Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Hirelings : confusing and limited. We need full customisation. Also, full Custom PC parties in SP.

That's a really good tangent, though. I'd like that change.

I'm still mucking around in Act 1 hoping for a custom party. If that happens, I'm going to restart, play through Act 1 (again) and get to Act 2 fresh with the party I want. I so hope that happens.

I'm like the others in this one. I put the game aside midway through Act I, as soon as I discovered I could never create my own custom party. It was thoroughly disheartening, and quite honestly if I'd known this, I would have never preordered the game to begin with. I would have waited for it to go on sale.

The game, no matter how good other parts of it are, just lost something with this garbage-tier Hireling system. I spent time with high hopes in having the Companions of the Hall, to have an adventure with them dealing with the tadpoles.Taking Bruenor, Wulfgar, Drizzt, Cattie-Brie, and Regis, using their second lives (aside from Drizzt), but also throwing in other characters, like Entreri, Gromph, Jarlaxle, Athrogate, Afra, Ambergris, etc. As optional joins.

While I can respect Larian wanting us to enjoy the Companions, they are wholly a one-note kind of thing.
It makes no sense to respec them to different classes because it breaks their story. Mechanically you can have what you want, but then it all comes across as stupid when you have Shadowheart's story about being a cleric, only you've got her playing as a Barbarian.

The Hirelings are 100% a joke. They should have let us create what we want, how we want. It's no different from an MP game and if it's more difficult, well some would actually enjoy that. So it hardly seems like an issue.


I gotta be honest here. If they put this on a Definitive Edition that requires me to buy an entirely new copy of the game, or else pay "extra" to upgrade my current version to Definitive, then I will never buy a game they've worked on again, unless it's on a steep discount/sale.

Can forgive a lot of things, but a feature like this, which should have been in the game from the very beginning being plopped behind a paywall, is absolutely ridiculous.

That is exactly what they are. If you look at the Hirelings thing on the wiki, they each had flavor text describing how they died. Essentially Withers is pulling up dead people to help us.

The joke is that Withers apparently has dialogue talking about there being an "endless supply" of these hirelings. So instead of rolling with that and letting us create our own custom ones, Larian force fed us this group.

If the D:OS games are anything to go by, we'll get an eventual Definitive Edition for free as we already own the basic game.

How much I want to play a full wood elf / half wood elf party for that juicy movement speed buff, but No, Larian won't let me.

Not even a single wood elf hireling.

Not to mention not a single Dragonborn hireling.

And it's almost like they are taunting us with it, by giving Withers the dialogue that talks about there being many many hirelings, since essentially he's raising them from the dead anyways.

Literally the perfect excuse to have 100% customizable hirelings, and it wasn't fully utilized. That is probably what irritates me the most.

I use the word "irritating" about the lack of custom party options, but I still think this is a great game. If I thought Larian would never add them, I'd just go ahead and start Act 2 and I'm sure I would enjoy it. I'm just holding out hope that it's still something that will happen, though I was disappointed it didn't make the cut for the most recent patch.

They also really need to fix the unpopular races. All of the popular races have a niche, like Wood Elf if you want to move faster, Human if you want a Shield, Wood Half-Elf if you want a bit of both, and the abilities of Drow, High Half-Elves, High Elves, Tieflings, and Half-Orcs all have things that you can stack up against what a Wood Elf gets and there are some pretty decent builds. You can just match up the unpopular races with various classes to see they clearly get less. With Dwarves, it's glaring because the Shield Dwarf just gets less than Hill Dwarf if you choose a class that has Medium or Heavy Armor, but all of them lost something in translation from 5e to BG3 that just wasn't replaced. That's bad game design. They should have said "Why would I choose to play a Rock Gnome instead of a Wood Elf?" Then made sure it fit somewhere. Like give a Rock Gnome Expertise in Sleight of Hand (to replace the Tinker ability they lost) and suddenly, without being OP, you might choose a party with no Bard or Rogue but has a Gnome (of any class) who can still competently do the lockpicking and trap disarming; i.e., a niche. And make Gnomes the "expert class" by giving Forest Gnomes Expertise in Handle Animal and Deep Gnomes Expertise in Stealth. Then you'll always feel like you have a reason to play a Gnome, even though they are slow. You could easily make Halflings "just interesting enough" by giving them Stealth Proficiency; it won't always be a no-brainer to take Wood Elf instead of Halfling, even though they are faster, and you could go Lightfoot for a lot of Stealth or Braveheart for just enough. If you just give Githyanki exactly what they had as racial abilities in 5e (specifically, the same as they are now + Psionic Resistance), they will be no less compelling a choice than they already are in 5e. And Dwarves are easy to fix, too; just give all Dwarves Light Armor Proficiency and Shield Dwarves get one better Armor Proficiency than everyone else (e.g., Medium + Shield (duh, it's right in their subrace name) if their class only has Light or No Armor, Heavy Armor if their class has Medium, and Heavy Armor Master if their class has Heavy Armor); then Dwarves have a "niche," which would be toughness for Hill Dwarf and armor for Shield Dwarf.

