Following up, belatedly, on my first post about BG3. (I'm traveling, I'm working from a friend's dining room table on my decrepit old MacBook, everything is slower and more difficult than I expect. The formatting is probably all janky. I'll fix it. And I'll get back to the twice-a-week thing, I swear it.) Today, we're doing the NPCs.
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Writing about BG3’s characters primarily means writing about the companions, and given that nearly all of the companions are romanceable, writing about the companions inevitably means writing about the romances, so first things first: Let’s get my feelings about videogame romances (and TTRPG romances, for that matter) on the table. I don’t care for them!
As I’ve alluded to here before, my preference in tabletop games is to keep sex and romance lightweight, limited to NPCs, and generally “off-screen.” Yes, it’s fun for some players and it’s important for some characters, and I want to accommodate that, but it’s potentially super uncomfortable (especially if multiple PCs are involved, whether that’s because two players want their characters to get together or because two PCs want to pursue the same NPC) and it’s almost always going to involve one person pulling focus in a way that can be boring for others. I’ll have some more thoughts on that last bit later; generally, that’s less of a concern in a singleplayer videogame, where the player is free to lavish all the time in the world on whatever sidequest or other peculiar fixation they like.
But I still don’t really care for game romances, and that’s because I think they tend not to be all that convincing or enjoyable. That’s for many of the same reasons the main storylines of these games tend not to be great, and I’m sympathetic for the same reasons. I mentioned in the previous post understanding developers who recognize that most players aren’t going to finish their game at all and that most who do aren’t going to take evil (or otherwise unconventional) routes to the ending; why throw a ton of development resources at something only a small fraction of people are ever going to see? Companion romances offer a similar dilemma. Lots of players aren’t going to do all the companions’ personal quests; fewer still are going to do any given romance. This means the team needs to economize. Even if romances are a big draw for players, each individual romance is a lot of work for relatively little return in playtime.
One good way to economize is to offer only a small number of romances, but this has obvious downsides and tends to provoke a lot of griping from players. Another way to economize is to make every romanceable characters “MCsexual,” as they say; this is the route BG3 takes. Again, I get it. It’s a sensible move in terms of husbanding development resources, and it plays well with a lot of fans. That said, I really dislike it from the perspective of writing, character development, and what we might call my principles about how we engage with media and how media should approach its audience.
The first point is simpler to explain: Erasing the characters’ sexuality—which is what this choice does for most of the BG3 companions more than it renders implicitly pansexual or bisexual—flattens them. It takes away an important facet of human (or demihuman) identity, takes away their history, makes each one less distinct from the others. It contributes to a frustrating pattern of in-game behavior (if you’re just nice to everybody in the early going, pretty soon all of them are trying to fuck you all at the same time, gumming up every evening spent at camp with a janky queue of romantic overtures), but worse, I think, it encourages unpleasant extra-diegetic behavior. It makes these characters less people and more a menu of sexual options, flavors to try on as part of the player’s character customization, little different from class, race, and the like. There’s something pornographic about it, the idea that all these people exist to be bedded, and that each one is ready to go the moment the PC expresses interest.
Maybe a lighthearted videogame isn’t the right place to learn important life lessons, but people do seem to take a lot from these games, and BG3 in particular, when it comes to modeling the relationships they want and picturing their ideal partners. And “she’s just not into you” is a very important lesson for people to learn. Realizing that nearly every BG3 companion was a romance option made me think, wistfully, of Cyberpunk 2077, which famously offered one and only one romanceable companion to straight male PCs: the tall, loudmouthed, hotheaded, and generally just not traditionally feminine Panam Palmer. A lot of guys hated this! They didn’t want Panam; they wanted the petite, girlish, relatively demure Judy Alvarez…who’s gay. Years of teeth-gnashing and ethically dubious modding later, the devs have never caved to fan pressure; Judy remains stubbornly sapphic. And sure, a lot of the guys who hated that they couldn’t “romance” her as a male character learned nothing from the experience (many just modded the game so they could), but hopefully a few learned something.
