Baldur’s Gate 3 offers tons of content for you to find and miss. Most of the time these are just smaller items or snippets of conversation. But if you don’t do anything with a certain old woman in Act 1, you’re missing out on a whole story. There is no warning for this.
Spoiler warning: This is about story from Act 1 and Act 3.
What kind of NPC is this?
What does Ethel do in Act 1? The hag actually invites you to her hut in the forest – which quickly turns out to be a witch’s house in a smelly swamp when you arrive or pass a corresponding check.
Tip: If you are in an “evil” round or simply like chaotic decisions, you can sacrifice your eye to Ethel and thus receive one of the best buffs in the game.
If you follow the quest, you will find out that Ethel has made a deal with a young, pregnant woman. She wants to bring her dead husband back and demands the unborn baby as payment.
You then have the option to stop this trade. Haggling is rarely fair. This leads to a battle so infamous that some players spend hours preparing for it. However, Ethel does not disappear completely, but appears again later.
Fighting Ethel can be exhausting. Have you lost your skills? This is how you can reset your character:
Baldur’s Gate 3: Reset character and choose new class
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If you let Ethel do her thing, you’ll miss her in Act 3
As Vettel, Ethel is quite difficult to kill. She doesn’t just die when you kill her. First you have to destroy certain plants in her hoard, otherwise she will simply revive. But you won’t find that out until Act 3.
There you will meet Ethel again with a long series of quests and many NPCs who were betrayed by the witch. This all turns into an epic adventure that will keep you busy for some time – between 5 and 10 hours, depending on your playing style.
However, one player on Reddit discovered that if you just let Ethel do it, you’ll never meet her again. If you don’t visit her in Act 1, then she will never appear again in Act 3. An entire area under the inn that would otherwise be Ethel’s new hiding place is simply not there. He simply doesn’t exist.
Even some of the NPCs you would meet during the quest would suddenly be completely normal. They are actually doppelgangers, while the originals are held captive.
That makes sense, because of course Ethel has no reason to disappear from her swamp. There are enough lost souls there who are desperate enough to ask the Hag for help. Even if they know that it can’t actually end well for them.
Basically, it’s better to get Ethel out of the way. After all, not only is the quest series exciting and extremely well told, you also save a few virtual lives. And there’s good loot to boot. You’ll also miss out on special content that only Vettel can offer: she personally insults every character!