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

As hillarious as this sounds, no. What's worse, I most probably won't even play half-orc.

Origin characters:
- Half-Elf
- Elf
- Human
- Human
- Githyanki
- Tiefling
- Elf
- Half-Elf
- Human
- Drow (ergo, Elf)

People on forum, providing feedback:
We would like to see more diversity!
There are no small races represented at all!

Larian ... releasing hirelings:
- Human
- Human (maybe Halfling tho, hard to tell by those pictures)
- Human
- Tiefling
- Half-Elf
- Githyanki
- Half-Orc
- Drow (still ergo Elf)
- Human
- Human
- Dragonborn
- Duergar (ergo, Dwarf)
- Dwarf

Larian: Ha! Nailed it!
People on forum: -_-

Final count of small races:
2 ... maybe 3

Final count of tall races:
Everyone else, why bother? -_-

Final count of Humans:
At least half, maybe 3/4 ... from brigt side, it at least will feel like Humans are dominant race.

//Edit:
You remember how Larian was "jokingly" complaining that they offered us tails, horns, tusks and claws ... and we created Vault Dveller?
I fear they took it as an instruction.

Have you actually played EA?

Shadow stait up tells you she only remembers 2 things about herself.

That she can't swim and that she likes night orchids.

We know she's telling the truth due to the tadpole.

Yeah, that doesn't look promising. I don't get their problem with small races.

Edit: the third character, the girl, is a halfling or a gnome. I used that face myself, but I don't remember, if it was on my halfling ranger or bard or my gnome arcane trickster.

What's the point in giving these hirelings character? They're not characters, they're empty suits meant to fill out our party. They said themselves that we can respec them to all be one class. Why start them out with traits to begin with and not just have them be freely available blanks?

Bit of a strange on tbh. No gnomes? No full elves? I can understand them going the easy route for origin companions for mo-capping, but surely more diversity in the hirelings would only be a good thing. And humans are basically a pants choice now, why so many of them

Because small races are a pain in the ass to do the cinematic dialogue style. When you are rigging these things You have to try to match up the characters line of sights and fool the player into that the models are actually looking at eachother. When there is a substantial hight difference its mush more work to do this

Go look at karlach talking to her dwarf friend in the panel from hell, it was all just zoom ins on each of their faces.
When you have an orgin character, with all the contend that entails, making them short makes things exponentially harder.

But if you play as a short race then you have all the same problems anyway. And that doesn't explain why the hirelings, who aren't even really characters, don't have more short folk amongt hem.

Halfling then ...
Rounded ears.

I say leave it ...
Larian want Hirelings to have their story, so let them have their story ...

There is still way to make this right.
As we create our character, there are empty party slots ... they look like big "+" symbol.
Just make them interactable, and allow us to create there completely clean slate ... no conversations, no personality, no nothing ... just a mindless drone to fulfill role in our party.

Everyone happy!

Mr. "im going to repeat whatever i want, until you all give up and then i will feel like i was right all along" ... strikes again. :-/

Yes but an orgin character makes it worse as the point of view usually has them looking at the player where and with player character if they are in the camera were usually seeing the back of their head.

Why are all the companions young, henchman are young? OK Jaheira isn't young ill give that. However she reminds me to much of my wife... I don't want to play with HER!!



We need old wise people on this adventure!!!

I guess that will just have to be the star of the show ... ME

I think 10/11 is a decent number of companions, the problem is the way Larian implemented them. Over half are stupid evil and unavailable to the vast majority of playthroughs, two are cameos only available halfway through the campaign. That leaves a single party of four characters 3 evil with redemption arcs, one neutral.

The way it should have been is either have a larger number of less involved characters or make the characters more flexible. If you have 10 characters each of which will fit with a few classes and can all be at least neutral aligned that gives a lot more flexibility for building a party.

Gale is certainly not young ... mid aged at best ...
Astarion looks young, but he is several centuries old ...
Wyll also looks like he is coming to his 30 ...
Laezel is still a child, but her people dont measure age by such insignificant triviality as time ...