I recognize that a lot of people do not need to learn this lesson. Many people are reminded frequently, and often unkindly, that the world doesn’t consider them sexually or romantically desirable. It’s cool to have a game where everybody is an option for them, and maybe that positive experience for them is worth reinforcing a bunch of straight boys’ bad, unexamined ideas. Nobody more acutely needs to learn that the world is not a menu of sexual conquests for them to select from than straight men, and straight men still probably represent a plurality of the audience of most games, including BG3. But maybe we don’t need every game to cater to that dominant group, even if it’s a negative, chastising form of catering.
I don’t know. I just know that I, personally, don’t really care for this approach. But I still enjoyed the game, and I still romanced Shadowheart, so who cares what I think? All of this is essentially a very long preamble to me acknowledging that, yeah, you learn a lot about these characters through the romance dialogue, and I’ve only played once and romanced one, and although I will probably play again and am certainly curious about some of the others (Astarion, Karlach) I’m never going to see them all, which curtails my appreciation of some. It’s my understanding that Halsin, for instance, remains pretty opaque to any PC who doesn’t romance him. Alas, I will not be romancing Halsin. C’est la vie.
With that caveat in place, from my limited perspective, my verdict is that the companions are a mixed bag but generally pretty strong. They represent a range of ways to develop a character, some more successful than others but all viable, and all worth thinking about in a TTRPG context.
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Lae'zel, to start with the first companion we meet, is a character almost entirely defined by her (D&D) race and class. She's a githyanki fighter. That's it. Nothing special in her backstory, in her parentage or childhood or upbringing, no special destiny. She's an archetypal githyanki fighter. And it works! She's a great character, brings an interesting perspective to the party's adventures on the Sword Coast, and has a whole satisfying story arc of her own. The big choice she faces doesn't involve any challenge to her core identity or her values. Even if she chooses revolution, she remains a soldier, and she remains utterly dedicated to the githyanki people. She just rallies to a new standard.
Astarion represents an almost diametrically opposed approach. His race and class are almost entirely irrelevant to his character; he's defined entirely by his history, his relationship with Cazador (and the other spawn, and their victims), his self-image and self-esteem. This also works! He's a great character, maybe the best of the bunch.
Shadowheart's kind of a synthesis of those two. “Cleric of Shar” is pretty much her whole identity…in her own mind. Like Astarion, though, hers is a story of abuse and indoctrination, willing but not consensual service to an evil cause, and paying her abuse forward. Like Lae'zel, she comes to a point where she has to choose whether to affirm her allegiance to the cause she's known all her life or turn against it; unlike Lae’zel, rejecting her upbringing also means changing her personality and her values (or, seen another way, recognizing and resolving the tensions between the values she was taught and her instinct for empathy, for kindness to children and animals, etc.).
I know that Gale and Wyll were also in the early access build of the game, but I don't think it's coincidental that Lae'zel and Shadowheart are guaranteed to be the first two companions the player meets and Astarion likely to be the third; I'd wager that those three were in development the longest. Gale and Wyll are relatively underdeveloped, as is Karlach (who was definitely the last addition).
Gale is a solid character, has some fun dialogue, and brings some fun banter to party interactions, but is perhaps the least connected of any of the companions to the others or to the game’s main story. His arc ends up being something of a cautionary tale, for the tabletop GM, of what can happen if you let a player’s melodramatic romance with an important NPC take on too much of a life of its own. He loved a goddess! He betrayed her! She punished him, or did she? It’s interesting stuff, but (unlike with Astarion’s story, which is also disconnected from the main plot) it doesn’t really offer anything for the PC or the other companions to do. Its dramatic climax involves Gale just going away for a minute to have a big talk off-screen. Thrilling stuff! (Or its dramatic climax involves Gale blowing everybody up, but the game essentially scolds you for having made a bad, anti-canon choice if you try that.)
