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The Gold Dragon writing that I saw was very much redemption 'just because', and also wanted to treat everybody's petty problems like they were equal when ultimately, they aren't, and we're in the middle of a war where people are dying in droves every day. Someone who wants a cheese wheel is not as important as someone whose family is dying, and denying that isn't 'learning humility', it's play-acting.
Azata felt like a much more satisfying path if you want to redeem baddies. I hope Gold Dragon gets re-written, because the sheer awesomeness of getting to turn yourself into a dragon got undercut hard by how limp-wristed the whole affair was. I wanted to be a fiery protector of the people and Gold Dragon did not give me that.
One thing is that it at least got me thinking about the ethics of what the Gold Dragon was doing. He was healing people who most likely were going back into the wastes to do more evil and then coming back again to be healed. It's very childish idea of what being 'good' entails. It's such a radical position because you're dooming countless innocent lives just to save a few who were already corrupt.
It really reminds of tele-evangelist and those 'pop' christian leaders who have such a radical reading of the bible that they end up underming their own message.
At least it gives one neutral option, the [Good] option is laughable. And there's no reason for the option to kill Hal to be [evil] since he is literally undermining the crusade's efforts.
Peter 2:9
“If this is so, then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials and to hold the unrighteous for punishment on the day of judgment.”
Ember's position is childish, but she is actively trying to change people for the better. Hal just seems to think that every good deed will propagate itself on its own, when multiple characters in this game show you that that is not true. And that is naive. Not only do people rarely improve on their own, but some people bank on this kind of forgiveness so they can exploit it.
I am, within the constraints of fictional writing, down for taking a chance on people and giving them a chance to change... but they have to actually want to change. Gold Dragon feels like I'm being told to play Undertale in the middle of W40K. I wanted to be a dragon the way Terendelev looked to be a dragon - kind to her people but ready to throw down with everything that threatened them. She wasn't trying to save the cultists that were massacring Kenabres.
I did not spare Nurah or Sosiel's act 2 cultist because both of those people laughed at me and said "lol no, I'm gonna keep killing people." At that point, even if redemption is possible, other people are going to pay for it with their lives. I'm the only person who can choose to shoulder the consequences for my idealism. Anything else is a mix of myopia and apathy towards anyone who isn't in my line of sight.
I did spare Hal's cultist, because the game obviously wanted me to, but I was perturbed that the topic of change or the question of 'are you still going to be a cultist?' never came up. I don't think it's unrealistic to at least check in that the person you're hoping to save has an interest in changing. And after following through and hitting Act 5, I found I didn't like the writing on the Gold Dragon path. It didn't feel connected within the same reality of the world I was playing in? The stakes were wildly incongruous with everything the game had shown me thus far and if those choices ever paid off, I didn't get to it before the game broke on me. I'm still angry about the cheese...
I'm allowed to critique a game's writing. If WOTR failed to present its case to me, as someone who wanted to be a goody two shoes and hold hands with anyone who would accept me reaching out to them, that doesn't mean I'm the problem here. Azata's writing felt much better... hm, integrated? Justified within its own themes? When I was sparing bad guys there, it felt like I was blitzing the world with the power of friendship and breaking all the rules that'd governed the crusade for a hundred years, and that mercy and free spirit was why I was winning. Same with Ember; the buildup of her movement into a force strong enough to defy all logic (and probably add a few years onto Regill's life) was powerful. People would come together and listen to each other and forget their differences - we were appealing to a fundamental humanity that persisted even in the buried hearts of demons.
Switching from that to Gold Dragon was a major letdown on my first experience with this game when I thought the 'save everyone I can' path would be the one for me. It felt so much shallower in presentation when I'd come to expect a higher standard of emotional connection and complex motives. Everything I saw from Gold Dragon was about sparing people just because, where Ember was about changing hearts and Azata was somewhere between that and being flexible enough to point your enemies at your bigger enemies. And I especially didn't like being handed the Just Because because the game had carried me to this point via five acts of slaughtering waves of nameless enemies in the name of righteousness. Why am I picking and choosing to save enemies who've dispensed with words and aren't surrendering now? The game is trying to prove a point, but is it condemning me for not doing this any time before? Given the amount of people I have to continue to kill in this fashion, and have no option to spare, I don't think it's doing a very good job.
I get it though. At first glance the actions seem odd, childish and pointless. Even counter productive. But that is not the point nor the purpose of the test. You're supposed to show willingness to be good regardless of the effects it has nor the reasons or reward. It has to be pure. It's a test of spirit and heart. The results do not matter. It's about your character. Your goal as a Gold Dragon is not to go around and let enemies go, nor do pointless fetch tasks for people. Those are just tests to see if you can be selfless and forgiving when there seems to be no point in doing so.
