Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General OMG, say it's not so! Just heard it was confirmed!

You can make a custom party once you unlock the hirelings.

Will be curious to see if hirelings have a personality and plot awareness.

It would be hilarious if the guy in the basement made the best companions of them all.

So nice class in calling me a politician then calling me a bootlicker and an idiot.

We will be able to create a custom party with hirelings. I will create my party of 4 custom elves to play with in my playthrough. I have seen no evidence that states i will not be able to do that at launch. If you have evidence otherwise again please share it.

We hear you loud and clear, community. Should you so choose, you’ll be able to create a custom party without any Origins, opting instead to have Hirelings join you on the road – mercenaries who can be hired to join your team temporarily.

yep, I knew it was not true.

Precious.

I mean it's EXACTLY the same process as Wrath, except faster and cheaper.

If you've played the prologue with four custom characters the balance is way off (too easy) and the cinematics get screwy. Everything else in the game after the prologue is balanced for four. You can get it after the prologue with one battle and a good sleight of hand check. Otherwise a couple of battles. It's really not a big deal.

Pillars of Eternity also uses the exact same system for custom parties.

Ye gods. Some drama queen starts the thread with an hysterical statement supported by no evidence and suddenly we have two pages of people arguing about if, when and where a custom party can or cannot be made and how Pathfinder and PoE did or did not do it. Calm down.

To be fair, as of the latest community update, it turns out he is right. In my initial response I argued with the information and assumptions I had at the time, but now Larian has given us official information which validates OP's claim. The hirelings are pre-generated characters and unless we can respec every aspect of them, our only way to have our custom parties is by the multiplayer method. Which is a workaround hailing back to the original BGs and not actually what was expected in a much more modern game.

Your character starts alone on the Nautiloid so a custom party "from the start" was never really likely. You can respec the heirlings (not sure about race) so eventually you can at least have a party customized by class. Perhaps there will be a Mod to allow full customization of your heirlings but you will still always start on the Nautiloid alone.

The Community Update said you can have a party full of badgers. And since there's one hireling per class, I'd guess that you can even change their class in order to accomplish the "full badger" party.

Oh I get it now, he wasn't complaining about being able to create hirelings of any class, rather make them all custom. eg three dwarves, etc

Well there are 12 hirelings available. I imagine if you had the option to make them through character creator you would have to use the voices on that and there aren't 12. I'm assuming they use different voices from that system, so they don't all sound like posh English people and there are a few barks that are relevant to the race. I imagine they don't all talk a lot, but they should probably say stuff now and then and make noises.

It's probably just down to not using the same resources.

I rather like this, actually. I feel it's so cheap and lonely to walk around with no-named custom characters in a game where the narrative means everything. I really don't need to customize everything to my exact demand in every moment. I'll take the guys-I-met- in Bg1 over the guys-I-tailor-made in IWD any day of the week, even though the latter would always be stronger.

Just play with what you get. Relax. There is *more* than enough variety.

According to the latest CU:

“But what if I want to create a party that is made up entirely of giant druidic badgers?”

We hear you loud and clear, community. Should you so choose, you’ll be able to create a custom party without any Origins, opting instead to have Hirelings join you on the road – mercenaries who can be hired to join your team temporarily.

In Baldur’s Gate 3, there are 12 Hirelings available for you to recruit – one for each class. Each has their own name, visuals, and race, and can be respecced at any time.

From what it said elsewhere in the CU it looks like Withers is the respec guy. I didn't see any mention of where you hire the hirelings.

There was an earlier Larian Gazette that seemed to indicate Withers was our go-to guy for hirelings (as well as resurrection and it now seems respecing).

Withers:
"The Three Rs your one-stop shop for: Resurrection, Respeccing and Recruitment"

From my understanding when watching the Panel From Hell. Larian did say you can create a custom party if you don't want any of the origin characters following you. Then the other dev clarified right after that the custom party is made of hirelings. Nowhere did they make you assume that it would custom characters from scratch.

At the same time, what stops you from opening 4 copies of the game and creating a multiplayer custom party?

That would be someone with a lot of time, a lot of money and no friends...lol.