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.
If they understand what players want, they'll add it in a patch/DLC or as part of a "definitive edition".
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.
So you basically can hire zombies.
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.
