Hexxat is the best Enhanced Edition NPC [Major Spoilers!]
Baptor
Member Posts: 342
So I've played through BGEE and BG2EE a few times now and I've tried all the new NPCs. (I also tried out most of the new ones in SOD but only once). They all have merit and I can tell a lot of work went into each one. I don't want anyone to think I'm "anti" any of the NPCs here.
But gosh, I just LOVE Hexxat.
If you haven't read the title, there are major spoilers after this, so please stop and don't ruin it for yourself if you haven't gotten her. Half the fun of Hexxat is the mystery surrounding her!
1. Recruiting Hexxat
Hexxat has by far the most unique recruitment of all the NPCs. You start out meeting Clara who says she is Hexxat and appears to be touched in the head. Regardless she claims to know a nearby tomb full of riches and magic items, and what adventurer can resist that? (It both amuses and annoys me to NO end that so many people thought Clara really was to be the real NPC you get and complained up and down the forums about it. Even I realized that there was more than meets the eye to her and that it would be interesting and worth it to follow the girl and see where it led.) Of course you learn the tomb is a trap and that a vampire guards it. You find Hexxat is really another person (who has a great portrait and voice acting) who is also a vampire and who, without hesitation, drains poor Clara to death to effect her freedom. That is awesome writing.
2. Hexxat's Questline
I enjoyed both Neera and Rasaad's quests but man nothing tops the Indiana Jones quests of Hexxat. She is like the evil Dr. Jones who is stealing artifacts not for a museum but for a mysterious private collector with likely nefarious purposes - and she just doesn't care either. The exotic destinations you are whisked away to on her missions are unlike any other. Heck in your first two you go to Kara-Tur AND Al-Quadim. That is amazing stuff. Each had just the right amount of traps, puzzles and monsters.
3. Hexxat is a Vampire!
And not one of these new fangled sparkly vampires who aren't really evil vampires. She's a real vampire. She drinks blood, she kills people, she has (almost) no remorse. She has cool abilities. She is immune to a ton of things that easily dispatch others, like energy drain.
4. The Cloak
At first I thought the Cloak of Dragonmir would be really annoying, but it isn't. It adds a measure of balance to an otherwise OP character and a great RP dimension to her. She's a bad A vampire but she depends on the PC to a certain extent. Plus, free bag of holding!
5. Attitude
So your PC is a god-child and part of an epic prophecy surrounding the Lord of Murder and his imminent return. *Yawn* Hexxat could care less. She's so blase about your quest and your needs, all she cares about is her missions and what she can get out of adventuring by your side. The fact that the lives of millions rest on your shoulder is almost *amusing* to her. But there's more to her than meets the eye: she has some kind of standard. She makes remarks every now and then alluding that she wishes there were a way out, and she refuses to turn Dorn when he asks because she does not want to spread her curse to others. She's evil, but it's an evil you just can't hate.
6. The Mysterious L
This one's such a big spoiler I won't even disclose it here. As a big Realms fan, I suspected who it was as soon as I knew his name was L. There's only one powerful evil dude in the Realms who regularly employs and half-enslaves other powerful undead to be his gophers whose name starts with L. Great touch to a great storyline.
Anyways, to Beamdog, whoever on your team came up with Hexxat, they did a FANTASTIC job. Hexxat is as cool, unique, and interesting as the NPCs from PLANESCAPE: TORMENT, and you know that's saying something!
But gosh, I just LOVE Hexxat.
If you haven't read the title, there are major spoilers after this, so please stop and don't ruin it for yourself if you haven't gotten her. Half the fun of Hexxat is the mystery surrounding her!
1. Recruiting Hexxat
Hexxat has by far the most unique recruitment of all the NPCs. You start out meeting Clara who says she is Hexxat and appears to be touched in the head. Regardless she claims to know a nearby tomb full of riches and magic items, and what adventurer can resist that? (It both amuses and annoys me to NO end that so many people thought Clara really was to be the real NPC you get and complained up and down the forums about it. Even I realized that there was more than meets the eye to her and that it would be interesting and worth it to follow the girl and see where it led.) Of course you learn the tomb is a trap and that a vampire guards it. You find Hexxat is really another person (who has a great portrait and voice acting) who is also a vampire and who, without hesitation, drains poor Clara to death to effect her freedom. That is awesome writing.
