Companions are one of the fundamental aspects of Baldur’s Gate 3‘s immersive experience. These characters can provide a changeup to your playthrough with additional dialogue options, get you into new situations, and even offer some opportunities to strike up a romance.
Undoubtedly, the most influential companion in Baldur’s Gate 3 is Shadowheart. She’s one of the most romanced characters, so she clearly has a lot of fans. As we unravel her story, the cleric of the evil goddess Shar wins us with charming behavior. Unfortunately, Larian nerfed her in unexpected ways before the game’s global launch!
Larian Developers Explain Why Shadowheart Was Changed in Baldur’s Gate 3
Throughout your time in Baldur’s Gate 3, Shadowheart will present herself as a potential party member multiple times. She can prove to be a bit abrasive, but most players often take her on as a party member. As a cleric, she’s pretty useful to have around, with her Half-Elf lineage giving her access to Darkvision as well.
While chatting with IGN, Larian’s CEO, Swen Vincke, talked about various characters in Baldur’s Gate 3, including Shadowheart. According to him, Shadowheart was initially envisioned quite differently in the game.
Originally the very idea was you met a bunch of party members that had absolutely no reason to trust you, but plenty of reasons to distrust you. And we went a little bit too strong on that, which is hard. Because we ended up with a party that everybody hated. So we dumbed her down a little bit… Her trauma and the closure of Shar has always been the main thing.
In case you missed Baldur’s Gate 3‘s early access period, our gothic cleric has changed a lot since her first appearance. When the game went live initially, Shadowheart was noticeably nastier and clearly not in a rush to make friends despite your shared predicament.
All of this led to the first party becoming incredibly hated and distrustful of each other. Larian decided to correct their mistake and make her much friendlier if you saved her from her pod at the beginning of the game.
However, that doesn’t mean that she’s now an open book! Just like Jason Bourne, she still suffers from memory loss and can’t quite share many details about her past with the player. Vincke believes that they got the balance right in the end, making her friendlier, but still not trustful enough of the players at the start of the game.
Larian Has Some Bad News For Baldur’s Gate 3 Fans
A shocking announcement from Larian Studios confirmed that Baldur’s Gate 3 will not receive future DLCs or expansions. Following the game’s success, many players expected that Larian would move to work on a DLC as a way of expanding the game for the long haul. After all, the games sold at an incredibly high rate for Larian, which made the possibility of expansion quite likely. Despite this, the studio has confirmed that it won’t be heading down this path.
One reason why Larian is bent upon ending its work on Baldur’s Gate 3 is because of the title’s development history. If you don’t remember, Baldur’s Gate 3 debuted way back in 2020 via early access. From this point, Larian started working with the game’s community to craft the final build of the game, which would arrive in 2023.
Given how long this development cycle took, there’s a chance that the developers feel they’ve put enough work into the game and are ready for the next chapter of their journey.
