Baldur’s Gate 3is a huge game. You could easily spend around 100 hours or more per playthrough roaming around Faerûn, so Act 1 has a hell of a job introducing us to all the game has to offer. But even though this introduction can take tens of hours, some players are still lost, particularly when it comes to companions.
Over on the Baldur’s Gate 3 subreddit, players share all the different companions they missed, accidentally running past major characters without even realising. Gale and Astarion seem to be the biggest offenders for this, as fans find it easy to walk right by them as soon as they leave the starting area, never really having a reason to go back again to bump into them.
This was all kicked off by Reddit user DaethChanter sharing that they accidentally went through a whole playthrough without Astarion, as they hadn’t run into his introductory cutscene after crash landing on the Nautiloid.
Turns out, they’re far from alone. Both Astarion and Gale are found near the Nautiloid, but not in places obvious enough for some players.
“You’d be surprised by the number of players who miss Gale, Lae’zel or even Shadowheart on their first runs then come here asking when they’re supposed to show up,” says AlbionPCJ.
If you missed Astarion, you can go back and get him in Acts 1 and 2. Just don’t enter Act 3 without him,because it won’t end well for him at all.
While Gale is a bit more understandable, since you might see the unstable portal and think, “Alright, that’s a problem for another time,” it’s hard to see how anyone could miss Shadowheart. Well, turns out, she isn’t always fully conscious after the short tutorial on the Nautiloid.
“If she dies fighting on the Nautiloid, she’ll be just a dead NPC on the shore at the start of the game,” says neoalfa. “If you don’t realize you have s scroll of revivify on you, and use it on her, she stays dead the entirety of the game. Same for Lae’zel.”
In Lae’zel’s case, you have other chances to miss her too. After you wake up from your Mind Flayer abduction ordeal, she’s ditched you and Shadowheart. Later on, you can find her imprisoned by scared Tieflings and she’ll need to be freed from her cage before she can join you again. If you were to either keep her locked upormiss this scene entirely, then you’d have to go through the main story without a Githyanki.
Of course, some of the companions are easy to miss by design. Minthara will only join you if you agree to wipe out a camp of refugees, something many of us would steer away from on a first playthrough.This might be about to change, according to some datamined dialogue, but that won’t remove every decision that can lock companions out of your party. Going back to the refugees, killing them will boot Wyll and Karlach, and possibly Gale if you can’t convince him to stick around. That’s not even getting into the characters that can die in combat the first time you meet them - looking at you, Jaheira.
