Minthara-lovers have had a hard time this month. Earlier in March, an update toBaldur’s Gate 3changed the Minthara romancewith The Dark Urge in a way that a lot of fans hated. After this update, if The Dark Urge resisted their urge andrid themselves of Bhaal’s influence, Minthara would break up with them. While our own James Troughtondefended the change, saying that it was in fact in character for Minthara to do so because she is, at her core, power-hungry and evil, Larian has now said thatthis was an unintentional change and patched it out.

This was a theory that TheGamer raised in our initial coverage – the change wasn’t mentioned in the patch notes, and would be quite a big one for a hotfix. It turns out that this was cut content that was accidentally reimplemented because of the update, and therefore was totally unintentional. This makes me think, though, about how flawed Baldur’s Gate 3 is as a game, as much as I love it and have invested into it since launch.

Part of this is just how buggy the game still is, thougha lot of the worst bits (especially in the third act) have been fixed in patches over time. The bugginess is to be expected, considering how big and intricate this game is. When it was first released, developers and critics alike were awed at how much freedom it offered players and how well-made it was, considering the potential for technical disaster. But that doesn’t change the fact that it was very, very buggy on release, and it still is.Patches to the game often create more bugs, as we’ve seen here, and players are constantlyfindingmoreissues.

I’ve learned to overlook the bugs as much as possible, but they still often disrupt my gameplay or worse, force me to reload old saves. I had an issue with Shadowheart getting frightened during the first fight with Ketheric and being frozen permanently in place. Characters randomly stop having voice lines, though I can see their dialogue on the screen. Wyll acts both as if I’ve saved Grand Duke Ravengard and let him die. Quests don’t update in the tracker when they should. I never know what’s game-breaking and what’s not, so I just keep going, hoping that a future patch or just bulldozing through will fix the issue. Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t. Bugs like this are a real problem, and I’m not sure if the game will ever be playable without coming up against an issue like this.

But I’m also concerned that there was this much discourse over whether this behaviour was in character for Minthara at all, making it unclear if this was even a mistake or not. In fact, when I first read that Larian had backtracked on the update, I assumed it was pandering to players again and the change hadn’t been a mistake – after all, the developer didmake Minthara recruitable on good runs,a move I found very fan-servicey.

Minthara is largely considered by the community to bethe most underdeveloped companion. I haven’t recruited her, so I can’t judge this for myself, but many players see her as evil for evil’s sake, power-hungry with no redeeming qualities.Even her writer says so– there’s no fixing her, she’s just bad. I’m down with a character not having a redemption arc, but that’s not the issue. It’s that something as important as whether she’d cut her partner off for something is so controversial. Her character hasn’t been as fleshed out as the other companions’, so it’s easy to project motivations and thoughts onto her.

Maybe I’m just being greedy, but if Baldur’s Gate 3 is going tokeep changing and evolving over time, I’d love to see Minthara get more development. Her romance arc has been criticised for being very lacking, with only one romance scene and not much else. Sure, she’s not an origin character, and Halsin also only has one scene, but your romance with Halsin has three acts of build up. Minthara, meanwhile, will hook up with you right after you do Tiefling genocide, and there’s not much after that. Minthara deserves better.