Once they fix the unpopular races with a minor feat here or there, they will truly have a game where a custom party is fun, assuming we eventually get a custom party.

I agree with all of this, I don't like Larian's insistence on putting time and focus on origin character content in a CRPG, that seems backwards to me.
But then again I'm someone who grew up on the Troika RPGs instead of BG1/2, where their games were much more focused on reacting to you the player and your choices, and much much less so on the companions, if you even had any.

I am currently doing a 4 character custom party via the 4 instances work-around, it's been very fun, but the game definitely doesn't expect you to play that way.
Most origin characters still insist on joining you and don't check your party size until you acquiesce and say "Fine, you can join" which leads them to be like "Oh no you need to get rid of people." and it comes off as very weird with mixed signals.

I also find that custom characters don't interact as much as they did in DoS2, you could have two custom characters react to eachother in dialogue when making choices (Not all the time, but for certain occasions). They will occasionally make random comments in the over world that *seem* to be in response to one another but it's very vague.

Anyway I'm getting into the reeds, I would much rather be able to have 3 hirelings that I have total customized control over than to have to do the 4 instances nonsense, or be made to use origin characters. I don't know yet how well or poorly BG3 works with smaller parties, we have no Lone Wolf mode despite the fact the game's story feels best with a party of 2 in co-op.

The reason I find this to be so irritating, is that it's 99% of the way implemented because of multiplayer. We're missing UI and save elements for the character creator, and to load secondary characters we've saved from the character creator during the new game screen. Yes they may have to patch any dialogue weirdness this creates when meeting origin characters, but that finger will point straight at the person who noped out of doing this the right way before release. Trying to put this off on a "Definitive Edition" neglects that the D:OS2 one didn't come out for like a year after the first release. That's unreasonable.

I tried to get Steam to refund this, and was refused due to my EA playtime. Total playtime since release: 35 minutes.

Negative experience, indeed.

No, that is intentional. They know exactly how to milk the cow. I think that's Larian's sales strategy, unfortunately. If we want to play a better version with different game mechanics, then we have to wait for the Definitive Edition and buy... I mean, it's as others predicted. I play EA only expanded by two additional acts and have to deal with... And yes it's my own fault for not waiting another 1-2 years for the Definitive Edition...

I'm a week into playing now and I've got to say I really don't understand why they didn't make hirelings customizable from the start - there's literally NOTHING to them.

Like their spatter of a backstory and their dialogue has absolutely no relevance. I would reroll my party with all hirelings if I could, but alas, I hate the design of all but 2 of them.

As for the significance of Companions and their relation to the story - I plenty enjoyed the hunt for Haslin... and the reveal and cheeky request of Astarion... and Gale begging for my magical resources and his explosive task.. Annnd the price Wyll had to pay for breaking his contract... and yet I still don't use them in my party. As for Lazael and Shadowheart, who are in my party based on their character designs alone... if anything, its kinda tiresome how blindly Lazael follows Vlaakith and Shadowheart follows Shar.

All in all, its not grabbing me as much as full custom parties would be.

