Highlights
- Custom characters in Baldur's Gate 3 remain in parties forever, even if they are dead or players leave the host's party, causing frustration.
- Dead and inoperable characters clog up party slots, making it impossible to complete main story quests and access important dialogue options.
- The game's design choice, though defended by some, ruins players' save files, forcing each player to deal with unwanted characters in their party.
Several Baldur's Gate 3 players have taken to Reddit to express their frustration with the fact that custom characters remain in parties forever, even if they are dead or the players leave the host's party for any reason.
"Random people jumped in my game and then left.... but I cant get rid of their characters in my party. How do I do this!?" asks Undeuxtwat after accidentally opening his game to the public, only to be met with comments like "Your save is bricked" and "You can't, the whole save is fu**ed now".
The problem is frustrating because, according to shplamana's testing, you can't even interact with characters who have left. They hijack your party slots forever. You can't talk to them in camp, and you can't boot them up to use them in combat. Even if they are killed, they are dead in the party forever.
An even bigger problem is that as slots become clogged with dead and inoperable characters, players become unable to complete main story quests. As TheKasaR puts it, players can't start various dialog options that lead to main or backstory quests if they don't have certain companions in their party. But because the party consists of multiple non-bootable, custom, and dead characters, it becomes impossible to access and interact with these dialogue options.
For some reason, there are some players who defend this design choice, even though it ruins the player's save file forever. DrasticBread clearly says: "It's not a bug, it's a feature that's there for a reason". The reason is apparently that the drop-in-drop-out feature in Baldur's Gate 3 is designed to allow a team to finish the game together, even if it takes years, but it must be the same four who started the campaign. The flaw, however, is that the game forces each player to deal with the characters stuck in their party, even if they don't want to keep them around anymore.
The solution at the moment, as Schlost suggested, is for each player to make their own campaign, then play another separate campaign together when they want to cooperate with friends, and that way their party configuration won't suffer. But for those who already have party slots that have been overtaken by dead, custom characters, there's no current fix for that.