The characters in Baldur’s Gate 3 are considered excellently written by many players, even the NPCs with whom you have little interaction. Only one regularly drives fans to despair: Isobel. She behaves so incredibly stupidly that she has caused countless reloads and even the end of Honour Runs.
Spoiler Warning: This is about an important NPC and their development in Act 2 of Baldur’s Gate 3.
Who is the NPC?
- Isobel is the daughter of Ketheric Thorm. You first meet Isobel at the Last Light Inn in the Shadowlands in Act 2. There, she protects the inn with her power granted by Selûne against the shadow curse.
- She is in a relationship with Lady Aylin, the Chosen of Selûne, who provides valuable support in the final battle of the game.
- Through Isobel, you also gain a way to protect yourself from the shadow curse. However, you must protect her, which is not that easy.
That’s why it’s so hard to keep Isobel alive: As soon as you talk to Isobel, you trigger a cutscene and an ambush. Servants of the Absolute want to kidnap her, and a battle scene starts.
Here Isobel behaves as stupidly as possible. She starts next to enemies and in a room full of foes. The first thing she does in most cases: run past everyone and incur opportunity attacks.
Since Isobel doesn’t have many hit points, she usually dies right in the first round, taking the whole inn with her, because the protective spell is missing. Even if you try to save her, you need luck.
Spells like Sanctuary make Isobel invulnerable, and an invisibility potion would protect her from attacks, but the young woman tends to ignore that. She simply attacks directly, breaking her protection and then running straight into the next enemy and dying.
“PSA: Just don’t talk to her”
Isobel has cost many players a lot of nerves with her behavior, especially since she is quite important:
- Only through her protection do the current guests of the inn survive, including Jaheira, whom you can recruit as a companion – if she is still alive.
- If Isobel is gone, the Tieflings you saved in Act 1 also die. Thus, you can no longer get one of the rarest achievements in the entire game.
- If the inn falls, you miss out on many quests and thus a lot of story in Act 2.
All of this makes it even more frustrating when one forgets again that with an intelligence of 10 she is not really that stupid and lets herself be torn apart by enemies. However, players have found an easy way out: Just ignore her (via Reddit).
If you simply don’t talk to Isobel at all, the ambush is also not triggered and she remains safe in the upper floor of the inn the entire time. After you find the Night Song and decide to help Lady Aylin, you return to the inn, where Isobel greets you with a pleasant surprise for the first time.
The only thing you miss out on is Isobel’s protection, which you don’t need anyway if you first free the pixie from the lantern. Everything else can be accomplished without ever having spoken to her. Especially the achievement “From the Bottom of My Heart” becomes significantly easier because Isobel’s stupidity doesn’t kill all the Tieflings.
The Tieflings are especially special in Baldur’s Gate 3. For a particularly rare achievement, you have to protect them – but for other achievements, most of them will not survive. However, you do need to have a dark soul: You can easily miss an entire story in Baldur’s Gate 3 if you just stick to the “good” path
