Gale isn't evil. You have to succeed persuasion check or he leaves if you go with evil route in act 1. He's angry at us. So then you're stuck with Shadowheart, Lae'zel and Astarion, that is... if they are even alive. If not, well then... you have only generic mercenaries from Withers.
If someone manages to lose all origin characters before the act 1 party, I don't think it's Larian's fault for having no content.
Right. Then why is it okay to have "evil" characters on my good playthrough, but it is not okay to have "good" characters on my evil playthrough? Why the restrictions? This game just doesn't offer you anything if you don't play a morally good character to the letter.
Larian should really take some cues from Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous. The game can change drastically depending how you play - good - neutral - evil. 4 playthroughs behind me and I still haven't seen everything the game has to offer and it's way longer than BG3. Not to mention companions - there are no restrictions with recruitement. Everyone can join, but that doesn't mean they will stay till the end. Too many decisions they don't like and shit will hit the fan. Or... we can even try and change their alignment, it won't work on everyone, but there's a chance. Now, this is what I call branching RPG with choices that matter.
Wrath of the Righteous is one of my all time favorite games. Frankly, I think the reason that it works so well is because of its own restrictions it presents. Because you choose which path you want to go down and then you have to stick to that path until a few set places. You get to choose what story you want fairly early on, and you still get choices and flexibility within that story, but the choice of story still applies. I think that if Larian tried making WotR they'd have done something stupid like trying to make it so you can switch paths whenever you like and nonsense like that.
Speaking of Owlcat, I played their Rogue Trader game and it was the first and likely only game where I played an evil run to the end. I don't like playing evil, but playing a Chaos aligned character felt really cool and fun and while the story didn't branch as drastically as it did in WotR, I still felt like they really tailored the chaos run quite well. I also think that characters were a bit more lenient with me than perhaps they should have been, but I don't mind that, something had to be sacrificed and I'm glad that was it.
I think a big part of why Owlcat manages to pull this sort of thing off and Larian didn't is because Owlcat seems to put emphasis on making the story about the player character, whereas Larian, at least with BG3, seems to focus on the player behind the screen. I feel that everything is geared towards letting the player get away with doing dumb stuff, and they don't really consider Tav to be a character who is meant to have agency. The player has agency in that they can go wherever and poke whatever they like, but Tav is a husk through which the player is able to see what happens if they do any given thing. In BG3, the story isn't about Tav, the story is another thing for the player to see and prod at to see what silly reactions pop out. Whereas in all three of owlcat's games, the story felt well and truly ABOUT the main character, about their experiences, struggles and how they change or develop as a result of those experiences.
