Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Losing companions after act1 is a deal breaker!

Any character can learn to use thieves tools if the learn the Skilled feat.

They haven’t released all of the origins characters yet. Druids, Bards, Paladins and Rangers can all learn Cure Wounds, so Shadowheart wont be the only healer option in the full game.

I am surprised this is a contentious topic. I expected to pick four characters at the beginning and then stick with them till the end, as they would all be gaining experience through the course of the game and to switch to somebody else would be to lose that experience. In table top D&D people wouldn't suddenly start having a different character for similar reasons.

I get why people might be upset, it has become a convention in party based RPGs that you can collect and swap out companions at base / camp.

I actually prefer what Larian are doing. I hated that in games like Dragon Age where I would have to ignore that half of my party is just putzing around at any given moment.

“Okay everyone, us four are going into the Deep Roads now, surely risking life and limb. Oh no no no, don’t get up. You five stay here and watch the camp. Don’t worry on our account.”

But it shouldn't be an issue. If character arcs are developed well through the entire campaign, you will want to do several playthroughs to see them all. Good replayability here.

i personally dont see why this is a thing.

companions leaving for plot reasons (or disagreeing with you) is fine.

The entire "commit to your party" is ... while normal for DnD but for a CRPG its very unusual and they pulled the same thign in the last game and there i didnt get the purpose of it either.

Not being able to chance the member after Act 1 might mean less choices, but it also means you do more meaningful choices with real consequences. IMO that's a good thing.

I still don't like that they are making all party members origin characters you can choose in the beginning. IMO it'd be nice that there are some companions that show up later. For example Act 2 could have 1-3 companions you can pick if you happen to lose one, you have replacements that aren't generic mercenaries you create yourself. Of course it seems like they really want to have similar "godwoken" story where all have same motivation for sticking around, then having companions joining in later would conflict with that.

About 20-plus hours of content should be enough to screen companions, see if their characters fit ours character and of they are annoying. Now if we commit to a party and they develop in unexpected way which creates tension with PC or companions, its IMO good.


I don't believe that with limited companion size there will be much overlap with roles (like 3 rogues) and even of there is some hopefully multclassing system is flexible enough to make things work.

And yes, I would hope for game to be designed well enough to provide paths for the party you will choose. Best RPGs are those where you don't have access to everything - your path choices and story tailors to character/party you have built. Yes, if actual amount of valiable parties we can built were limited, it would be a problem. If the choice of our party would meaningully alter our play through - that's good.

[/quote]

Any character can learn to use thieves tools if the learn the Skilled feat.

They haven’t released all of the origins characters yet. Druids, Bards, Paladins and Rangers can all learn Cure Wounds, so Shadowheart wont be the only healer option in the full game.
[/quote]

Unless I've missed an update, there seemed to be some question whether feats would be implemented, but it's good to know there is at least one other option.

I'd actually be surprised if there were many more origin characters just due to space constraints on the Nautiloid. There's no law requiring that all party members be tadpoled, mind, so not every part member has to be an origin character.

People talking about how they didn't switch parties much in BG I or II (and like most of you I was the same except when a quest required someone specific) have a point, but I'm not sure the comparison is completely apt - here we have a 4 person party, not 6, and in BG I and II there were multiple companions available to fill any role. You could build a team that you could stick with for the duration. It remains to be seen how true this will be here. I know I'm going to spend EA doing a "no rogue run" and "no cleric run" just to see how painful an experience each is.

I for one am not a fan of this decision to make us commit to a set party. I love interacting with companions and swapping them around throughout a game, and I find the idea of people not swapping characters in and out kind of bizarre personally. If that's fun for you then go for it, but I never could, it would feel like a wasted opportunity.

The fact they're doing this as well as a 4 person party also concerns me since as has been mentioned, that takes away a lot of flexibility. Sure losing out on a rogue and not being able to open chests is arguably a way to add replayability, but only if the game is mindful enough not to put too much quality loot behind locked doors and give ways to avoid traps. But my main concern is for combat. If there are characters whose dynamics I like together but who don't make for a good combat team, then I can't have them together. For instance I love playing magic users, they're my favourite kind of characters to play by far, nothing else even comes close. That automatically means that I can probably only afford to include at best one other magic user, otherwise my party likely won't have a chance in most combat encounters. It precludes certain party combinations without multiclassing, which isn't a great option for every situation anyway, and furthermore multiclassing introduces another layer of complexity which can be a pitfall for players who aren't familiar with the system, like me. If they're going to be leaning on multiclassing as a way to alleviate that kind of problem then they absolutely need to have a solid tutorial that can help players figure it out.

