Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Recruitable companions - Railroading the Dark Side

Firstly, a huge thanks to all the team at Larian Studios for the hard work to date. Amazing work guys and gals keep it up!

Executive Summary:
Observation: The game in general, and specifically Companions in Early Access need clearer information about alignment.
Recommendation: Add Alignment field in the Character Sheet. Add Alignment to any field which has impact on the story e.g. Cleric Deity (mention the Deity's alignment).
Hope: That additional Companions of differing races will be added in the future e.g. Lawful Good Dragonborn Paladin, Neutral Good Dwarven Cleric.

Detail:
In the original Baldurs Gate games you always had the freedom to make up the party as you wished. If you wanted to go Evil, then one could easily create a full companion group that supported that. In BG III there is no "alignment" field on the Character Sheet tab so it's not easy to discern this absolutely - the addition of alignment indications would help a great deal. But from the dialogue and scant clues in the game so far, it seems to me to have a strong bias towards the "dark side". I.e. it's very hard to build a "light side" team (if not impossible).

Here's my guess on alignments from what I've seen in the game so far (dialogue and other clues):

• Lae'zel - Lawful Neutral (Githyanki Fighter - STR 17, DEX 13, CON 14, INT 11, WIS 12, CHA 8)
• Gale - Neutral Good (Human Wizard - STR 9, DEX 14, CON 15, INT 16, WIS 11, CHA 13)
• Astarion - True Neutral (High Elf Rogue - STR 12, DEX 17, CON 13, INT 9, WIS 14, CHA 10)
• Wyll - Chaotic Neutral (Human Warlock The Fiend subclass - STR 9, DEX 13, CON 15, INT 14, WIS 11, CHA 16)
• Shadow Heart - Lawful Evil (Half-Elf Shadow Cleric - STR 14, DEX 9, CON 13, INT 10, WIS 16, CHA 14)

So firstly, I wholeheartedly agree with ReaLMoisan's thread on the bizarre attribute set up of the companions. I would definitely encourage Larian Studios to make the Character Sheet tab more "D&D" - for instance alignment is missing for almost all the party members.


Shadowheart - Tag "Evil Cleric" - is the only "primary healer" available to the party, which railroads players who want to go more "light side". Aside from the seeming broken ability for Gale (a wizard) to learn Cleric spells (such as Cure Wounds), there is no other healer in the group. The hope therefore is either that in Shadowheart narrative it's possible to "flip" her (no indication of that), or that there are other Companions which are planned in the future which include "Light Side" options.

It's interesting that with all the PC "inclusivity" pushed into the starting Companions:

• Strong independent woman
• Homosexual man
• Black man

While these are all fine, it's interesting that there isn't a big spread of actual D&D races in the starting group, all we have is Elf, Human, Githyanki and a Half-Elf (which is just a HumanElf mix... so not much diversity). Perhaps the team was wanting to buck the Warhammer Quest-like-Trope of Dwarven Cleric, Halfling Rogue, Elf Wizard, Human Barbarian? But we don't have a Delorian to go back in time to change these starting companions - with all the artwork etc. What is, is. I just hope that there will be future Companions which give us more D&D racial and alignment diversity.

All in all, despite the dark tones of this installment, I'm really enjoying this game. Very happy customer.

Alignment doesn't really exist in 5E outside of rare circumstances. It's replaced by the notion of consequences for actions instead.

Disagreeing a little here. Astarion's not gay (he seduced my female tiefling pretty fast), and is very likely evil given his reaction to some choices. He complains about being good if you save the tieflings. Shadowheart, while explicitly described in the game as evil, seems rather torn over the issue and expresses guilt over certain evil choices. She follows an evil goddess for personal reasons but is not herself into evil. Wyll is almost certainly good, since he left the party because I wasn't heroic enough.

There's apparently 12 writers, each working on one companion except for two who have two companions. So fourteen in all. They wanted to start us out with the more evil-leaning characters to encourage evil playthroughs and feedback on evil choices since otherwise most players play good.

Their attributes, however, I completely agree with you, they're trash. Shadowheart's mechanical design especially seems very confused.