I guess I'm going to put this game on a shelf. I tried doing mods and couldn't get a custom party. I'll check back in with the next update and hopefully we can have custom characters in a few months. Rather than play through the game now, I'd like to have a novel playthrough with the party I want. I doubt anyone would even care if they scrapped the whole mercenary system because that is not an appealing option.

I'd be happy with three extra slots in camp where a custom character can go. It would be nice if they could all be tadpoled, but I'd settle for mercenaries that stick around and don't have vessel dialogue. Even better would be you can create custom characters during character creation and either start with 1, 2, or 3 of them at the outset or some predetermined meeting point, like one of them is on the beach where you find Shadowheart, one is in the jail cell in the grove, and one "randomly" shows up when you make camp. There's room for one more in the nautilus, so you could also start with two characters there, either just showing up when you hop out of the pod or replacing one of the dead thralls with an "almost dead" custom companion.

Another option would be to replace origin characters (as if they were killed when you met them) and meet the custom characters where there would have been an origin character, but that seems unnecessarily destructive.