I just want to point out that the whole Abdel/died-in-Baldur's-Gate thing is not really canon to the games.
Yeah I guess you could say it represents one permutation of the Bhaalspawn protagonist, but that canon FR protag is clearly designed to be minimally important to the FR setting and take a path that almost no actual player of the games would take.
Most people would assume the mantel of god-hood in their playthrough of ToB; or if they didn't, be so fantastically powerful that no upstart would ever, ever present a challenge to them personally. Good luck killing me asshole, I'm behind Timestop and 20 layers of contingency.
It's a classical "we wrote a cool story involving the most powerful stuff in the setting... then ret-conned it all into being a perfect loop that ends up back at square 1" canon setting solution. If your canon story completely negates the whole point of the storyline in the first place (i.e Bhaal is back to what/who he was before the Time of Troubles) then you just retconned your whole story in effect.
Of course it's not canon to the games. It's just canon for the general setting, so other games can have an outcome of it. Pretty much every FR game or tabletop setting is minimally important. And even this minimally important protagonist has a Schrodinger's cat death. Did he die to the other Bhaalspawn, or did he die to an adventurer party after going ravager on everyone? It's all stupid either way.
But yeah, I agree. That's why I said unless you can import a character, BG3 has no connection to BG1-2, and why I predict that one of these events will be referenced in the game as some kind of "See? They're connected!!" moment, as if it's not some kind of cheap cop-out.
Anyway, Bhaal isn't completely back to how he was; he reclaimed his pantheon, but came back mortal. Maybe we'll kill him (again) in BG3, since there's currently no events after that. That would be the perfect terrible woke writer ending to the entire saga; everyone involved died and nothing mattered.
I just want to point out that the whole Abdel/died-in-Baldur's-Gate thing is not really canon to the games.
Yeah I guess you could say it represents one permutation of the Bhaalspawn protagonist, but that canon FR protag is clearly designed to be minimally important to the FR setting and take a path that almost no actual player of the games would take.
Most people would assume the mantel of god-hood in their playthrough of ToB; or if they didn't, be so fantastically powerful that no upstart would ever, ever present a challenge to them personally. Good luck killing me asshole, I'm behind Timestop and 20 layers of contingency.
It's a classical "we wrote a cool story involving the most powerful stuff in the setting... then ret-conned it all into being a perfect loop that ends up back at square 1" canon setting solution. If your canon story completely negates the whole point of the storyline in the first place (i.e Bhaal is back to what/who he was before the Time of Troubles) then you just retconned your whole story in effect.
Of course it's not canon to the games. It's just canon for the general setting, so other games can have an outcome of it. Pretty much every FR game or tabletop setting is minimally important. And even this minimally important protagonist has a Schrodinger's cat death. Did he die to the other Bhaalspawn, or did he die to an adventurer party after going ravager on everyone? It's all stupid either way.
But yeah, I agree. That's why I said unless you can import a character, BG3 has no connection to BG1-2, and why I predict that one of these events will be referenced in the game as some kind of "See? They're connected!!" moment, as if it's not some kind of cheap cop-out.
Anyway, Bhaal isn't completely back to how he was; he reclaimed his pantheon, but came back mortal. Maybe we'll kill him (again) in BG3, since there's currently no events after that. That would be the perfect terrible woke writer ending to the entire saga; everyone involved died and nothing mattered.