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

Most of my playthroughs of EA was with a custom party. I’m not sure why you think it would take time and money. All you are doing is setting up a private LAN game, opening 4 instances of the game, joining the LAN session with each instance, creating 4 characters, and quitting 3 of the game instances. It’s really easy, doesn’t take any more money than you already spent to play the game, and only takes a little longer than creating 4 characters.

Lol!

I don’t get the joke.

It’s funny because you described 5 steps in order to make 4 custom characters to play on multiplayer. It would be funny if you’re doing this to play by yourself. I would rather have custom party members that comprise of real players in a multiplayer session.

I still don't get the joke. The idea obviously isn't to play MP in order to SP with that party but merely to start the party in MP and then transition that into regular SP, at which point you have an IWD style custom party. I wouldn't do it either but that's not really an argument for why it shouldn't be possible in a less clunky way.

As for what you'd rather have, why exactly is that relevant in this particular context? I'd rather listen to Amon Amarth but that's hardly an argument for why Taylor Swift shouldn't be on Spotify.

??
4 custom characters in multiplayers were a possibility from the start.
The feature many are asking for would be precisely to sidestep that series of step and emulate a multiplayer session only to create a party for a single player campaign.

How is playing a video game single player funny? The steps I describe isn’t 5 steps in order to make 4 custom characters to play on multiplayer. It’s 5 steps in order to make 4 custom characters to play in singleplayer.

Once again, I think you are misunderstanding. Playing single player is fine. I'm just laughing cause I think its funny to have to do all just cause you don't want to play with the origin companions. At the end of the day, you do you. It's all good.

Okay, that makes sense and wasn’t clear in the initial posts.

I put a few hundred hours into the EA, and after a handful of playthroughs I had seen all there was to see if the origins and wanted to try out different party builds. Like, did an all Druid party and just bear-raged my way through the game. I also just like designing characters. I’ve played a lot of D&D, so it’s fun to build out some of old characters and watch them kick ass together.

Based on the current information (from WolfheartFPS) it looks hirelings have name, race and looks predefined - that's not a custom party. Those are just like companions without the origins' attitudes. Just because I can change their class it doesn't make it a custom party.

No. He described 4 steps none of which involved money, friends or, as explained, any great length of time.

See what Larian wrote in the Community Update, see post by me on the previous page (~10 hours ago).

Each has their own name, visuals, and race, and can be respecced at any time.

Based on what we know about respeccing so far there is no option to change visuals and race just class. So I'm not sure what the issue is with my statement?

Honestly the hirelings are.. baffling to me.
Its one of these thigns where Larian just keeps... pulling stuff that is kind of indefensible.
Its not terrible, i wont be using them. But its one of these things that makes it impossible to talk about the game in public forums because people will just point to these dumb descisions and say larian is insane.

For what purpose would you have predefined characters that have no personality anyway?
Just let the player make their own companions it worked in divinity, it worked in pathfinder, who the hell wants a "custom" party ofl.... predefined characters.
its like picking the standard party members in Icewind Dale, who ever did that? not one person im sure.

Fair enough. 'Custom party' obviously means something different to you. I care more about class than name and visuals but I would like to be able to change those too.


Good points all. Taking it one step further would it not be possible to have a selection of personalities (with associated dialogue) to choose from so you could assign one (e.g arrogant noble, shady low-life - cliches but you see my point) to your build?

Wizardry 8 did this and it was fantastic.
but Wizardry 8 also didnt have the scope Baldurs Gate 3 has, so its a bad comparison.

Just give me barebones custom Companions. thats good enaugh.
these hirelings are just.... the worst of both worlds.
Weird premade characters that are hit n miss.... that also have no personality to speak of.

To add to that: Hirelings, aka characters that are throwaway, is exactly where you LEAN INTO the tropes.
This is where you do the Stout Dwarf fighter (seirously: wheres the bloody dwarves?) , the Elf Ranger, the Old wise Wizard.
This is not where you put a non binary half orc paladin.
Im not going to be thrileld about a character like this on the best of days and if that character then also has no dialogue or quests to make me warm up to him, then all you did was make a character im not going to pick.

And now you could act thats just me. But you know your numbers Larian, you made that post a long time ago already, in fact you made two posts like that.
People that play CRPGs will want the Lodoss War Party, theyll want the Fellowship. You already have very over the top companions, the Hirelings should lean into the tropes, because righ tnow, you dont even have the OPTION to besides playign with friends or exploiting the multiplayer system to make 4 custom origin characters.

I suspect it has to do with voice acting. The PC character obviously has way more lines than a hireling would. Even when your pc doesn't talk in dialogue, Tav and Urge often comments on the situation, such as on the Nautiloid. Recording ten or so additional voice sets for a PC character would be a huge cost. Now, they recorded 12 hireling voices with not a quarter of the monolgues and that, as they say, was that.

For me, this is fine. I don't need to control *every* little bit, and I somehow feel it's nore natural to hire a person than to create something from scratch. If you really must, go do the multiplayer hack, but otherwise... You have nothing to complain about, really.

Remember NWN1 Shadows of Undrentide with the whacky companions? The cleric/rogue dwarf and the half-orc sorcerer? The only decent NPC was a human paladin who you couldn't choose. People, including me were as annoyed as hell. Eventually the paladin was made recruitable by a mod.

Ah, now I see. Yeah, so for me custom party is naturally going to have cutbacks in the sense that they have no story, voice or whatsoever, but as they are that disconnected from the game I actually expect the possibility to make them fully the way I want - to recreate a party I played with or something like that or just play around with the waste customization options the character creator actually offers. Pretty much like Sordak I'm confused what the point is of characters that lose all the 'benefits' of origin companions and at the same time have the same restrictions when it comes to customizing them. As other games all previously had such characters be build by the same option you have when creating your main, without the main-protagonist benefits.

To be fair - it might be we have that level of customization in BG3 as well, but it hasn't been shown so far and the reason for not being in there seems odd.

Look we don't know enough about how hirelings work in game so it is all speculation for now. I hold out hope that we can completely customize all aspects of a hireling and will likely be called naive for it.