Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Story & Character Discussion Petition: Let us have Minthara without mass genocide

It makes a hell of a lot more sense than the Nere interaction that was in early access where you could convince someone who is far more chaotically evil to take a step back from the Absolute worship. Especially since he doesn't join your party afterward and so would go straight back to being mind controlled. The entire reason it makes sense for Minthara is exactly because of how you already recruit her. She has a scene at Moonrise which you then rescue her from. All anyone is saying is that if she is not killed, that scene should still play out the same way it does if you ignore the Grove conflict entirely. Because it doesn't make sense for it NOT to. Nothing about the game visibly changes, just one programming quirk that counts her as dead if you knock her out which makes far less sense.

The early access stuff with Nere made more sense when it seemed more ambiguous what the limits to the absolute's control were-how much of it was conditioning/brainwashing and how much was affinity with the tadpoles making you more susceptible to the absolute's voice. (stuff like the characters speculating that the nautaloid was taking them to moonrise to 'complete' the transformation into true souls, or the stuff where overusing the tadpoles could give Nere the ability to take mental control over the PC's and force them to help him in a fight)

The idea of even having to 'discipline' unruly true souls who get too big for their bridges when they essentially have no free will is an odd notion in the game as things are now, IMHO.

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.

I have to disagree with many of the posters here.

I'm a huge fan of Minthara, but suggesting that you should be able to recruit and romance any companion regardless of the choices you make in the game would remove the idea that your choices have consequences. You should not be able to recruit one of the villains, unless you side with the villains.

If you don't want to attack the corrupted grove that's been infested and the devil spawn that's taken refuge there - you don't have to. But that's the price for being able to recruit one of the villains of Act I. If you opposed her in Act I , don't expect her to suddenly be friendly later on.

In the playthru that I did in which I recruited and romanced Minthara, my character's justification was that the Druids weren't the peace-loving, nature-protecting people they claimed to be; and if the Absolute put this tadpole into my character's head, then those working for the Absolute might know of a way to get rid of it. THerefore I infiltrated their organization to gain the info, and if it meant choosing sides, I chose the loveable goblins who were being persecuted by the mean Druids.

On my "good" playthrus, I chose a different motivation and helped the Druids against chaotic goblin-kind.

How you justify it is completely up to you. One thing I love about BG3 and dislike about most other games is that in most other games it doesn't matter what choices you make, those choices have no real consequence on the story; but those choices do have consequences in BG3.

If you like women, there's romance options available for you.
If you like men, there's romance options available for you.
If you like both, there's options there too.
If you like threesomes, or even foursome - they put in an option for that.
There's an option to have a primary romance and others on the side (if you're into that).
You can play as "good", you can play as "evil", you can play anything in between - there's options available to you.
You can play custom characters, you can play origin characters.
You who choose to have in your camp or party affects what storlylines you have access to, same with the choices you make on how you treat recruitable and non-recruitable folks.

I like the fact that you can't 'get with' certain companions if you don't play in a style that they would want you to.

If you want to recruit someone who starts off as a villain, it should be expected that you'd likely have to do some villainous stuff. For those that know the lore, she's a Drow loyal to Lolth and an Oath of Vengeance Paladin. So, no, she's not into those who aren't willing to kick a few puppies (rhetorically speaking of course).

But, as always, you play the way you want to - as long as you're prepared to face the consequences of those actions.

The issue to me is that the logic behind why various characters can/cannot be in your party is...lacking.


If Minthara survives Act 1, there is *no reason* that she wouldn't end up back at Moonrise towers, having her mind wiped, ready to be recruited. Slaughtering the Tieflings or not really has nothing to do with her as a character - she only wants them dead because she (wrongly) believes they have the astral prism, and she only wants *that* because she's being mind controlled. Hell, Minthara even calls you out for slaughtering the grove if your reasons for doing so are frivolous.

