Yeah, particularly since she was described irrc in a panel from hell by Swen as a 'reward' for sticking through the ever-controversial grove-massacre quest. Kinda gave the impression that she was something special, not a 'sidekick' that was intended to have less content than other companions. (even though you recruit her later-whaaat?)
But there's two parts that are particularly dissapointing here:
"She's there to actually serve another character that you meet later on in the game, one of the antagonists," he says. "So, she was supposed to bring a different light on that antagonist in there."
So that's Orin, right? Yeah, IDK about a party member whose primary reason for existing is a boss you meet in Act 3. Is Minthara supposed to be BG 3's Yoshimo, or something?
Then we get this:
"There was a variation that they discovered of Minthara that we removed because it became too complicated. Then we didn't have the real estate across the game anymore to tell that story. So, they found some fragments of it. But I mean, every single companion that you've been playing has gone through those multiple iterations. So, it's not that it's something like we massively cut something there. It's just that Minthara also serves the power fantasy of going for evil."
So it was 'too complicated' then 'We didn't have the real estate across the game anymore?'
What the heck does 'we didn't have the real estate across the game anymore' mean anyways? That sounds like an allusion to the massive amounts of cut content a lot of people are speculating on, particularly in Act 3.
So she was intended as a power fantasy for evil players, but she was intended to give one of our villains some (easily missable) narrative depth. She was too complicated to get to work, and we didn't have anywhere to put her content because we cut down the game, but she's totally a sidekick and we didn't cut anything meaningful, please don't look to hard at the romance stuff in the files that we cut, or how we were selling her to the player base as a romance option...did I miss anything here? Because that sounds an awful lot to me like cut content....which they are trying to downplay the significance of.
Bracing myself for when they patch her messed up triggers and it turns out that her not having a romance was actually intentional.