And finally, yes it's true that D&D might be optomized for a 4 character party, but translating that to a video game becomes complicated because unlike in a real life game, your GM can't tailor your experience to the party composition to ensure that an encounter is never accidentally beyond the groups abilities. If you want to have a group of all mages, a GM can adjust the threats you face accordingly. A computer can't do that. So yeah, I'm worried that this particular combination of choices will limit player choice in an un-fun way that doesn't actually benefit the overall experience.

Except for the pesky detail that this is a video game and NOT tabletop.

Yes, I do not at all buy the argument about 5e classes being flexible and everyone can do anything. D&D is about classes, and classes are meaningful only if they have mutually exclusive elements. The whole point of a party-based game is that each party member brings something special or unique to the party. If every party member can do anything, there is no point to the game being party-based. This also then means that, as circumstances warrant it, you would change your party composition to suit the needs of the moment. Furthermore, the smaller party size only exacerbates this issue. It is easier to stick with the same party for the whole game when the party size is bigger, i.e. six. But with the ridiculously small party size of four, it is that much more of a concern that we cannot alter our party composition at will. The way I see this playing out is that I will have to settle for either a party with companions who I like but who make up a terrible, weak team in terms of the party roles they can cover, or else a party with companions who I hate but who I was forced to include to ensure I had good party roles coverage. And either way, that would be a very poor way to have to play the game.

Speak for yourself, really.
It is great as for me. Before D:OS2 in every cRPG I was thinking at every point when my party was going into obvious danger: "Why I'm not taking the whole party of 5-10 companions with me? Oh, yes, 2-4 party slots". Each time returning to the camp and talking to them was making it immersion breaking that companions who wasn't with me had no clue about my deeds, while having more than enough people to tell them.
Finally I have just enough companions and no lazy asses at the camp.
And "tailoring party" each time has nothing to do with a good RPG. A good RPG allows you to use different approaches and allows you to fail miserably if you have no creativity or suitable skills at all.

I also immediately noticed that line when I read the Q&A but I'm still not quite sure if I like it or not. I think it's ultimately going to depend on how it's implemented in the game.

I'm honestly fine with having to commit to my party after Act 1, but considering it (apparently) comes at the cost of the game not having recruitable story companions during the later stages of the game is very souring. Something I always liked about older games was the possibility of encountering characters you could recruit to your cause even when you were significantly deep into the game. I know we'll get camp followers in place of party companions, but they just don't have the same kind of feel to them. Maybe I'll change my stance on this once I see how much you interact with the followers, but currently I think it's a bit of a shame that this announcement serves as an indirect confirmation that there won't be story companions beyond Act 2.

I think my biggest fear with this is that all of the different story companions will be located at the start of the game for you to pick up within the first 1 minute to 1 hour of your playthrough. I fully understand the logic behind giving the player a full party early on (both from a game design perspective and for the sake of the story) but I'm just afraid that picking up companions right away will make it feel as if they are nothing but an extension of the character creation where you essentially just customise your party right from the start. I'll have to wait and see how it plays out I guess.

NPCs coming and going as part of the main narrative or their own character arc is great, but committing to and preventing from changing up one's party after only the first act is yet more evidence (to me) that Larian simply is not up to the narrative task this game set before them.

Honestly, swapping out party members throughout the course of the game is a staple of the BG (1&2) games. Certainly one has favoured party members that rarely, if ever, are changed out...but this? I'm sure it's not the end of the world or anything, but this only erodes my confidence in Larian even further (which I hadn't thought possible). I mean between this, making this game look like Dragon Age (seriously, the art looks like it's recycled from DAI), a studio completely unproven in their narrative design abilities (which this party commit thing post-Act 1 further demonstrates)...I mean I get it's not enough just to copy what came before and they need to also add new things and their own spin....but c'mon.

