cursory storyline and a female-only romance option, then that's what Clara will be; if modders decide Clara is a Neutral Good Skald and you'd rather she was a Chaotic Neutral Blade, that's something you can already do. Because your starting point for arguing that such a DLC should exist in the first place is that the character has enough merit to warrant the additional time and effort necessary to create more content for her. And those merits are entirely subjective. No, but if you then make the argument that you should have been able to give Neera up to the Red Wizards and recruit Ekandor instead, and that Ekandor should therefore be a DLC character, you'd probably need better justification than your own subjective evaluation of what the latter could be.
Pretty much agree with everything shawne and AcridSyphilis have said.
Bloody hell, if there is such a negative attitude to some players' interests, I would suggest to forget about it and I'll refrain from posting about this in the future. I didn't think this would be such a moody community... blagh
I did nothing but draw logical and obvious inferences from the information we are given about Clara. In that case, why should the Enhanced Edition exist at all? Why should Hexxat exist at all? There were already mods with a vampire character. Your insistence that all desire for a DLC character to directed to mod making is at direct odds both with the very nature of the game's existence, as well as the dev team having already openly considered making DLC NPCs (by making a poll asking what people would pay for one). The devs have also said they are not against a DLC for Clara on principle (they have not said they are for it, either).
Your personal crusade against the topic is your own. I suggest you make your own anti-Clara topic, where you and like-minded people can gather to complain that people want to pay for DLC and make sweeping generalisations as to their motives and character, and stop trying to torpedo other people's discussions and fun.
You are the problem here. Not the people making a handful of threads about Clara. My starting point for arguing for such a DLC is that I am interested in it and would likely pay for it. That is also the starting point for arguing for any and all possible DLCs for any game ever made. It is not for you to decide what I should or should not be interested in, and all desire for DLC for a videogame is inherently subjective.
I desperately want Beamdog to use their limited resources on fresh, unique content. New quests in new areas. Entirely new NPCs, in under-represented races/kits, or even brand new races/kits. The possibilities are endless. Why are we trying to settle for the first character we see that just so happens to have voiced lines and a portrait?
Also, who says that a hypothetical DLC Clara is not going to be an unrepresented kit? I've suggested in another thread that perhaps she ought to be a bard, a currently unrepresented class (Haer'Dalis does not really play like a normal bard).
Aside from that, why does this have to be an either/or thing for you? Is it impossible to have both?
And just what IS interesting in her? Average characters plunging into wild adventure is a popular theme of fantasy, but not one that Baldur's Gate subscribes to. The BG saga is about an ascendant demigod and his or her highly capable companions, not the story of how Clara the chipper whore got to get out of the game by almost becoming vampire food.
And if you don't? That's fine! If a Clara DLC is made and that is its focus, feel free not to buy it. See? It's really that easy, and notice how it doesn't require me to denigrate your preferences, insinuate they are invalid, or make wild assumptions about your motivations for having them.
If you attempt to start an argument in a thread that wasn't asking for an argument, and the people in that thread ask you to stop, then stop.
I am asking you to stop. Please stop. Leave the thread to people who want to discuss Clara, and stop trying to start arguments to prevent discussion of Clara.
If you can't control yourselves, I'm requesting that a mod enforce the forum rule on the matter. It is ridiculous that every single thread about the character is continuously invaded by people whose only desire is to stifle the discussion.
The big difference is Clara already is a recruitable NPC in BG2. Currently the player has no input on whether or not he exchanges Clara for Hexxat. That means huge problems for Hexxats first quest and makes it very non sensical. Good RPGs give you as much choice as possible. It's one thing to have something happen that the player would not be able to influence anyway seperated by distance or time. But if this something happens in a situation, where normally the player would be able to act, then it becomes railroading. The game needs to have a pretty good reason to take away my control as a player for story purposes.
In this case it was handled badly.
If you're really going to pursue that angle of writing, give me an example of how it would work. What possible justification could Clara, failed actress and former prostitute, have in following the offspring of the God of Murder into a dungeon? Morbid curiosity? What justification could the protagonist have for taking her along? None of it makes sense.
Do you honestly think it didn't occur to ANY of the developers to make Clara a permanent party member? It's easy for the pro-Clara people to daydream about making her a permanent, "true" NPC, but it's pretty clear from how BG2EE was launched that the developers opted against it. Stop making that goddamn argument. Obviously I don't have to purchase it. What I DO have to endure is not getting fresher, better DLC because the developers spent their finite resources on fleshing out Clara.
This isn't just whether or not you get what you want. This is whether or not you get what you want, at the expense of what other people want. If Beamdog decides to take the time to make a DLC NPC, it will take the place of a theoretical as-yet-unseen new NPC. Sorry that you're tired of defending your opinion. I am, too. I see no reason to stop pointing out reasons why making Clara a permanent NPC is ridiculous and time-wasting, and I haven't seen anything even remotely approaching a reason to change my mind on the matter.
You're welcome to "Discuss Clara", which I'm reading as "projecting qualities of your dream NPC onto a blank slate that spends all of five minutes in your party", in any of the existing threads on the subject. But this is a discussion forum, not a soap box. I'm not spamming general with threads titled "NPCs die, deal with it" and "Stop undermining the developers' creative work with your demands to incorporate fan fiction", after all.
If you think the conclusion of Hexxat's recruitment quest was handled imperfectly, that's a perfectly valid opinion to have. One I might even agree with you on. That's a far cry from demanding that Clara, an NPC created SOLELY for the purpose of setting up a plot twist and then dying, needs to be a permanent party member.