Similarly, though, while it makes sense that Karlach and Wyll aren't down with slaughtering tieflings, it *does not* make sense for them to leave, knowing that doing so means immediately falling under the absolute's control (and likely ceremorphosis). Honestly, it would make much more sense for those characters to try and kill you than to just up and...wander off to die?


(it also bothers me that the game reacts the same way if the druids slaughter the tieflings as if you do the job yourself, but that's a separate issue).

Tbh topic should be renamed to "Can we have Minthara?" because other doesn't matter since most of her dialogues and romance in act 3 (probably act2 too) so bugged. It's almost 2 months and she's still bugged it's even more hilarious because of hotfix #5 claimed to fix it but it's not. If you never tried to romance Minthara in your playthrough you need to know what most of videos at least with her romance is restored with Debug Book mod (and no, it's not just install mod and play. There is some work to make it playable).

What makes you think that Mintharas content is bugged instead of cut/nonexisting?

Answer on your question was on my last sentence. Finish the new game after release hotfix #5. Then saw dialogues with Minthara on youtube which I obviously didn't get in my playthrough. And this is not just voice lines, it's completed animated scenes which you can get if you download debug book and make some work with flags. That proceed to a conclusion that her content is bugged otherwise it makes no sense for a hotfix #5 which declares of restored 1500 dialogue lines with her because after a new playthrough I got only 1 new dialogue and 1 chat between companions.

Little of column A, little of column B, honestly. It's clear they cut a lot of content, and it seems like they never got around to adding anything to replace it, and if we are being honest, never really bothered to make sure what was left actually worked after cutting her content apart, hence the bugs.

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.


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.

That's just one of the things wrong with Minthara at the moment to the point she'd need a patch just for herself entirely. But yeah, +1.

Minthara has been one of my favorite characters since early access. I've been holding off doing a run with her in the party because I heard so much of her content was missing. It sounds like it hasn't gotten any better yet. Fingers crossed that whatever's wrong gets fixed.

That depends if you want them to stay a companion or not, I'm pretty sure Korgan is eventually going to fight you if you're too much of a goody two shoes and he's not the only one who'll either walk out or come to blows if things get too far stretched from their alignment.

It's partially due to the fact that you lose out on THREE companions and the ENTIRE Tiefling story and willingly choose to have your character go down an evil route only to realise the companion you wanted to recruit is actually NOT EVIL IN THE SLEIGHTEST that makes your statement completely false. It would've been alright if they made her to actually work with an evil playthrough but when you save her and free her from the Absolutes control she presses you and asks you why you helped her kill all those people seeing as she was forced to kill them against her will and you willingly chose to kill those innocents. If you broke her from the mind control in ACT 1 and asked her if she still wanted to attack the grove she would've been fully against that idea and would've likely left camp had you gone through with it which means theres no actual reason to lock her behind an evil only playthrough. So either the completely change her character so she doesn't ask you why you decided to slaughter innocent people or they actually give us more options to recruit her so we arent forced to slaughter the entire grove and lose multiple companions.

Minthara is definitely evil. But she's pragmatic evil, which is why it doesn't mesh well to have her recruitment locked behind the senseless slaughter of innocents.

the slaughter is not senseless... its part of her plot and she is more upset by that than anyone
Minthara is buggy but she is still the best option by a long way... Larian is unlikely to spend the time needed to really fix her as their last few patches have been phone it in efforts

The Minthara problem is not about whether or not a good player should be able to recruit an evil character. We already can do that with Astarion, Lae'zel, and Shadowheart. Like, someone tried to dunk on someone else by pointing out that Minthara is Lolth-sworn, but Shadowheart is a devotee of a real piece-of-shit goddess herself when we first meet her. The game cleverly tricks you by giving her a voice-actor that isn't obviously evil-coded and not having her cartoonishly demand that you be a dickhead all the time, but there's no way to interpret Shar-worship except as an evil cult. Lae'zel, on the other hand, is openly an asshole who thinks the weak must perish, which is generally understood to be an evil point of view, and is devoted to a goddess literally known as "The Lich Queen." Astarion may not have any evil religious affiliations, but he has similar approval/disapproval reactions to Lae'zel, his instinct is to acquire power for himself no matter who he has to hurt to get it, and he will cheerfully drink your blood until you're dead if you let him. And all of them can be recruited on a good playthrough, you can keep them for the entirety of that playthrough, and you can change their minds but you don't actually have to! So let's not pretend this is about whether a good player should be able to recruit an evil companion.