2. Hexxat's Questline
I enjoyed both Neera and Rasaad's quests but man nothing tops the Indiana Jones quests of Hexxat. She is like the evil Dr. Jones who is stealing artifacts not for a museum but for a mysterious private collector with likely nefarious purposes - and she just doesn't care either. The exotic destinations you are whisked away to on her missions are unlike any other. Heck in your first two you go to Kara-Tur AND Al-Quadim. That is amazing stuff. Each had just the right amount of traps, puzzles and monsters.
3. Hexxat is a Vampire!
And not one of these new fangled sparkly vampires who aren't really evil vampires. She's a real vampire. She drinks blood, she kills people, she has (almost) no remorse. She has cool abilities. She is immune to a ton of things that easily dispatch others, like energy drain.
4. The Cloak
At first I thought the Cloak of Dragonmir would be really annoying, but it isn't. It adds a measure of balance to an otherwise OP character and a great RP dimension to her. She's a bad A vampire but she depends on the PC to a certain extent. Plus, free bag of holding!
5. Attitude
So your PC is a god-child and part of an epic prophecy surrounding the Lord of Murder and his imminent return. *Yawn* Hexxat could care less. She's so blase about your quest and your needs, all she cares about is her missions and what she can get out of adventuring by your side. The fact that the lives of millions rest on your shoulder is almost *amusing* to her. But there's more to her than meets the eye: she has some kind of standard. She makes remarks every now and then alluding that she wishes there were a way out, and she refuses to turn Dorn when he asks because she does not want to spread her curse to others. She's evil, but it's an evil you just can't hate.
6. The Mysterious L
This one's such a big spoiler I won't even disclose it here. As a big Realms fan, I suspected who it was as soon as I knew his name was L. There's only one powerful evil dude in the Realms who regularly employs and half-enslaves other powerful undead to be his gophers whose name starts with L. Great touch to a great storyline.
Anyways, to Beamdog, whoever on your team came up with Hexxat, they did a FANTASTIC job. Hexxat is as cool, unique, and interesting as the NPCs from PLANESCAPE: TORMENT, and you know that's saying something!
11
Comments
Stat wise her abilities did not make much sense. There is no logical reason for her not to be able.to level drain. And as a pure class thief she is the opposite of OP.
As for L, meh. Do not feel you can do a character like him justice with a cameo like this. Felt like named dropping to me. Though in this case Neera is just as bad.
I was just bored of it all by the end.
Hexxat is often used as an example of what is wrong with the extended editions, and that Beamdog can't write like Bioware could, and so on and on. I'm pretty sure she would have gotten better ratings if not written by Beamdog but some unknown modder.
Frankly, Hexxat appears to me as the victim of excessive ambition. As if the writer had this awesome story and ideal gameplay planned in their head and forgot she was supposed to be a BG2 character, realizing too late the limitations of the setting and game engine. I wouldn't be surprised if she happened to have a large amount of cut content.
Perhaps this is why I can't really bring myself to dislike her even though I loathe Neera (who is objectively better integrated than Hexxat.)
There's some real dumpster fire NPCs, and most are so-so and fairly forgotten. I mean, how many mod NPCs do you know BY NAME? I can probably do a couple dozen, and as I said, I just recently combed the interwebs for making a list of them all. But there are some good ones, Sturgeon's law and all. Heck, taking Sturgeon's law literally, there should be 15-16 good mod NPCs.
I don't find Hexxat all that special, already got 3 other Vampires on the list, 2 of them being Thieves as well.
I don't have a Juno down. Whossat?
I would say, from browsing a whole lot of NPC reviews, that it seems people have a real hate-on for punctuation-spamming in dialogs with parentheses, ellipses, and asterisks denoting actions, thoughts or other non-verbal communication. Although broken (unplayable) mods, OP stats (Where Chloe gets most of her hate), OP gear, and bad voice acting are all in there too. I can stomach quite a bit of excessive punctuation (Hey, look at my posting style), but I can't stomach badly worded lines, or even worse, badly written lines that got voice acted. Hey, Saerileth...
Personally, what I look for in an NPC mod is a character who provides something vanilla NPCs don't, which is usually a class (e.g. Tashia), or an expansion of an NPC, namely through various NPC friendships and banterpacks; or, a big reason for me making the list, because I wanted to see about NPC-NPC romance. That didn't actually pan out too well, only 6 when one excludes paired NPCs in the same mod, and I couldn't stomach most of those pairings, such as Chloe->Imoen being one of them. I prefer the NPC to have good, but not broken stats and class (There's more than a few Kensai, F/M, even Kensai/Mages on the list).
