Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Story & Character Discussion Minthara Story & Character Discussion

Nice find. I am certainly supporting the restoration, whether partial or more comprehensive, of any cut content for Minthara. It's something we would all like to see, given what we've discussed before (in short, how having her in the party can still feel a little buggy and incomplete, compared to the other companions).

At the same time, after playing more of the game (all of Act 2, part of Act 3)...while Minthara does reveal her actions during the druid grove massacre were ultimatley carried out under the influence of the Absolute and not truly coming from her free will, it's presented as more of a difference of degrees. She wouldn't go that far, yes, but plenty of other evil actions would be acceptable for her.

In other words, she's still a very domineering individual with a lust for power and conquest. Mind you, I am not criticizing her for that. In practice, she's essentially framed as a lesser evil, compared to the major villains, yet still focused on such objectives as vengeance and taking over the world. Not exactly heroic feats, in and of themselves, even if you can justify them with roleplaying.

For instance, Minthara supports Shadowheart embracing Shar and making "evil" choices in that questline, despite not personally sharing her belief system. If the developers were to somehow allow you to recruit Minthara without massacring the grove, which would be fine as an option given enough conditions, there still would be plenty of tension in the air. All fine and good, but it's worth being aware of it.

I was thinking about a possible option of Minthara joining your party while siding with the druids, so I mad this short storyboard.

During the raid, when siding with the druids, she can only be knocked out, so she stays at 1hp once you beat her.
After successfully defending the grove and watching Zevlor's cutscene, a new scene (the storyboard) will be triggered when you are getting near Minthara's unconscious body.

Then you would have the option to visit her in the Emerald Grove's prison.
After asking some questions, you can free Minthara and invite her to your camp/party. While being on a good playthrough : )

There might be spoilers.

I'm not going to watch that video, but just to confirm, this is just fan fiction correct?

THat storyboard is great, it would mean grove sided would get you Minthara BEFORE goblin siding though?
Also as much as having her earlier would be cool, I do feel saving her for the tower prison, is an important moment in her story that would be robbed from the player?

Also here are two posts about the data mining, there is ALOT more Minthara content Larian made but never implimented into the game
https://www.tumblr.com/baldursyourg...field-day-reading-the-datamined-dialogue
https://www.tumblr.com/roksik-dnd/725479264465666048/bg3-parsed-dialogue-03082023-google-drive

Especially the first link contains plenty of PC-Minthara romance content, and the second has the link to the full datamine

Also Minthara-Karlach dialogue!
[img]https://64.media.tumblr.com/82e8927...c9bc5d0284f09d596d35be35c4acd283a3aa.pnj[/img]
when the game currently doesn't let you have them both in your party

I hope Larian just didn't have time to finalize it and bring back all the romance in a patch

In its current state the game, at its heart, has a Minthara - shaped hole.

But you can fix it Larian !

Yes it's pretty much fan fiction.

@starshine Thank you! She could stay in the prison for a while and than escape later on, which leads to her being at the tower again : ) So she will be recruitable in act 2 while being in prison, again.

That'd work perfectly, she's still have that moment of silence to build doubt on and meet all the (nonromance) plot beats.
Hopefully Larian are working on this for an update.

Before they work on entirely new content for a "good path" to recruitment, they really should properly hook her existing content so it actually happens. That she has all that content in the files, but none of her romance scenes properly trigger and so can't properly activate the flag so the game will recognize it is pretty wild. Her Random Inclusion dialogue and what little of her content does properly trigger hits VERY well so this is a massive, massive shame. Especially since Larian got nearly 35% of people to not side with the Grove, like three to six times the average of most "evil" story paths in videogames. Even if they don't romance her, what few trickles of her own content activate are nothing compared to the other non-Origin companions.

This is easily the biggest bug in the game if it wasn't intentionally cut. And if it was intentionally cut I can't imagine what the justification was because it looks far worse to leave her as-is.

I see the two as the same thing, having her recruitable in both paths means she's a part of 100% of players story, not 35%, meaning theres a strong incentive to improve/finish/expand her character. Not either or, but A so B

The game does let you have them both in your party, you have to either ignore the grove or solve the problem through Kagha's shadow druid questline. You can even ask her for her opinion on Karlach, but since the refugee smith won't be available, I'm not sure where that leads (I paused that save and currently just going with the "intended" goblin raid way). But yes, a lot of this seems unfinished or cut and I really hope we'll get a Minthara expansion, she's the perfect companion for my drow mc and I'm obsessed :c

That's fair, I just wanted to note the wild success Larian's had in getting people to not choose the obvious morally "good" path in a videogame. It cannot be overstated how absolutely unpopular it is, even in a series like Mass Effect where it's less of a moral choice and more of a color-coded attitude. And it's a massive shame that after being that successful in getting so many more people than usual to try out the less traveled path, a companion unique to that choice is just flat out missing most of her personal story and interactions.

Though honestly Larian already built in the best way to make her available to anyone following through with defeating the Goblin leaders/defending the Grove during the assault. There are at least a couple fights in the game already wherein a specific enemy reaches low HP, sometimes under other circumstances like at least one other enemy being dead, and tries to surrender. Since "Knocking Out" counts to the game the same way as killing does, just script a low-health surrender condition into her combat interactivity in the Temple or the Grove assault. After the surrender maybe you talk, but I think with her personality and skills she'd try to stealth away and end up in Moonrise regardless (and maybe on a successful perception check a player chooses to kill her anyway for trying to escape). It would play into how shattered her confidence seems, having narrowly escaped a more permanent defeat and would have no conflict with how her dialogue already plays out there. Xiphos's storyboard is nice, but probably more work than needs to happen to accommodate her availability.

But the most immediately important thing is that she just flat out needs to have her existing content fixed to properly activate in-game, assuming the associated voicework and scenes are also finished and in the files.

I've only just gotten Minthara into my party but there are definitely some bugs with her.

For instance, I rescued her from the dungeon before getting the moonlantern from Balthazar's room, and she kept initiating dialogue with my character every five seconds to tell him that she wouldn't follow him upstairs. (And this is after I tried to tell her to wait downstairs!)

The way her dialogue tree is constructed is also different from the rest of the companions, which strikes me as a rushed fix to get her commentary on everyone else. She does have some very incisive comments on the rest of the party, though!

It's really a shame to have to give up three companions to get a kind of broken one.

One important thing is when you recruit Minthara DO NOT ASK HER ABOUT SHADOWHEART!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! She spoils the end of SH's story for the end of Act 2[i][/i][u][/u]

It spoils one possible ending...since you can, of course, still make the opposite choice during Shadowheart's personal quest.

Hopefully the developers are aware of these bugs, especially when they spoil things like that.

Is there where we come to beg Larian to add the missing/fix Minthara content? If so, I'd like to throw my hat in as well.

I suggest renaming this thread Petition to Larian to Fix Minthara, there is a fan club thread for character discussion
https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=697736&page=1

Yeah, something like that >_>
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3020024227

I can say that I will give the game a 9 out of 10 only because of the broken Minthara, which spoiled my first playthrough.

I didn't have romance the whole game and also lost a lot of companions because of it

Heads up someone over at the reddit mentioned that Larian responded to a support ticket saying that Minthara is bugged and will get fixed

https://www.reddit.com/r/BaldursGate3/comments/15rx34f/baldurs_gate_3_hotfixes_patches/