Larian talks a good game, but it's becoming more and more clear to me they have little idea what BG actually is (granted it's many things to many people), but they seem to lack even a core understanding of what made BG1 & 2 such absolute successes.

I'm too lazy to look for it, but at some point they said that all joinable NPCs are also Origin characters. They have said that if you don't pick some Origin, then they won't necessarily be available at the start of the game, but I'd expect that to just mean you find them later on in Act 1, not in 2-3.

Honestly while I see the appeal of getting story companions later on in a game, I feel like the reason it's not done anymore is the fact that characters who come in later cannot get the same amount of time and attention from the character as companions introduced in act one. I literally do not think there is any way to alleviate this problem. If act one of the game is 10 hours long, then introducing a character in act 2 means the player has 10 hours less time to get to know that character and get invested in them. The player has had ten hours to settle into the party members they already have and get used to using them and understanding what they can do. It also limits a new players flexibility if not done right. In PoE1 there's a character that potentially you might not meet until act 3 of that game, since he's in an area that you may not find a reason to visit until then. Every time I've played through since then I make it a point to go get him as soon as possible becasue I don't want to miss out on having him around.

This game will probably have more possible dialogue impacts and deviations than any other game they've made, and most definitely more so than the original 2 BG games. I get the limitation of locking your party down based on that alone, it would be a nightmare to have to account for all the various deviations between an interchangable party. Sometimes awesome things like that require sacrifices. On top of that, I can't imagine how companion quests would work if you could so easily miss something because you didn't have X party member in your party during an encounter.

Honestly it's a little funny to see people shout "DEALBREAKER" every time some information comes out that goes against their expectations. People have such a rigid view of what this game should be, it seems like there isn't any hope of people simply giving Larian's vision a chance. Design decisions like this are made for a reason most of the time, and it's at least worth considering what those reasons might be and that just maybe it might be the best thing for the game.

Here is part of the problem with this design:
The limited party size with the combinations and permutations possible between races, classes and subclasses, and NPC's with character quests is a big tension.

Being able to get all of the story of an epic RPG in one or at most 2 playthroughs should be the goal. Forcing us to play 3-4 times to experience all of the companion stories is not good.

Let me compare and contrast DOS 2 with PF:K.

Chris Avellone wrote Fane and Nok Nok/Nockers. I wanted to experience both. In PF:K i made a custom all elven party for RP purposes, however i was able to swap out my customs for all of the pregen NPC companions with story to actually move through their entire story in my one playthrough so i got to experience all of their stories. In my DOS 2 playthrough i got rid of Fane and Beast so i never got to actually experience the writing and their stories.

Now remember in BG3 they are talking about an additional 2-7 pregen NPC's with story. That will be alot of unused story with this mechanism in place.

Have they said, one way or another, if there are origin characters that we don't meet until Act 2/3? was that a thing in DoS/DoS2? I don't remember..but it wouldn't surprise me if there are new companions we could get after Act 1.

In the original Baldur's Gate it was impossible to experience the entire story with every companion, so focusing the tagalongs to just 3 (not including us) is fine with me.

I'm going to get a bit sappy while saying this, but part of the reason I love party-based rpgs is because I feel like it provides me with an opportunity to collect a group of friends from a wide variety of backgrounds and explore their relationships not only to my main character, but to each other. Hearing the news that I would be forced to leave some of these companions behind after Act 1 of BG3 has made me more than a little bit disappointed. Baldur's Gate as a series has always allowed me to swap characters out not only to try different class synergies, but to hear different combinations of characters banter and get to know one another. It's like building a family. They don't always get along (some might even hate each other!) but watching those relationships grow is rewarding, and is my favorite part of games like BG1 and 2 as well as Dragon Age, Pillars of Eternity and other games with a varied cast of companions. I was similarly heartbroken when I realized that half the cast of D:OS2 would be left behind, and found myself enjoying that game less than I'd hoped to because of it. I get that part of this decision is to encourage multiple playthroughs, but to me a playthrough is like a journey, and leaving friends behind on a journey just...doesn't feel right. So Larian, I kindly ask that you please reconsider this direction and allow all companions to be accessible throughout the game so we can watch their relationships unfold as we embark upon our quest.