I've lost all interest in this game as of part way through Act 2.
I play with mods and just to try to shake things up a bit, i.e. play for laughs, I thought I'd install 'Party Size Begone'. The mod seems to work just fine but it brought me into contact with the hirelings who I'd not previously paid much attention to.
Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear. What a waste of space.

I'm just about to trawl Nexus mods for a 'recruit anyone' type of mod I spotted some time ago. Not that there are a lot of people left to recruit in Act 2.

I'm going to go a little tin hat here. Maybe WotC told Larian custom char gen is not allowed. If there is a mod that allows you to change the rules to match 5e rules and have a cool character editor, it will compete with the 5e subscription service, which they've been pushing in the boardroom for quite a while now, using words like "D&D is undermonetized." Maybe a little too far on the side of conspiracy theory that Larian is not allowed to let people make custom-generated characters.

WotC would also oppose a DM mode for BG3 for the same reason. WotC were being complete dicks to other game content producers when they tried to yoink the license for 5e out from under them all, and the new contract says you can't use the license if you animate a magic missile on screen. (I haven't confirmed that; I just heard the "rules lawyer" say that on Youtube.) It would make sense they would gimp Larian if Larian tried to do some things that could be used outside of BG3 for a TTRPG, like a custom character or dungeon maps.

The fact that 'fixed' appearance hirelings is a thing is a crying shame. It makes zero sense to NOT be able to customise them. I like playing as a variety of races, Halfings (still waiting on someone making a Ghostwise Halfling mod), Dwarves, Dragonborn etcetera etcetera but with all 'main' companions being Human, Elf, Half Elf or Tiefling and a relatively limited selection of the fixed Hirelings, it's impossible to assemble say, a party of Dwarves or have a pair of Dragonborn (or whatever combination you might wish for). It also leads onto the 'issue' of playing a short race and only having 'tall' love interests... but that's a whole other rabbit hole that I've read several complaints about already. I'm hoping Larian themselves make moves to resolve this but I'm thinking it'll probably be down to mods to get a party that we REALLY want.

If that were the case, we wouldn't have been able to create a custom character at all.

That, and multiple companions have room to be different races.

1. Lae'zel obviously needs to be Githyanki
2. Shadowheart could be any race's female, no need to be half-elf.
3. Gale could be a male wizard of any race.
4. Wyll could probably be any race as well, as long as you transform his father along with him. I do see human fitting better.
5. Astarion could probably be any tall race except Orc or Dragonborn. Probably works better with the more mundane races (elf, human, ...).
6. Karlach is Karlach, backstory is too specific for her to be anything other than Tiefling.
7. Halsin could be any race's large buff male.
8. Jaheira is Jaheira.
9. Minsc is Minsc.
10. Don't know anything about Minthara yet, so I can't judge there.

The OP is a great post and articulates my own confusion and dislike of the current hireling system.

I would feel much better if we were told that they would fix this in a future patch. I'm taking it slow on my first playthrough but my second one will wait until they add the possibility of a fully custom party. I want to customize race, names and appearance to make my dream team.

I haven't been playing because I'm still holding out hope we get a custom party and want to dive into the last half of the game without spoilers. It kind of sucks waiting, though.

I'm playing through anyway because the story appears to be slightly different, or at least have different arcs in it, based on having the cast of characters with you. I'm doing a playthrough with Astarion, Karlach and Shadowheart. I realise you can still get much if not all of these stories without having them actually fight with you (by just returning to camp to discuss) I do feel like I'm getting added story value by bringing these characters with me. Some things just seem to unfold while wandering in a way that makes sense. I wouldn't be achieving that value if I were in a full custom on my first playthrough.

If Larian drags their feet too long, or confirm that they never will do custom parties in a normal way (without the multi-client workaround) then I'll probably play through again until I've used all of the companions in my main party for the win.

At that point, though, when I would normally be doing all kinds of creative parties I'll probably just walk away from the game if they haven't implemented a suitable feature.

Guys!!! CUSTOMIZABLE HIRELINGS ARE LIVE!

As of when? The latest patch? Also, do you mean respeccing via Withers and then changing appearance via the Magic Mirror?