I just wanted to thank you all. I genuinely didn't expect anything close to 20,000 views on this extended rant, but here we are! You've all been so kind, thoughtful, and supportive. Thank you again and see you in the next one <3

Every time I think of Wyll's story, I remember something my friend said to me about it. He said "Wyll is a great main character. Unfortunately, I am the main character."

The factor I would change is that Wyll never seems to really suffer because of his pact and it’s very easy to convince him to break it. No one refuses to work with us because of his horns, or attack us because they’re scared of him, or anything of the sort. His punishment just seems to be aesthetic.
A hero complex can push someone too far, refusing help when they need it and biting off more than they can chew. His story could’ve expanded on that. He doesn’t need to be a shallow egotistical jerk to make him interesting.
If Wyll really accomplished so much with the Infernal power granted to him, it shouldn’t take me 2 conversations to convince him to relinquish it. He should be defending his pact, making excuses and obviously lying to himself. And Mizora never sends him on a hunt besides Karlach, so we don’t know what their typical encounters are like. Maybe this hunt was his last straw and he’s been tasked with killing innocent people before, or maybe this was the first crack and she tasks him with worse and worse things and there are greater and greater consequences? Either path would have been interesting.

Tav: Damn that was crazy, I wonder what everyone thinks about what just happened.

Wyll: Well met.

GREAT. THANKS LARIAN.

My favorite part about EA Wyll was that sometimes his feather fall buff would bug and just not be added to him
then he would jump off that cliff while saying "MAKE WAY FOR THE BLADE OF FRONTIERS"
*SPLAT*

withers big naturals jumpscare

I watch Theo play Wyll in as much DnD stuff as I can and think to myself that we deserved the Shade of Frontiers. Mr. PhD in Rizzonomics himself. When Theo actually gets to table top Wyll it's a whole different character. And yeah I miss early access Wyll too, he was cheekier and had more fire in his soul.

Fun fact, current Wyll's story is daisy-chained so hard to Karlach, that if you kill her before recruiting him, he'll despawn and become unrecruitable. Even if you have one member of the party in an active conversation with him while the rest kill Karlach, the conversation will end abruptly and he'll despawn lol.

It blows my mind every time I'm reminded that Wyll is 24. He comes across like he's 33.

I don’t even think the lack of major character development is the biggest thing working against his Full Release Wyll. It’s the lack of drama and interiority. Karlach is also a good aligned character who doesn’t change much over the course of the story. But we get to follow her as she reckons with the sheer unfairness of finally clawing back her life only to learn that she doesn’t have much of it left. Her emotional responses to things are so big and dramatic that it almost doesn’t matter that her quest is even more barebones than Wyll’s. Full release Wyll just doesn’t have that. He doesn’t have any regrets about his pact, or display grief about the sacrifices he’s made. He’s authentic all the way through. He forgives his father immediately. His body dysmorphia fizzles out after the tiefling party. I don’t get to watch him slowly open up to me about his trauma, because he’s only hiding things from me because his patron literally won’t let him tell the truth. There’s nothing wrong with writing a fairly static lawful good character, but you do still have to grab me emotionally.

Act 3 Wyll’s story drove me insane when I played it. The fact that the player makes the choice says so much about how little thought they put into the story of the current Wyll. It was fascinating to hear about his early access story because I didn’t get a chance to play it. What we could have had 😞

That brings me back to early access people were SO upset that like you said, the companions weren’t immediately enamored with the player. I thought it was kind of obvious that characters like shadowheart and even laezel would just need more time and the right choices to soften up to the player.

Seeing people complain about the lack of wyll updates after the last patch on Twitter before watching this video, I 100% see why both people are upset and why he was given a lack of content in the first place given the 9 months of time given to rework practically 2 characters with how both him and Karlach are both important to each other's stories because they took in fan feedback.

Putting catering to players over artistic integrity is, in my opinion, the source of BG3's biggest flaws, though I guess not many people see them as flaws because they'd rather be catered to. Halsin being a companion is a big example of this, but also things like Shadowheart being essentially just kind and sweet despite allegedly previously torturing people without any scruples. That way, what she has been through becomes nothing but a dark and edgy backstory for your cute goth girlfriend.

I do think there was potential in this Wyll, though. He has a very black and white view on morality that could have been challenged by being forced to work with people like Laezel, Astarion and Shadowheart, whose less than savoury attitudes are heavily informed by the things they've been put through. That could have led him to really grapple with how his father undeservedly rejected him for being a warlock, based on the same black-and-white worldview. There could have been conflict there, instead of Duke Ravengard being informed what actually happened and basically going: "Oopsie! Guess that was a mistake. Welcome back, son. No hard feelings, right?"

"He's just as chaste in early access"
> next sentence
"Easy Access Wyll"

Given how late Wyll was rewritten, I'm pretty sure the decision to get a different voice actor for Wyll was primarily motivated by scheduling conflicts. Lanre probably hadn't anticipated having to redo potentially thousands of lines and thus had made commitments to other projects that would get in the way of doing all of that.

I think all the companions being sanded down a bit post-EA is also a result of the planned “good” companions being cut or trimmed down.

Originally Larian claimed that they front loaded the evil or morally grey companions and that more good guys would come later. But ultimately we only got one more origin and I think Wyll was seen as the best candidate to change up.

After ignoring Wyll for...well since release, I decided for Patch 8 to play the game AS him. It's funny how the most interesting thing about him (his backstory) works better for the player than the character himself. It almost feels like I'm playing Mass Effect with a semi-established backstory (Wyll feels like a Spaceborn War Hero). Like you have these small scenes where his backstory comes up in Act 1, with Mizora, Karlach, and Florrick. Because Wyll is so vanilla, you can sort of roleplay him however you feel like in these scenarios, and it doesn't really break his story arc. Also the pathos you have with Karlach really makes that romance a bit more fun.

He's sort of like Tav with a little extra. The CG counterpart to Dark Urge's CE. I could almost imagine making Wyll another customizable origin, where the player chooses to be Wyll or Wylla and your appearance will alter how Duke Ravengard looks when you finally meet him. Sorta like how Bioware had your character's father in Andromeda have a different appearance based on how you customized Ryder.

The most annoying part is they had no problem going back and rewrite stuff for Astarion when his fans started complaining they had multiple chances to go back and maybe give wyll some more shit but they didn't

Finally the first good Wyll critique video.
RIP his character though.