It would have been better if there were more gold dragon quests about actually being a dragon and using this power for good.
But hey. Regardless. You get lots of Dragons helping you out so there's that.
Aeon is hella disconnected, but I can at least look at the path and go 'yeah, that's probably the point when I chose to become a cosmic stop sign.' Can't comment on Trickster yet, as I haven't dipped my toes in that mythic yet.
But yeah. I would have liked more payoff, or for that test of pureheartedness to escalate into something satisfying. I've heard Devil has the same issues, though as for other endgame paths I've seen Swarm playthrough and it's jawdropping, if not the polar opposite of anything I could ever stomach doing.
The dragon army was awesome, I must admit.
1. He is actively watching over said cultist. This is clear as he can answer your question as to what has become of the cultist you spared. It's not like he's just letting them go without knowing where they're going.
2. He gives them the option to leave and live and rethink their lives. And if they choose otherwise, well, the corpses in front of the citadel you meet him again at show what that choice gives them.
I do understand doubting his methods, but I don't agree that Ember's are anymore sensible or valid. The girl is a bit out of her mind, and is clearly getting otherworldly help as evidenced by an early check you can make. It's okay for her words to work on the commonfolk or the cultists. I don't get how they have any effect on demons though, especially when they're harshly rebuking her in the Abyss and the World Wound, yet her last quest has her somehow convincing them? Even Nocticula seems confused as to why she bothers looking out for Ember when she saves her. I do like Ember though, I just find her method of redemption being...a bit undermined by the idea that it's not her own doing.
Overall though, I do agree it's all rather lopsided in how its written and presented, so having even one actual quest of redemption for Gold Dragon, that would make things way better. Let's hope that supposed planned story content can become a reality.
I can only share my takeaway with Ember, since I haven't even reached the end of the game yet and I don't know too much about her patron, but my thought with her brand of redemption is that while she is off her rocker nuts, between having no self-preservation and thinking she can go up to a demon lord and ask them nicely to stop... she's not as stupid as she looks. She has no common sense, but she's scarily accurate about the many reasons people do evil, and breaks it down into 'you're not happy like this, but what if you stopped being unhappy?' with a side of the classic 'you can always choose to stop, even if you don't think you can.' So everyone rebukes her when they first hear her words, be it random people on the street or cultists or demons. And most of them will still rebuke her - for everyone who is happy in their monstrousness, her pleas are useless - but there's a few that will go home and think about what she said, and the thought grows. That's why all the demons curse her out in the Abyss, but there's a few that defect to her side later. Even in Alushynirra, nobody attacks her because they're too freaked out by getting psychologically profiled by a tiny child who doesn't get scared when she's supposed to.
I got the sense that was Nocticula's reaction, in her own catty way - she's expecting to be castigated by righteousness, and instead she's told that she's miserable and hurting, and that's so ludicrous (and so privately, unwantedly true) that she doesn't know how to react, and has to shut the stupid waif up so she doesn't have to acknowledge this nonsense anymore. She's in denial, but the thought is stuck there, worming through it. And Nocticula doesn't know why she gets involved. She doesn't trust it, and the whole thing sounds idiotic... but the fact that a part of her is curious at all is already Ember's mad genius in motion.
That demons are able to be appealed to at all - again, insane, but we have Arueshalae to show there are kernels of something resembling humanity in creatures that were germinated from human souls. Minagho and Chivarro managed to care for each other without anything to do with the KC. The lore here is confused, but I lean on Areelu's musings on the difference between demons and qlippoths, with demons being tainted by ultimately mortal desires. And life in the Abyss sucks, so it's not an impossible sell... I do wish a little more attention was paid to the reality of reforming actual demons, and that it's not as simple as them saying "I don't want to live like this anymore" and suddenly they're good people now. But TBH, I wished Arueshalae had a rockier redemption arc too. You very rarely see her struggle or behave badly - she's mostly got herself figured out before she meets the KC.
I guess the TL,DR; is that even though Ember is insane, the game's writing gives her methods, has a theme. Even if it's unrealistic, the game presents a how and a why through which her fairy tale operates. The Gold Dragon path doesn't give either.
Gold Dragon is my go-to mythic path for getting the secret ending. Trickster -> Gold Dragon saves the mythic path from being completely incompetent. The "Dragon Feats" can be surprisingly good with some hardcore metagaming.