Morally speaking, allying with Barrowholm was not the same as allying/killing Anasteria. I understand it’s a grim world, but this choice literally makes you evil.
I like morally grey decisions, however there’s no way this can be morally explainable to anyone except perhaps the pragmatic ones i.e I allied with them to get an ally against Chthon, and also for lootz and augments.
I know there are similar such decisions, such as saving or killing the couple who dupe you into giving them iron, and saving or leaving the cultists in the chthonic rift, but none of these are as monstrous as this decision.
I know it’s called Grim Dawn for a reason, but perhaps this decision was the most grim for me, and I don’t think I can even call it grim.
I hope that more thought will go behind making choices such as these in the future. I would also love to hear your thoughts on this matter, especially the devs. Was it simply just pushing the moral barrier as far as you can go?
Well, they give you a mission to save people from the Wendigo camps. They tell you they want to increase the population but they simply eat them.
Or how they kill the witch Larrisa if you spared her. Or they feed you, if you really wanted to replinish you constituion there, a soup with human flesh.
Well, they are cannibals and are devoting themselves to a Wendigo but as the story of Grim Dawn explains it mmight be out of desparation.
Same goes with the Blood Sworn. I think a lot of people just wanted to be safe and would pay every price for that but I a not so sure about the people in Barrowholm.
Until now there wasn’t really a “will you cross the moral event horizon?” choice and I don’t mind that it’s there. Given the apocalyptic situation I’m honestly surprised that there aren’t more of them. Up until this point the choices you have are “save them” or “save them while quipping sarcastically”, to me at least. Now you can be a monster.
I’d like it more if it was more of a moral choice and not a gameplay decision based on gear availability, seeing how unlike Kymon/DV, it’s mandatory, and if in doubt, why not pick what gives you more items and a superboss?
Grim Dawn is supposedly about moral ambiguity in the aftermath of the apocalypse, which simpy becomes a non-factor if one choice is clearly preferable with regard to gameplay.
Barrowholm feels more restrictive than just about any other choice in this regard, even killing Isaiah in EA prior to craftable dynamite…
Also what disappoints me a bit is once you go hostile on them the village is filled with some trash wendigos and … nothing. That Scorv (or whatever his name was) doesn’t even respawn. Underwhelming.
I was about to make almost the same thread as this so I thought I’d tack on to this one.
I am not really a story-driven player, I barely pay attention to what is happening in questlines, but when i realised what was going on with Barrowholm I immediately wanted to reverse my decision.
Upon doing a little research it seems like the choice offered is “side with cannibals and get access to awesome gear and enchants, or don’t side with cannibals and get nothing”.
Is that actually the choice you present us with here?
Because that is a really, really awful design choice to make. It is literally impossible to make a character that makes “good” choices without knowingly giving up top notch vendor stuff without any possible replacement.
Is there something I’m missing? Is there an equivalent vendor that pops up somewhere else when you decide to kill off barrowholm?
I would very much like to kill off barrowholm, but I’m not going to do that if it means I give up the opportunity to get good stuff from a vendor that I cannot otherwise replace.
Probably would have been fun if we would have been able to join Cronley’s Gang for loot and power (maybe vendorable/craftable aether shards), a similarly morally questionable decision
I agree with the OP, maybe a decision more like the Kymon/Death’s Vigil choice, like evil toons side with Barrowholm and get their vendor goodies and other toons kill them and get a new vendor in the Witch town (an escaped victim of Barrow perhaps) that sells you goodies based on how much Barrow hates you. That sounds like a more fair system to me.
Not getting an equivalent material reward, but doing it anyway, is the nature of making “good” choices. People who require the equivalent of the “evil” reward in order to be “good” are not good, they’re capitalist.
I don’t see a problem there, you’ve already chosen between demon worshippers and necromancers (and Uroboruuk’s background is very sketchy, even when not as obvious as Korvaak’s ball). So sacrificing several plebs would be a drop in the ocean compared to that.
Strange you have problems with Barrowholm, when you are sent there on behalf of witchgod worshipping witches.
I’d say it’s entirely possible to be a morally decent person and still side with Barrowholm. I might need those augments and gear to help me “save the world”, I could die without them. And if I’m dead? Well, I hope those few people I saved from cannibals (who, might I add, probably would have died anyway) are gonna enjoy what little is left of their lives, because the one person who could have potentially halted the Aetherial invasion died due to having crappier gear than he could have had.
