The Baldur’s Gate 3 experience with friends

Introduction

The Baldur’s Gate 3 experience changes drastically with friends, and even more so with a full party of four people. Everything feels more alive thanks to the individual decisions every player can make, and the combos people can pull off in combat can be very satisfying if done correctly.

Party Management Challenges

However, this doesn’t come without a catch or two. Players will naturally lose space for Baldur’s Gate 3’s prebuilt companions (unless players choose them as their preferred characters). More importantly, party management will become an issue, as many players have already found out, as swapping characters in a multiplayer campaign doesn’t work the way most would expect.

Can You Remove Custom Characters In Baldur’s Gate 3 Multiplayer?

Unfortunately, there’s no way to boot a friend’s custom character from the party as of Hotfix #4. Once somebody joins and makes their character, they are there to stay forever unless Larian (or some talented modder on the internet) says otherwise. Drop-in co-op exists in Baldur’s Gate 3. Players can safely join an existing campaign and create a custom character that will get scaled up to match the host’s power level. However, co-op characters will remain in the party even after the player controlling them leaves. If a totally different player joins mid-campaign, then they’ll have to make a custom character. The host will be forced to send an NPC-controlled Origin character back to camp, otherwise, the new player won’t be able to join.

Removing Custom Characters

If a party is full of custom characters and their respective creators log out of the game, the host will be able to control all of them as they would NPCs in a single-player session. Friends who rejoin will automatically regain control over their hero. As of writing, the only way to remove custom characters is to reload the campaign to the point before it became a multiplayer game. Those who started their journey as a party are out of luck, and their best bet is to start a new campaign.

Conclusion

Having a party of four custom characters in single-player mode drastically dilutes the Baldur’s Gate 3 experience. The depth of the origin characters is incredible, and players will miss out on a ton of potential interactions if said characters aren’t adventuring with them. At the very least, BG3 players can still romance Astarion or any of the other NPC party members even if they’re playing with a full party of friends. Baldur’s Gate 3 is available now on PC with a PS5 version coming soon.