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

The game will allow you to hire mercenaries. In DOS2, the feature becomes available in Act 2. I don't see why it would be different here. The "it limited the party skills/options" isn't actually an issue. Sven even talked about allowing people to make full custom parties.

As for "locking" the party after Act 1, I personally will wait to see what happens. There is already quite a few possible scenarios here, starting with "couldn't save everyone from ceremorphosis" to "some joined the Cult of the Absolute while others didn't" (there are a few dialogues in the demo presentations Larian showed that suggest the Absolute leaders also have tadpoles).

Or Raphael kidnaps the party and send it to Hell (again)...

For many people who play cRPGs, myself included, precisely for roleplaying reasons, using mercenary companions is flat-out not an acceptable option. We want a custom PC, but non-custom companions.

I don't think I'm alone in saying that a party made up of mercanaries can't compare to having fully fleshed out companions that you can interact with and who have their own stories. I've talked to a friend who knows the system better than I ever will and she reassured me that things are flexible enough that even with such a small party we wouldn't be completely screwed out of being viable by accident so long as encounters and such are well designed to accomodate the possibilities. I'm choosing to accept that reassurance, but I do hope that if we end up with a non-viable party composition by accident, swapping out for mercenaries and missing out on our companions stories isn't the only option to fix that.

How well does that idea work with "I killed Wynne, WTF! I have no healers anymore, BioWare you're shit at designing games!" that hiring/creating mercenaries help fix?

Moving from Act 1 isn't the time you might lose a companion, the other cases will all be role-playing reasons/choices.

Firstly, the comparison doesn't hold because in DA losing Wynne or any other individual companion does not close off any important skill areas for you because there are other companions available with the ability to cover you and also because in DA the "classes" are essentially superficial and you can add any skill (ex. healing) to any of your characters.

Back to the main point, yes, exactly, we stand to potentially lose some of our companions in later parts of the game due to the dialogue choices and other roleplaying decisions we make, not to mention them getting chunked. And if at that point my only option is to bring in an empty-suit "no interactions" merc, there is no way in hell that is happening. So I would either have to continue on with an even smaller party (and I consider four to be way too small a party size, so ...) or else restart my game from the end of Act 1. All rotten and ridiculous options.

You forgot the also-rotten options of save-scumming to undo their death or choosing a dialog option that doesn't result in that party member leaving. I'd be much more likely to do one of those things than continuing with 3 members (mercenaries don't count) or restarting back to Act 1. Which is bad on two fronts: 1.) Larian has strongly emphasized their desire for people not to savescum and 2.) choosing dialogue options to solely prevent a forced 3-man party completely invalidates any role-playing decisions by turning them into purely tactical ones.

IF we are not able to replace lost companions with other Origin characters with actual personalities, then Larian has gone significantly against their goal of making this game feel like an authentic roleplaying d&d experience.

Are people really so stuck in their principles that they wouldn't just do another playthrough to see how the other character stories or other decisions pan out?
A lot of the comments that I'm seeing make it seem like you only get one shot at this and I can't for the life of me figure out why everyone needs one perfect playthrough.

For the record, I plan on doing multiple playthroughs and I agree that every playthrough does not need to be “perfect.” I just think that it would kind of suck if one of my 3 companions dies/leaves a few hours into Act 2 and I have to go through the rest of that playthrough having only 2 companions that I can meaningfully interact with and learn about their story. 80+ hours per playthrough is not an insignificant amount of time…

Again, this is all assuming that you can't fill an empty slot with an Origin character past Act 1, quite possibly a faulty assumption. If we are able to go onto a quest to locate and convince someone we left behind earlier to rejoin us, hopefully starting out with a very strained relationship from whatever choice in Act 1 led to them leaving our party, I'd be more than happy!

Dragon Age classes are superficial? O_o You either never played the game or have terrible memory. DA classes are way more constraining than D&D 5e is. Only Warriors can tank/taunt, only Mages have healing/debuff/aoe CC abilities, only Rogues can pick locks and disarm traps. The stats requirements on weapon/armor also limit what you can use on a class because talent lines requirements pigeon hole you into specific ones. Mage are very much stuck with staff (unless you go Arcane Warrior and that is basically limited to the PC). DAO has only two mages, Wynne who default into healing/spirit healer and Morrigan who default into entropy and shapeshifting. The game has no respeccing unless you mod it. You could rely on health poultrices only but a mage healer/support is way more efficient, and less costly.

In D&D 5, making a longsword using Wizard who can pick locks/disarm trap is just a question of taking the right race and background. Nearly half the classes in the PHB can cast healing spells. At worst, play a Bard, it's literally a Jack-of-all-Trade: can heal, can boost rolls check with Bardic Inspiration/Jack-of-All-Trade/Expertise and with the College of Valor, can fight.

Nah, since I made no assumptions anyway but simply gave my opinions about possibilities based on what was said by the developer, I actually don't need to be patronized or told what to do with my time, because letting my thoughts be known now on what I like and don't like gives the developer more time to actually change anything about how they're developing the game.

And to everyone who's said more respectful things, thank you, I appreciate you.


I'm with you here; I plan on multiple playthroughs... but not everyone does, and it's not fun to have the rug pulled out from under you, so I think all games should give the player some narrative control. If you know what you're doing is risky and might get someone killed, then it feels like a mistake you made when they die--that's so much better than if it feels more random. All those hours of play don't feel wasted if it feels like the main character screwed up rather than the story screwing them over. I like how Mass Effect did it, for the most part--if someone died during that suicide mission, you mostly had yourself to blame for not doing due diligence.