Wyll, as I understand it, underwent a pretty significant rewrite, softening him and making his arc more straightforwardly (if mildly tragically) heroic. It’s fine. It gets the job done. His connection to and various bonds with Karlach and some of the important non-party NPCs in the city keep him involved in a way Gale isn’t, but his generic good-guy personality leaves a lot to be desired.
Karlach's an interesting one. Fun, endearing, feels a bit unfinished. The zaniest character, in the sense that she often comes close to breaking the fourth wall, lampshading things with comments about tragic backstories and the like. She has a bunch of dialogue that doesn't really fit the setting—at one point, she makes two cinema references back to back, in a world that doesn't have cinema (and not just in throwaway dialogue, either, but at the dramatic climax of her story)—and I can't quite make up my mind about whether it's simply lazy writing or whether there's something winking about it, like she's an MCU character who wandered into a different media franchise by accident. It sort of works, somehow? Her whole story is like a caricature of a protagonist's tortured background. Impressionable waif taken in by predatory older man, literally sold to a devil and taken to actual Hell where her heart was literally ripped out, etc. It might land a little more effectively if some of the tropes it's sending up weren't right there in the room with it, so to speak. (Pretty silly that two of the six origin companions have tragic backstories that involve dangerous devices being implanted in their chests.) Which I suppose is strong evidence in favor of the argument that, no, it's not a sendup, it's just a pack of cliches. But they’re fun cliches, at least.
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Looking at all six origin companions together, I see two interesting things. One is that the first three—my favorite three!—are straightforwardly bad guys, in the sense that they (a githyanki warrior, a cleric of Shar, and a vampire spawn) are classic mid-level Forgotten Realms enemy types. The others aren't straight out of the Monster Manual, but they're not far off: the mad wizard whose ambition outstrips his morality, the fame-hungry egotist who sold his soul for power (albeit the devs walked this one back in the final release), the footsoldier of an infernal army. Thinking back on the wild profusion of recruitable companions of all alignments in BG1 and BG2, it’s hard not to suspect that Larian had planned for a much larger group of potential companions, started with the evil (or at least evil-ish) ones, and then scaled back and found themselves having to dial back the evilness. Ah, what could have been!
The other is that there are a bunch of doublings going on here. Astarion and Shadowheart as abuse victims abusing others in turn. Shadowheart and Karlach as abducted children. Karlach and Wyll shanghaied into the Blood War. Gale and Astarion both seeking magical apotheosis. Gale and Karlach both with IEDs in their chests. Lae’zel and Shadowheart reckoning with cult upbringings. Hard not to feel like the devs could’ve done more with this, too, although this might be something I’ve missed out on by not playing as any of the origin companions. So many opportunities for these characters to bond, to find points of identification with one another, or to fall into conflict over the narcissism of small differences. We get a bit of that with Shadowheart and Lae’zel, but it peters out quickly.
Finally, of course, there are four other, later-arriving companions. As I alluded to above, I don’t have much to say about Halsin, who strikes me as a rather generic bear and druid, thought I realize I hardly scratched his surface. I have nothing at all say about Minthara, whom I killed not realizing she was recruitable. Oops!
Jaheira and Minsc, though? Loved them. Huge credit to the writers who worked on both for serving up successful nostalgic fan service for us old Infinity Engine heads (and even cracking a few jokes about it via Karlach’s in-game fangirling) while actually making both characters suit this story and these roles. I think Minsc might be the more impressive feat—keeping all of the wackiness that defines what is essentially a joke character while giving him an interesting story relevant to the plot, not letting the silliness damage the setting’s verisimilitude (such as it is on the goofy old Sword Coast), and even injecting some real pathos into the proceedings—but I just loved Jaheira. Maybe it’s because I’m an old fart myself, at least relative to what I was when Jaheira and I first traveled together, but I found her perspective endlessly compelling. Also, I want her house. Especially her office. Especially her office’s secret annex.
Next up: BG3's reputation as the highest and best representation of tabletop D&D in videogame form. Maybe. Probably.
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