Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Characters

And you are right. Sapient beings are more patterns of behavior. Should you encounter them in their societies you are totally justified in destroying them because they threaten your own society.

However things get more complicated if you are a Paladin and you come across a Bugbear or whatnot that is 1) away from it's society and 2)has not attacked you.

Like a Goblin you meet in Baldur's Gate that is living in an apartment and goes to work each day - that would be a different story.

yeah it's more of a case of nurture vs nature with some races, also I'm guessing since Zariel still has tieflings

yep attacking that city goblin would result in a Devotion Paladin becoming an Oathbreaker,

Exactly, if WotC were truly as woke and diverse as they claim to be, we'd have had the Goblin version of Drizzt by now, a lone gobbo hero, exiled from his pack for being a vegan and collecting pressed wildflowers, I see a Gloomstalker/Druid Dual Class, eternally stalking the swampy hinterlands and warren-like undersewers of Faerun, accompanied by his faithful pack of cockroaches, talking to himself and playing riddle games, bringing justice and protection to the little folk, the gnomes and halflings, like a reformed Gollum if he'd at last got some therapy and was now modelling himself on the Strider-type.

Not the Lumberjack sub-Class of Ranger?

I feel attacked :P

It all boils down to how the DM wants goblins or whatever to be... in any of my campaigns you would never encounter an orc or goblin that isn't thoroughly evil. Basically I see them much like orcs in LotR ... creatures of evil with no capacity for goodness at all. I'm pretty much a pure black and white guy when it comes to fantasy.

Then Nigel Wormgrub-Mucksniffer is the hero you didn't even know you'd been needing all your life!

It says something about the state of rpgs when people are mad that companions have their own personalities and arnt all just yandre waifus/husbandos.

I think part of the issue is a lot of people grew up on the mass effect franchise where you had 3 entire games with these companions so now they expect new games to have companions who hero big brother wordship you like Tali did even though they dont know you at all.

Look at Mass Effect Andromida to see what happens when writers try to make everyone a big family off the bat with now development, it feels hollow.

I'd advise against making conclusions about "the state of rpgs" from complaints about a handful of unfinished characters - who are presented to us this way in part precisely because those complaints can serve to improve their eventual completion. This isn't people wishing this was Mass Effect, this is mostly people frustrated by how often a few of these "companions" refuse to cooperate or outright threaten you during gameplay. By that, I don't mean they don't do what you tell them to, I mean they do and say things that are hostile for the sake of hostility and are often self-sabotaging for the character - they get handed the idiot ball just to get angy.

Characterizing this as "people are just upset they aren't getting waifus/husbandos" is wrong at best and disingenuous at worst. Some of this might be limitations to character growth that directly arise from the incomplete nature of Act I (and I sure do hope that's the real reason Shadowheart is so endlessly obstinate that her corpse after the nautiloid crash is almost equally as informative as her living self towards the end of the Early Access plot), but for whatever part of it isn't, the feedback informs Larian where either their intent with the character is not well communicated or the balance of character dispositions to populate your party with is lacking something important to the playerbase.

Personally, I have middling hopes for Lazy L and Shart, a strong suspicion that Gale will never fill out the shadow of Fane he's standing in, an opinion of Astarion that's mostly soured by the poorly framed introduction and "vampire reveal" (seriously Larian you can see the bite marks) being outliers to his general personality in my gameplay experience, and an impression of Wyll that can't get over how stupid he had to have been to sign his soul over to a clerk in the 9 hells' hierarchy so he could have proficiency with a weapon he doesn't even have the DEX to use. Halsin seems like he wouldn't want to leave the grove again so soon, and IMO the more in-character option would have been Halsin sending Kagha away with you until your tadpole infestation was cured, both so he could personally help the grove recover as a whole and, for Kagha, as punishment and opportunity for redemption - but others may prioritize bear sex. Karlagh seems promising in theory but it's way too early to tell how well that translates into implementation, and I strongly suspect that Minthara is a Drow.
I really, REALLY hope that the "new character" they've teased isn't them extracting the content they intended for custom characters and congealing it into yet another "Original Larian OC: Donut Steel" with inexplicably important backstory that overtakes the later acts like some sort of infectious fanfiction affliction while leaving the custom character narratively forgotten (alright, maybe Larian's not always like that, but DOS2 was so overt about it after you got out of Early Access Island it felt like the studio's writing had been purged and replaced between loading screens), but given the timing of the reveal I suspect that's precisely what happened... maybe minus my gripes with DOS2's writing. Hopefully.

Some, arguably most, of the iconic companions in video game history had strong personalities and butted heads with protagonists of their games.

Hk-47 Bastila Garrus Wrex Morden Liara Morrigan.

Complaining about independent companions you sometimes have to roll a persuasion check on is just odd to me.

Good thing that's not what people are doing, then.

A Goblin version of Drizzt named Bevis?

Make it so Larian!

Okay, a lot of the stuff in this thread went down while I wasn't around, but given the unpleasant way the OP started it and spoke to others in it, and that they've now been banned, it's not a thread I particularly want people's attention drawn to or for us to dignify by continuing to add to. Especially when there are plenty of other good discussions of companions in the game, both from over EA and more recently.

I'm locking this thread, and would suggest that if someone has a contribution to make on the topic of companions they consider popping their thoughts in one of the following instead:

Are you disappointed with companions' variety?
Total number of companions : disappointment over the Dark Urge
extralive on Companions and Romances - Spoiler

If anyone has any constructive post here that they'd like moving to one of those other threads, let me know by PM which post and which thread and I'll do that.