I like the quest idea as well; I don't mind having to go through some lengths to set a quest flag like "Wyll recruited late" that would limit him from deeper interactions with other characters. That would in fact increase the variable nature of the game and make each playthrough feel more like a different story, a different experience.

I think this is massively overblown.

there's a lot of that going around here

There is no "deal breaker" for this game until after I have played it. I am not that vested in any one thing that would keep me from playing for myself. The game has to earn the 'deal breaker' ruling for me, not on some speculation of what may or may not happen for any game mechanic.

What we have a lot of going around here is people who love every aspect of this game believing that everyone else should as well, and if someone doesn't like and has a serious issue with some aspect of the game - well how dare they!!

Just because something isn't important to you does not mean it is or should be unimportant to everyone.

with this i agree 100%


again, who are you to speak for everyone?

Since the original point is being raised again and I've already touched on the fact that I was fine with the character limitation, I have to chime in again to agree and say that there's no loss of depth.
In fact, that may provide more depth because it's pushing you to become more familiar with each character's skillsets depending on their builds since everything has a greater significance with 4 people than it does with 6, and in the case of the VERY popular Lone Wolf playthroughs with either 1 or 2 characters, the game gets even deeper because you can't just hang back and mash keys arbitrarily depending on what's not on cooldown because every single action matters.

Although generalizations are annoying and I don't generally nitpick them, generalizations are particularly awful when what's being stated is objectively false.

Arrr all right just stop yelling.

There is absolutely nothing objective about any of this. This is entirely subjective personal opinion. And your personal opinion is no better than or superior to my or anyone else's personal opinion. And in my opinion, which I have every right to voice here in the hope that Larian will hear me given that this issue badly hurts my game experience, losing all the out-of-party companions after Act 1 is horrible game design.

And I think that obligating people into making hard decisions, especially in a genre that's been watered down by allowing people to do everything possible in a single playthrough, is fantastic game design. Especially in a medium like this where someone can play through the game an infinite amount of times and have a different experience each time. I believe that the way that D:OS2 handled it was ingenious.

Those people that you didn't take along didn't just disappear, they took an alternate route to attain power and became your direct competitors, and you still have a few conversations with them once you've moved on from having them in your party. So it's not like Larian just said "You know what would be cool? Let's limit player parties because that's easier to design around." A lot of developers adhere to that philosophy, so I'm grateful that they although they forced a decision, we still got to interact with those characters in a meaningful way. If they had made it possible to take every single origin character with you, that entire dynamic would have gone out the window just to appease a minority fanbase need for a fully-stacked, one-time experience. I'm glad that we didn't end up with that.

These forums are the first place I've seen where people are acting as though they're getting a limited time with the game and only buying one playthrough worth of content and just need to have one perfect playthrough or the entire thing is a wash.

First, I would say that I hope I don't come across as angry. After all, we're arguing about video games of all things. But there were a lot of questions I had earlier in the thread that remain unanswered.

To address one argument - that people should play through multiple times - I feel that this argument is dismissive and unrealistic. Many players, myself included, tend to get a little burnt out after one playthrough and don't feel like picking up a game immediately afterwards. Expecting players to play through your game multiple times so they can have the experience they wish is unfair and unrealistic. It places an unrealistic expectation on the player, and frankly totally misses and sidesteps the major points that many of us are making. I do understand that a really large game that has so many choices will inevitably lead to people missing content, and I'm ok and supportive of that sort of thing. I simply don't understand why that should apply to character and party choice, when having party choice and conflict was such an essential part of the original games. To sum up: I'm not looking for the perfect playthrough. I'm looking for a satisfying one.

Another argument I would make is that limiting character choice after a single act totally misinterprets and changes the way characters have always worked in the BG series. In those games you could lose your important, essential characters late in the game, forcing you to either make due or change your party. This, to me, goes to the heart of what a previous poster said - I totally agree that forcing a player to make choices is essential and a good thing for a game and an experience. It makes everything heavier and more meaningful. But currently what we see is that the major character/party decision is made potentially only once: at the end of act 1. In the original games these heavy choices were made *frequently* with every dialog and moral decision that you would make. These were hard decisions, and they happened a lot.

I've mentioned in a different thread that I sometimes enjoy playing evil characters. In the BG games, my choices were sometimes strongly influenced by who was in my party. By choosing to do the evil thing, I sometimes ran the risk of pissing off Minsc, for example. And if this happened late in the game then I was doubly careful and aware of where we stood together in a group. So how did I make these decisions? In short, I roleplayed. I used "head canon" with my character and justified it in character realistically, thereby giving greater depth to the character I was playing instead of playing a cartoonish villian who did whatever he wanted, consequences be damned. The consequences were very real from a player's perspective. I could, of course, replace Minsc if necessary. The game allowed for that by letting Minsc walk away if needed and by giving me extra choices late in game. They might not have been my first choice but.. is that not the nature of in-game decision making? The way I understand things, I can be an evil dick in the later acts and my good friends will simply stick around. And if they won't - will I be allowed to replace them? Based on what little we've heard I would guess no. Currently, this is unknown and I am totally open to being corrected on my initial suspicions.

Ultimately, what Larian is implying is that players really must make one decision, or a culmination of smaller decisions, that pays off at the end of act 1. And that's it. There's nothing else, no further decisions to be made about party makeup later in the game, and absolutely no serious character v character conflicts that occur after the 1st act (don't forget how characters could clash in the original games). To me, this is not a choice. This is railroading. And it certainly isn't BG.

One thing I will add that is in agreement with what has been said previously. I do think that smaller parties with less potential mixing of personalities tends to lead to greater in-depth character interactions. Planescape was a great example of this, for instance.