Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Hirelings : confusing and limited. We need full customisation. Also, full Custom PC parties in SP.

With patch 7 there will come an "official" mod to make custom hirelings, I'm sure. It already exists now BTW. I did 3 complete PT's without rule-altering mods, but for the 4th I installed "CustomCompanions" and "Party limit Begone". So now I can create a party of any size with all classes and races I want. It's so much fun, you can finally try out classes you would not do because of the restrictions, and also, get your class do "silly" things (silly in a party of 4) but fun and interesting in such a large and varied group because you're not TPK'd so easily anymore. E.g. I rarely used my bard's vicious mockery as it doesn't do much damage, but now I use it all the time because damage from one partymember is no concern anymore.

I still don't understand why a simpler "Create (and ideally store for future reuse) a custom party" wasn't ever offered as an option, frankly.

Frankly I can't even see myself making much of a use of it when the story-centric companions offer a lot more reactivity to the story... But I would certainly take that option over the half-assed and a bit trollish solution that these abominably ugly hirelings offer to the player currently.

I’ve tried using them but the whole “this vessel is at your disposal” crap turned me right off. Not at all what I was looking for.

At this point for me making them fully customized won’t make a difference so long as the weird premise of what they represent and that god awful dialogue remains.

I only use the hirelings for buffs. Making more than one custom character without opening more instances would be nice.

I've tried to make use of the Hireling Zombies, mostly by attempting to recreate NPCs that are already in the game, since I still think that would have been a better idea, but it's a frustrating system.

The single most important choice that we're actually making when selecting one of these random zombie cultist over some other zombie cultists is the Voice work, but we can't preview that from the "Choose" screen. We should be choosing a barkset here, since that character is going to interject with the same sorts of lines that a tadpoled adventurer would use for the corresponding voice-set, but we don't have a ready way to parse that from the UI presentation.

Next would be Race/Subrace/Racial Body Phenotype and Background, since those things also cannot be changed at the Mirror or by Respec.

There are 12 backgrounds on offer, but they're all gated by a visual and a sound. To me this doesn't make sense at all, if we have 16 standard voice options and 11 Races we should be able to use any of those. The idea that the vessels are somehow cultists of the Absolute is silly. Like why do they have to be anyone/anything in particular?

If they didn't have to be a pre-set character with a locked voice and all the rest, then they could be anyone. We could recreate our Kivans the from previous BG games and headcanon whatever explanation for that. Or we could revive NPCs that got killed along the way in this campaign, and slot them into a new role on the team.

The dead inside voices are meh, we only ever get that stuff when adding or dismissing a hireling from the active party, in all other cases their banters and interjections are the tadpoled adventurer lines, so why not just give those voice sets some standard recruitment barks and dismissal dialogues? If they're disembodied souls entering the vessels, ok fine, but then they should open that up to cast the widest net possible. Hirelings should be the place where players can experiment with character concepts and builds.

It should be possible to recruit a Tav from a previous campaign. That would have been cool. Like where we get 12 characters for our Wither's Tomb, and our Tavs just overwrite whatever random default zombies. Also like if they're going to feel so random anyway, why not randomize their appearance each time and use that as a showcase, so they feel more custom. Maybe they have unique stat blocks or randomized standard equipment, so that if one wanted to roll the roulette wheel on it there'd be a bunch more standard templets for this, instead of just a dozen, that all feel like somebody else's idea. You know, as opposed to something we can get invested in, cause we just made them, like we do with the Dream Guardian say.

For a practical implementation, when Withers says "Choose" it should pull up the same menu, except with a 13th zombie called "Custom."

That way we could keep whatever Origin Zombies currently exist in-game, but without putting so many limits on our creativity to do the mix and match. The sorts of things that I'm sure BG players would want to do, like creating a party with 4 Drow, or 4 Halflings, or 4 Githyanki, that stuff should be possible. The empty vessel thing is weird and strains credulity, like if you buy into the idea that they're just Withers or some reflection of yourself, but then they interject with the same lines you'd deliver if you happened to trigger a banter. They can't use tadpoles, but they still get all the tadpoled adventurer riffs on whatever just woke up down there. Their boots see all the same everythings that the tadpoled adventurers see. Why can't they just be tadpoled adventures? Also I feel like Withers should drop some time travel angle on it, like a zombie eternal return, to help smooth over the rough edges. It's an alright jumping off point, but it should be open enough the hirelings system is also like a mirror on the MP system, where that's the way new adventurers get introduced.

A second recruitment option via Volo would also be good. It could use a different narrative conceit. So instead of revived Cultists, we put Volo on recruitment and he gives us the Custom option? Just seems like it could be more expansive. I've remade Roah and Sarth Baretha a bunch of times cause there are Zombies that work well for that. You can turn Kree into a few fan favs from Grymforge but it's all locked by whether the voices or subraces or whether that background matches the character concept.

https://bg3.wiki/wiki/Hirelings

why = because Larian assumed everyone plays good so doesn't kill off any party _ so they are a last min add on that the game doesn't see for many of the quest lines i.e, really they are just a pack mule to carry your extra loot

fixing that is a pretty major coding issue

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Could be, but the current mod (CustomCompanions) already does a pretty nice job IMO. With official mod support, I have hopes the wrinkles may be ironed out to get a nearly perfect custom party.

The existing mod can create any race and class. They can engage in conversation with other NPC's and even get the specific class response options. I use my "hireling" bard for trading as she has the highest CHA. They even have banter lines while running in the jungle.
Talking to Tav or party members only has the standard hireling line now, but an official mod could maybe add some specific lines for this case also.

The creation screen has some quirks, but mod support should get these out also I think.
1. You need to state it's a custom hireling (which is totally unncecessary ) and if you forget it will tell you only at the end when the character is entirerly ready so you must restart from the beginning. That's an error you normally do only once (or twice if you're like me)-
2. You also get the unnecessary dream companion screen that you just have to ignore.

These minor inconveniences don't diminish the loads of fun I had , being able to use just any character combination.

There is so many posts here, i don't have the time to read them all. But i have a weird effect. I have only 11 hirelings to ick from instead of 12. Maddala the rogue girl is missing for me. As in, she does not even appear in the recruitimg screen after talking to Withers. Everyone else is there but her.

Does anyone have an idead why?

Bump!

Patch 8 should fix this I think.

It's bizarro to have the Withers Hirelings being all unnecessarily gated off in the way they are now - having a preset Race/Class/Gender etc for those characters. Just seems like they could be made fully interchangeable, so the player could choose whatever voice performance they prefer without bothering about the mechanical stuff, say which Race or Background is associated with a given Hireling.

There's still no convenient way to create an actual custom party by using the Wither's zombies right now, we can only riff off what's there. Depending on the character you're trying to make some combinations simply aren't available, which means the voicesets there are less likely to be used. I don't see why there couldn't be a Tav option as well for these characters, and the regular full buffet on that, with all the barks available to choose from. Complete with the Tadpole if that's what the player is after.

Maybe the Wither's cultist plane could even have it's own area?

That could be like a way for players to test out class abilities without having to account for an XP sink. Better than a practice dummy we could just go toe to toe with whoever is in the Wardrobe, but right now it's only presets.

Would be more fun if we could save our characters this way, and then bring them dust them off periodically for use in other campaigns. Or at least to have the char re-creation option from the models and voicesets. I think that would improve the experience overall, Just something to make it cooler