Slightly disappointed we got no dwarf, gnome or halfling companion

Claiming 'short races causes issues with the camera' is silly because if that was the reason why are they allowing us to create short race PCs *and* have romances and cutscenes with them? That makes no logical sense.

They pulled a DOS series on us with the mercs. Ahhh welll... at least we have the MP way to make our own parties.... that's wonderful way to connect the game to
The originals.

Most of the times our characters backs are to the camera in dialogue.

A few romance scenes interacting with short pcs is a heck of a lot diffrent than a short orgin character who would need special camera attention for every scene they are in

Well, you can always want for more, can't you?

However, I think there is enough choice for how you can approach the game, unless you are extremely fussy.

If you don't like Origin characters, there are 12 hirelings of various races ( 8 of 12 are indeterminate at the moment ) all of which can be made into whatever you want, and none of which ( probably ) will sass you.

If you need more flexibility with no-name characters, you can probably create a 4-person faux-muiltiplayer party of whatever takes your fancy, and continue playing them all as single player.

If you like deep story-connected companion characters, you have 9 to choose from ( I assume Minthara/Halsin exclude each other, and the "Urge" will not be a companion ).

If you like playing your own fill-in-the-blanks character, as I usually do, you can be whatever you want.

If you want to re-live the BG1/2 Baalspawn power/temptation story, the Dark Urge has you covered, and I'm sure I will try that as well.

And if you want a more fully defined and detailed protagonist, you have 6 to choose from; maybe I'll eventually try one of them, maybe not.


I agree that even more choice of would be a good thing, but I would rather the game is released now than wait another year while extra characters are written/created, recorded and integrated into the story.

In particular, I would contrast the 9 BG3 companions with BG1, which had 25. But, the deepest level of interaction in BG1, which had no romances, was probably Coran; and that wasn't exactly deep and meaningful, he just had 2 simple quests for you rather than one. The 5 companions not available before reaching the city were so late in the game that they were probably only ever used if you had lost party members, which is much less common in more recent games unless scripted. ( BTW, did anyone actually find any redeeming feature to Tiax? Second only to Noober in annoyance value in my memory of the game ).

Companions in BG2 were a little more satisfying, as the majority of side-quests were organised around them, there were a few romances, and they did have a few alignment-based interactions, including fights to the death. But there were only 14 of them ( excluding the more cameo characters, Imoen, Sarevok and Yoshimo ), not significantly more choice than with BG3, and likely (we don't know yet) with less depth.

There are reasonable concerns about balance between races, classes, and alignments of the main companions on offer, but I don't really know how those could be resolved to everyone's satisfaction.
- Demographically, Faerun is supposed to be 80%+ Human, so BG3 already seems much more diverse than that. I guess, hireling, protagonist and faux-multiplayer will be the only routes to party race diversity unless there are later companion additions.
- The game supports over 40 class variants, so you obviously need to pick and choose, even with a party-of-6 mod. But, it sounds like you can multi-class and re-spec companions and hirelings as needed, even if this destroys the story-logic of companions.
- Alignment has never really been treated properly in BG games, since Law/Chaos was mostly ignored; now in 5e it doesn't really exist! So, if it's not really part of the underlying mechanism, you get to make your mind up how to deal with companions. I can cope with that, if the story does a good job with morality and choice generally; we have yet to find out.

Either way, I'm looking forward to playing the game for what it is, rather than what it isn't.

To be fair, here how it lookf for Baldur's Gate 2:
One really gets the sense humans is the main race of Fearun. Others seems more fantastical and rare. But that has to do more on the setting of the game.

Half-elf
Human
Human
Dwarf
Drow
Elf
Human
Halfling
Human
Half-elf
Gnome
Human
Human
Tiefling
Human

Humans are the main races but non human races like the dwarfs and even elves are highly represented. Dwarves have multiple strongholds. And, the sword coast is littered with dwarf and elf stuff. In BG1, there was atcually a halfling village. Most major human cities including Baldur's Gate have sizeable non human populations. The fact that drow and tieflings are represented - espicially drow - says a lot.

Since we can play short races, they have to make the camera work for short races anyway. It wouldn't be any/much extra work. Thoroughly dissapointed at not having a dwarf/halfling/gnome companion.