Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Story & Character Discussion Are you dissapointed with companions variety?

I didn't claim Minthara is the only evil party member. Only that Larian on the Stream equated the new good characters we are getting (four new ones) with her, which is not an equal exchange. And I disagree with your assessment of Jaheria. She might be TN, but she's extremely loyal, heroic and good-hearted. She'd even split with the harpers, an organization she served most of her life-to have your back. Minsc speaks for himself. Halsin and Karlach by all accounts seem to be pretty darn good.

Shadowheart, Gale, and Wyll in particular seem to be set up to have a 'fall/redemption' arc. One could just as well say that they have 'strong good leanings' Noteworthy I think that Wyll leaves automatically Gale *can* leave and both him and Shadowheart breaks off their romance with the player if you side with the goblins. They might not be 'good' by your metrics, but they certainly don't fall neatly into the camp of 'evil' either.


They might be recycled, but you get to enjoy (or not) none of that fanservice if you are an evil player, since they are both good-exclusive. I wish I could take someone like Viconia or Edwin on my evil team. But evil players just don't have the option of indulging in nostalgia if they want, I guess?

I don't need that fanservice tbh. I want new stuff. We had Jaheira and Minsc - and Edwin and Viconia- for two games already, that is enough for me.

I am and I think it is because of origin characters. I get it - Larian has a finite amount of dev time and the origin characters are going to take a ton of work compared to characters like Halsin, Minthara, Minsc and Jaheira.

But let's say they take 2x as much development time (which seems generous, I imagine it is significantly more than twice as much development effort) - I would much rather have 16 well fleshed out companions (if they can develop two companions for every origin) than 6 origin character and 4 companions.

But that is also because playing an origin character is not super appealing to me. I have a little interest in playing Wyll and Gale, I suppose. But I'd much rather just have more companions to make each play of the game unique rather than playing as a predefined origin.

I loved, loved, loved DOS2. It is in my top 3 favorite games ever. But playing as the origin characters didn't click with me. Maybe it will be different with this game.

I am as well. It is surprising there was no dwarf character..perhaps they considered it a trope? I get the arguments around resources but I think that is the issue with Larian style "origin" characters. I would have preferred more characters with less over the top storylines.

I'd argue Jaheira being true neutral is more of a formality if anything because the original druid kit had that as a requirement. In practice she leaned a lot more into good in the previous games. Also it's been a long time now and things could have changed.

Agreed, Jaheria leans heavily towards 'good', whatever that means now. I don't remember being able to get her to leave by being very good, but you could easily get her to leave if you were very evil.

She did complain a bit if your reputation got to good, likewise if it got to bad. But she definitely leaned towards good.

So far disappointed that there is no sign of Helia.
Doubly disappointed if the reason shes missing is that her ideas were used for Halsin because a few loud people could't stop thirsting.

I don't see the appeal in playing Origin characters either, and could easily sacrifice them for more companions instead. That's not the hand we've been dealt though and I assume it's based on the popularity of Origin characters in D:OS2.

My concern is team composition variety in terms of classes and mutual exclusivity.
Presumably, you cannot have a team with both Halsin and Minthara. At the same time, both druid options (why there are two I do not know) are good-aligned and potentially story-locked. There are 10 companions and 2 PC-only options. Let's say I want to play the game 3 times with 3 completely unique parties of 4:

My first playthrough:
-Dark Urge
-Shadowheart
-Karlach
-Minsc

My second plathrough:
-Gale
-Lae'zel
-Astarion
-Minthara

My third playthrough:
-Tav
-Jaheira
-Halsin
-Wyll

NOTE that the third playthrough doubles up on Druids (not something I want to do) because I presumably cannot move Jaheira or Halsin into party two unless I intend to move Minthara to another playthrough. And I presumably cannot move Minthara to playthrough 3 unless I remove Halsin and/or Jaheira. And Minsc is good-aligned, so I don't know who I can and cannot swap in and out of playthrough 1. I am worried about trading off between story-compatibility and class/attribute diversity.

Yes, though as usual I need to see more. Selection to me looks very limited, very one note when it comes to origins. Of course, even small pool of companions can work if they and the story is very, very good. Planescape Torment good.

Nope

No, not really. Out of the bunch I litearlly don't care about three of them (Astarion, Jaheira and Minsc), but I don't hate them. Okay, maybe I kind of dislike Jaheira but that is me projecting BG2. We'll see.

Playing the Origin characters we'll be able to make them as good or evil (or inbetween) as we like, Larian straight up confirmed that even as companions we will have means to sway them either way so what's not to like? I don't remember any game with that amout of reactivity and thusly - variety.

Is there any data on how popular origin characters were in DOS2?

I thought customs were far more popular, but I haven't really dug into it much.

Since "reactivity" seems to be the buzz word of the week, I'm curious how we sway companions to one side or another, how this reactivity works, and if it simply comes down to them liking us vs not liking us. I hope it's not that simple, and we can actually challenge their beliefs, and over time they start to change their opinions on how they see things through how we act towards them and others.

From what I've seen, origins were more popular because custom characters were simple a lesser experience.

Pretty much this. A self fulfilling prophecy.

I see origins as a freaking amazing idea, and the dark urge is the next level of this concept.

Every game have its story settled for the main character. In mass effect sheppard is a human soldier, period, how cool would it be if we could live the story from a quarian perspective? (Not to shit on ME, I love it).

I see origins just as a series of subplots that I can choose for my character. They should be a little more customizable (see dark urge, I don't love that some origins are too heavily tied to a class or another), they should never result as being one more predominant than another (see Fane, he is the main character of DOS2 and that's wrong), but they are a revolutionary idea all around.

No. Eight of the character options are evil. Of the three remaining two of them are returning characters from an epic level campaign, which can't really make any sense.

So that leaves Halsin. Halsin, by himself, is not diverse enough to fill a four character roster.

I was disappointed 2 years ago because I knew that they where completely full of BS when they said they had just started with the evil and neutral characters, inferring that the good characters were on the way.

I fully expected the last character to be nothing I was interested in and so no disappointment there.


I am excited to scoop up Minsk and Jaheira, they are a game-changer for me. Are they optimal?


"Doin' what I can with what I got"