Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Gale Romance: I Quit

I've managed to get the Weave scene exactly twice since Early Access launched, and I've played for hundreds hours. I'm tired of getting yanked out of the story by having to constantly second guess the approval. Moreover, once you DO manage to start the romance, there's no change in his reactions to the OC the next day.; he still talks to them like a traveling buddy.

I'm done. I officially give up on Gale.

You and Mystra both, I guess.

His romance is bugged in so many ways it's ridiculous. I'm hoping his lack of a post-party attitude change is also a bug, or something not implemented yet, because otherwise he just comes off as sort of a jerk who's using the PC. Which... maybe that's exactly what he is...

Well, they DID say they'd only added the Neutral and Evil party members to the game so far. So, maybe he is just a user. Gale? Are you secretly evil jerk-weasel? Is that why Mystra kicked you to the curb?

Gale seem to be the most buged companion so far ...
In my last gameplay he came to me with request to thrust him without questions, when he allready ate two artefacts. O_o

BURNED!

A lot of romance/companion story triggers in the game are still buggy, and Gale's is really the hardest one to have work. I actually made detailed suggestions to the devs on how they can address the elusiveness of companion camp scenes via the forums (https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=762606#Post762606). It would be best if we make more noise about this across all the BG3 forums so Larian may prioritize addressing this problem during the development of the game.

That being said, you can follow the detailed guide commented on this reddit post to trigger the Wizard's romance while in EA - https://www.reddit.com/r/BaldursGat...les_buggy_romance_arc/gphgr75/?context=3

Ahh, the days where the alignment was given in a character sheet. That was really helpful in BG1 and BG2. Actually, as quirky as those alignments are, I really liked how you could influence your kingdom in pathfinder.

But shouldn't there be some spell like ~detect evil?

Detect Evil only detects supernatural evil.

That's been the case since at least 2nd ed, by the way. It's generally not supposed to reveal the alignments of characters.

Thanks for the links! And I agree, until we know they've actually heard, we need to make more noise about this.

You need Detect Evil on Astarion? C'mon, look at his face. The only thing missing is the pinkie to his mouth.

My kingdom for party members a DM/party would actually allow in a game

The only thing that really stands out about the companions we have so far is that they have some of the most outrageous backstories I've seen in a while (and I've seen some questionable backstories), but honestly, the characters without them are... bland? a little bit stereotypical?

Certainly more vanilla than many games I've played, as only Lae'zel is any kind of exotic race, and not even a particularly monstrous one at that, but I've recently come to learn that my circle of acquaintances is a lot more open to that sort of thing than other groups might be. We once went to a tomb of annihilation game with almost an entire party of anthro-races by accident. I wanted to name our party the Menagerie.

Race choice never really have any influence over whether your character is bland or not.

No, they are bland because of their personalities. I look forward to actually getting to know these characters, I'm sure there is a character in there behind the stereotypical fronting. Somewhere.

Being vanilla isn't a bad thing, unless your DM forces it. Just highlighting how an individual player's experiences alters their expectations.

I would definitely agree with this.

The group I used to play with (I haven't played D&D in about 3 years) were open to more unusual races but in terms of alignment and personalities, the GM could be pretty controlling. I tended to create Vanilla characters of my own volition but it was always aggravating when someone was asked to change their character when they dared to be more adventurous with it.

That and my lack of overall experience with D&D could be why I don't really mind that the characters are a bit bland, stereotypical or with questionable backstories. I still find them interesting enough to like them. Since we're also experiencing just Act One at this point I'm hoping that the characters will become more interesting as they develop throughout the story. I haven't played any of the DoS games yet so I'm not sure how Larian usually does with things like character development.

I've been gaming a long time. I have no problem with outrageous backstories, except when they're used to justify characters that are beyond perfect at everything. I once found a character sheet someone had left behind at a con from a superhero campaign. It was for a Spider-man clone who had PHDs in 8 different hard core sciences and spoke 8 languages fluently, (without an accent) and only too damage from super glue. But hey, the player justified all of that with their ridiculously over-the-top backstory!

That said, if a crazy backstory is fun, or funny, or just works, it's all good.

One of the best fixes is to simply kill Shadowheart. Larian tries so hard to force her romance on you that she blocks everyone else's scenes. Apparently, Larian dislikes Gale, because his are always the last in the scene queue. Irritating. They made Shadowheart less irritating but I hate DMs forcing things on me and that includes Larian. The one way to make me not do something is to try to force me to.

Detect catfish is a 4th level spell you only get from hard earned experience

In patch 9, I've tested this to see if it was the same, and yes, you can't get too high approval too fast (without long resting in between) or else you don't get the romance scene at the party. You have to get all the other scenes first, or at least to the weave scene, I'm guessing. I was testing that out, but ..

On another playthrough, I painstakingly made sure I didn't get his approval up quickly, took long rests, got the "go to hell" scene, waited to get the mirror scene, but made the mistake of getting Astarion's approval up a bit, which triggered a few scenes for him. Argh. Finally I decide to go down into the grove, at level 4, and save Arabella, without Gale there. Didn't matter, somehow I see "Gale approves" when I convince Kagha to let the girl go, even though he wasn't there. Sure enough, that brought me to medium approval and that effort was wasted. I could go back to a save before and just camp without saving Arabella. But it occurs to me this whole process has been ridiculous. It's like you have to do an immersion-breaking puzzle to get the wizard's romance to work. Do a puzzle to romance the wizard, haha. It doesn't work with my play style because I want most people to like me, plus I try to do as much as I can before long rests, using up all party members abilities before going to camp. Efficiency, you know? But no. If you want Gale, you camp after one interaction, don't do anything other characters like or their scenes will get precedence, so you feel like you waste 3 or 4 days, which doesn't make any sense when you have a tadpole in your head.

Like someone else said, something needs to be done about this. Maybe make the characters' scenes possible in the same camp time as others. So you could talk to Astarion about the stars, then talk to Gale about the mirror, and Wyll about whatever.