Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Multiple class options for companions ?

I hope its not too late for this but what i really miss from Divinity original sin 2 is that you got to choose the classes of your companions. Now that the druid class is here, it becomes obvious that without this you will never experience group of druid + ranger + other playeronly classes together, this kinda reduces replayablity by a lot. Its fun to experience different combinations of classes in your team but current design reduces the combinations by a lot.

Some classes dialogues already have integrated them to certain class which is bad. Perhaps this could be solved by having few options for their class, like Gale could be warlock, wizard some other caster.. But not warrior for example.

For DnD it is more ingrained that they stay as their classes but in the BG franchise you are supposed to have a lot of possible companions and a greater party size so in theory it would be possible in the future to have a full party of whatever classes you want.

D&D allows you to choose a new class when you level up (subject to certain restrictions). If this eventually becomes part of BG3 then you will be able to radically alter the direction your companions take as they progress.

That would be interesting, because that would solve the current issue about us having to worry about having to prioritize our choice of companions based on our setup needs, rather than choosing companions that the player (or PC for that matter) deem appropriate and/or interesting.

For some companions their backstory forced them into certain classes. It wouldn't make much sense for Wyll to be a barbarian. To satisfy your will to have different class combos they need to implement mercs. Or make all companions recruitable fairly early in the story.

I think the issue is less that characters are locked into classes, and more that the combination of not all of the classes AND companions being implemented yet making this game feel more limited than it actually would be.

For example, I have zero interest in making a Druid character myself, but I would most definitely have wanted a Druid companion in my active party. I think this patch really should have had the Druid companion to go along with it.

I hope if the next update adds in a new class, their associated companion (or the Druid or Ranger companion) gets added in too.

Is there going to be more compantion options for sure ? Even then it would be interesting and improving replayablity if you could choose like 2x druid and 2x ranger into same group for example, or go nuts and pick 3 fighters and 1 cleric etc etc.

I think with the current origin companions, some of their classes are too intrinsically tied to their story.

Wyll, Shadowheart, and Gale's stories are deeply class driven. I'd say Lae'zel and Astarion have some flexibility, but it would still be too immersion breaking from a D&D standard to implement the Divinity class switching system. It simply doesn't fit the tone of BG3 (considering your companions are mostly reluctant allies at first, it'll be quite jarring for them to be open to letting you choosing their career)



Considering all the work (voice, dialogue, and reactivity) that Larian is putting into each companion, we probably won't see every class represented by a companion. Mercenaries (player made companions) is most likely what we'll need to use to play some of the unrepresented classes.

With that said, there might be some ways to get the best of both worlds without completely breaking immersion. Maybe one of the new companions can potentially have a "flexible" background story that lets them take on the any class the player needs not accounted for by current companions. That companion's story just needs to be written in a way that it makes sense the player is determining their class. A couple of bad generic examples:

1) Player meets/saves a skilled but untrained commoner who gets inspired to become an adventurer. Through dialogue, the player can suggest a class/path for them to follow, and later on, you meet up in Baldur's Gate and they are now a recruitable companion.

2) Player finds a deactivated Warforge, who you can reactivate through a quest, and through it program in the desired class.

Then the flexible companion can have a proper character, story and motivations like the other companions (preferably much better than the examples I gave above). The goal is to have it make in-game sense that the players have dictated what class they are. This approach can potentially be used to let the player choose the class of some of the datamined companions too.

I feel like implementing all of the classes but not having companions to go along with each class is bad for the game's balance. It would inherently pressure players to pick classes for their main character that don't have a companion to go along with them.

Of course, this could be mitigated if multiclassing became a thing, but not completely, given many characters might not have the stat spreads to multiclass very well.

That said, maybe some of the remaining companions could actually have slightly different stat spreads and one of two different base class options upon joining the party. This is something Pillars of Eternity 2 did, probably one of the few things that game did extremely well (that game had 3 highly thematic choices for each companion, some of them multiclass).

Yes, I do believe it has already been decided that there will be many more companion options before it's all said and done. The one thing I hope for is the ability for a larger party size. I'm sure if it's not implemented in game, someone will create a mod, but if I could have just one more slot, I'd be so happy. :P A party of 4 makes it very hard to balance the party and make thing interesting. At least with 5 members, you can balance it and give it some flair.

Six would be the ideal imo, would call back to the older games and the general 'max' of campaign modules being 6 players typically (I think). And I certainly hope so on more companion options, I really don't want the mercenary system from DoSII tbh, or rather I don't want it to be the main way of getting a larger cast, and having many unique people sounds awesome.