If the person writing the new content doesn't have to run it past the writers who wrote the original NPC's I think there's a tendency to change the expected or more in character reactions of the existing NPC's to suit the new NPC.
Especially if the new/mod NPC is very in your face., "look at me I'm so special".
Her personality works for me too. She's a really practical kind of evil that's very different from the other evil npcs in game. I like that if you take her into a good/neutral party she tries to actually befriend any npc that doesn't have an innate way to detect evil on her.
I don't get a lot of the complaints about 'writing'. After playing her full quest, seemed perfectly fine with me. It seems more like a style or tone complaint which has merit but is a lot of an 'eye of the beholder' kind of thing to me.
The best thing to do when you get "Hexxat" is to go straight to Dragonmir's Tomb and do the quest immediately.
Also I've got to agree to the second, though the group DOES eventually voice their displeasures and eventually even take action against her. See my earlier comment on Mazzy.
For me, most of the interactions made sense. Dorn asks Hexxat to turn him so he can become more powerful, Hexxat refuses because she doesn't want to spread her curse (and given her ultimate decision, makes sense.) Mazzy hates Hexxat and eventually decides that no matter what CHARNAME says, a vampire is worthy only to be destroyed and duels her to the death (not gonna lie, I reloaded after this one because Mazzy defeated her and Hexxat ran off with half my stuff.) Lastly after Imoen loses her soul, she asks Hexxat what it's like to be undead (because Imoen fears she may become undead, or is contemplating the transformation to cheat death like Bodhi) and Hexxat lies and tells her it's not so bad but the confesses to CHARNAME that being undead is unending torment.
So my experience was much better. I guess they wrote some banter better than others. =/
I just looked up the Korgan banter with her on youtube. He makes a sexual pass at her and she implies she'd drink his blood and he sorta just 'eh I'll pass'. He doesn't get 'intimidated' by her just loses interest and Korgan makes a lot of sexual passes at Mazzy he also backs down from so... eh?
Korgan: I have been resisting my urges far too long... I can hold off no longer.
Player: What on earth are you talking about, Korgan?
Korgan: Ye are a fine-lookin' PRO_RACE! Ach, ye have no beard to speak of, but I be a man of the world and able to look past such things. CHARNAME, yer beauty has overwhelmed me!
Player: At last, Korgan! Now our feelings are out in the open, and our love can bloom!
Korgan: Eh? You actually feel... uh... well, let's not be too hasty, lassie.
Player: What's the matter, Korgan? Getting cold feet?
Korgan: No... uh... no offense intended, lassie. Ye are indeed a fine-lookin' woman, and mighty powerful too. A true catch, if I say so myself.
Korgan: Ach, ye know as well as I that it could never work out between us, lassie. It's that Bhaal taint of yours, ye understand. That immortal piece of yer soul. Ye be more than this dwarf could handle, and that's the truth.
When I first met Hexxat...I almost couldn't believe what I was seeing. I haven't used Hexxat yet since i'm a heavy roleplayer and most of my charname's are either too good or too practical to take an evil vampire who just murdered my old companion along. I'm playing evil for the first time now just to try it. I will say that as a vampire thief she doesn't stand out much. This is a city caught in the midst of a guild war between thieves, and vampires, after all. Her personality so far after the initial incident seems more practical and makes me more forgiving although i've only just started.
@AWizardDidIt you make a really good point about the overall writing consistency, particularly where you can kill an innocent and not lose good party members. I guess Clara's demise stood out to me more since she's a member of your party. If I'm being honest there's no way even my charname would accept or trust Hexxat after that, though I was willing to overlook it because I wanted to try the new NPC. As I mentioned to @Baptor, it's been ages since I played her and I guess my memory is fuzzy - I remember the Korgan dialogue differently. Thanks for the clarification.
Edit: @Artemius_I thanks for posting that dialogue. Jeeze, I really remembered that badly. If I were a mage I'd be struggling to memorize my spells. Cheers to middle age.
She's just sloppy all around... Still I'm willing to overlook it for the weird film noir vibes she gives off and for the awesome portrait.
I honestly can't tell if Hexxat is messing with Aerie here or if she is being genuine.
I like to think it's a bit of both.
Either way, this one became the fuel for my headcanon that Hexxat has a special weekness for 'maiden' type of women.
"Return the heart and all is well again. If only it were as easy for me..."
Stuff like that is why I like her.