I agree, by the way, that it's fine to have companions who aren't available to players of a certain alignment or tendency. I kept expecting Lae'zel to ditch me or attack me, and I was okay with that. That would have made sense! It does not make sense that the only way you can recruit a companion is by doing something she doesn't agree with and wouldn't have wanted you to do, especially when she does not start out any more "evil" than several companions you can recruit as a good player already.

HOWEVER. The one thing that would have to be papered over or altered in a significant way before Larian would probably want to make the requested change, and very possibly the reason they ended up doing what they did, is this question: what possible reason would you have for knocking her out instead of killing her? See, we know that at one point quite late in development they intended for us to be able to do exactly what we're asking for here. There are Minthara dialogue files referencing the tieflings as being alive in Act 2. Karlach and Wyll have dialogue files referencing her pregnancy. What reason could they have had to abandon this possibility? I'm sure the (utterly misguided) notion that evil players should have exclusive rewards was a part of it, but a bigger part, I suspect, is that Larian is trying to make a roleplaying game here. That means a game that doesn't reward or incentivize metagamed approaches to various decisions. You can tell this is a priority for them because of how they did the companion relationships. If you try to metagame for "good endings" for your companions the way gamers usually do (i.e., by just mindlessly farming approval points and letting your companion do whatever they say they want to do) you'll end up with some real dickheads in your party. So it seems clear that Larian is trying as hard as it can to stop you from trying to engineer any particular set of outcomes.

So how, in that spirit, could they currently justify giving us what we want here? The only reason I could have for not killing her is that I read on the internet that you can recruit her as a companion. There is no plausible in-universe reason for me to leave her alive while killing everyone else. You can't even argue that I'm hoping I can recruit her because she has a tadpole, because Ragzlin and Gut have tadpoles too. So why do I kill them and not Minthara? Is it because their names are more obviously evil-henchman-coded? Is it because they're goblins and I'm some kind of racist who makes decisions about killing a person based on how fuckable their race is? They'd have to give us a reason, probably gated behind a pretty steep skill check of some kind, to suspect that she's fighting the Absolute's influence and could be turned if we spare her life. So it's really not so simple as just letting us knock her out.

You could make the argument that trying to capture Minthara could serve the purpose of giving you a way to get closer to the Absolute without having to kill a bunch of refugees/leave them to their fates. As I understand it, she's higher up on the ladder within the cult, with the goblins being placed under her control. Ragzlin and Gut seemed more like the middle-managers compared to Minthara and in all likelihood, might not be much help with the cult itself. Nevermind that Ragzlin kind of comes off as dumb muscle and Gut as just...dumb with trying to get a Mind Flayer as a pet.

And I suppose Larian could maybe implement something to make it so that Minthara seems off when she gets close to you and the artifact to clue the player in that it might be worth it to knock her out? Precedent's already there when you're at the goblin party and romance her.

Oh thank god! I thought I was the only person thinking this about the whole Minthara Problem. I get it, Minthara would be nice to recruit no matter what route you take but it doesn't make sense as going down the route of "I must help The Grove". She's a Goblin leader, that to your knowledge without any meta gaming she is a Lolth-Sworn Drow and is Evil.

I want Minthara and Halsin together in the group, I have nothing against the “genocide”, but Halsin does (Wyll and Karlach too). We lose three companions just for one. That's not worth it.