What makes you think that Mintharas content is bugged instead of cut/nonexisting?
Because Hotfix 5 fixed almost nothing it advertised itself to have fixed. One romance conversation got fixed so the game properly flags you as romancing her, a little bit of party banter (nowhere near 1500 lines), and two bugs related to her mostly already working dialogue got fixed in Hotfix 5. Patch 3 fixes a couple more of those bugs with her mostly working dialogue, but didn't make any reference to her romance interactions. Her content is well and truly borked and it seems even the developers don't understand why. It really comes off like they stopped paying attention to her programming when the big shift in focus happened in the middle of early access and have just a couple people scouring the code for errors. It could also very well be exactly what Leucrotta said, that they did a bad job when cutting content and didn't realize some of the intended content's stability was dependent on what was cut, and it would certainly explain why they're having such a hard time getting her working properly. But it doesn't explain things like the second romance scene not firing after the dialogue to confirm the romance which should be directly hooked together; it should have been relatively trivial to test if the scripting for that was functional and they just didn't bother.
Originally Posted by zonn
BG3 could've taken a cue from its predecessors in terms of companion acquisition and management. They should all be recruitable. Some more difficult to get than others, such as with Minthara (which would actually make it even more rewarding), but it should ultimately be down to companions choosing to leave, stay, or try to kill you, based on player decisions.
I feel that this evil/good barrier is way too forced when it comes to companions. I would never choose to massacre the inhabitants of the grove, therefore I'm missing out from experiencing someone who seems to be even more interesting than what Viconia was back in the day. I'd be OK with cosmetic or gear rewards being locked to good or evil playthroughs, but not with such a potentially interesting character.
The sense of missing out is killing me, but not to the point of being forced to do an evil playthrough for the sake of it. This particular hard lock is frustrating, and the reason why there's mods and other shenanigans that attempt to contravene this.
So, yes. Make Minthara recruitable without the need to massacre refugees and tree huggers. And give the most awesome weapon that laughs maniacally whenever someone dies by the player's hand as a reward.
Also yeah, most of this is rock-solid. It would still stay true to the dev intent for Minthara to be incompatible with Halsin if say, Halsin sees her and immediately attacks because rawr threat to the grove (even if you murdered every living thing there and told him about it when you recruited him which is so fucking insane, just let Minthara carry forward to Moonrise if you knock her out ffs). In the first Baldur's Gate certain characters would just murder one another if they were incompatible unless you arranged the death of one of them yourself. Their recruitment wasn't limited by a programming contrivance like counting the knocked-out as dead to excuse making them unavailable.
