Companions are an important feature in Baldur’s Gate 3. The NPCs assist you in combat, have their own stories, and can even become permanent partners. One player has tried to figure out how to quickly mess things up with the companions – with surprising results.
Spoiler Warning: We discuss topics from the companions’ stories, which you may only learn about late in the game.
That’s why it’s important what companions think of you:
- Each of the 10 companions in Baldur’s Gate 3 has a “approval counter” that shows how much they like you. You can see the display in their character sheets.
- If a character is very close to you, you’ll receive new dialogue options and may even start a romance with that companion.
- However, if approval decreases, it may happen that the NPC permanently leaves your party. This happens with some companions when you want to recruit Minthara.
This is what the player found out: A user on Reddit uses a script to determine how much rejection (or more correctly: “negative approval”) certain actions generate with the respective NPCs.
Although the script is made for version 1.0, it is still supposed to be accurate. The player has limited their focus to decisions that have the most negative impact. Interestingly, killing a companion doesn’t show up.
Murder only brings -10 approval, at least as Dark Desire. It doesn’t seem to be that bad for your companions to stab them with a knife. Perhaps because Lazarus can revive them anyway. However, they struggle more with other decisions:
The worst decisions in terms of approval
- With Astarion, you can lose a maximum of 45 approval if you cast “control undead” on him. -15 occurs if you speak poorly about his sex life or refuse to be transformed by him after he has ascended.
- Shadowheart loses 20 approval if you hand her over to Viconia – which is irrelevant at that point.
- Jaheira and Minsc each receive -50 approval points if you offer one of them or both as a sacrifice at the tribunal in the Temple of Bhaal.
- Gale cares 30 points less about you if you repeatedly deny him magical items or if you play as Astarion and deny that you are a vampire.
- A harsh -100 points deduction occurs with Karlach if you say after the first sex with her that it was a mistake.
- There are additional decisions that generate considerable dissent. We have only picked the strongest ones. You can find the entire list on Reddit.
With enough approval from companions, there are even steamy scenes:
“Karlach hits hard”
Fans are discussing under the post about the various decisions. In particular, the drastic loss of trust from Karlach apparently hits the players hard. One user says: when he decided against an initiated romance with the tiefling woman at one point, her subsequent speech hurt quite a bit.
Many find her reaction understandable. People who are terminally ill apparently know no greater fear than being abandoned by their partner. Karlach, through her hellish machine, is presumably in a similar situation.
In addition, it comes that Karlach was already betrayed earlier by one of the antagonists in the game. By the way, there is also a 20 points deduction if you kill the corresponding opponent without taking her along. This may also happen through a bug if she is present.
There are other decisions, such as killing Gale’s cat, which results in a relative amount that is 10% of his approval. However, whoever does that will likely already be so low in esteem with Gale that it doesn’t count among the harshest decisions.
That it’s precisely Karlach who impacts the community so much is, however, no big surprise. The barbarian is among the most beloved companions but has an unfortunate ending:
Baldur’s Gate 3: A new ending for Karlach is coming, it’s supposed to make everything better
