Baldur's Gate 3's New Romance Scene Is Heartbreaking For One Key Character

new romance scene is heartbreaking for one key character. One of the key draws of the award-winning RPG has been the depth of interactions between companions and the player, including friendship, rivalry, and even romance. While companions like Astarion and Shadowheart often receive the limelight, a new scene shows a tragic ending to the relationship between one origin choice and everyone’s favorite evil drow, Minthara.

[Warning: The following contains spoilers for main story elements in Baldur's Gate 3.]Players have debated about Minthara as a character since the game's launch in August 2023. Compared to the other companions, she appears to have only a fraction of lines, cutscenes, and conversations. It turns out that a bug disabled nearly 1,500 lines of Minthara's dialogue. Ardent fans of Minthara were quick to take to the forums to complain about her lack of content, and Larian listened. Subsequent patches allowed the studio to fix Minthara’s bugs and add some more romantic scenes with her. Few people chose to recruit and romance the drow even with these fixes.

The only way to recruit Minthara before Patch 5 was to side with the goblins at the Goblin Camp and raid the Emerald Grove, killing all the Tiefling refugees and the druids who dwell there. If players take this path, they lose Karlach and Wyll as companions and possibly even Gale if they do not pass the skill check to convince him to stay. Evil choices aside, many players consider losing these powerful companions as a net loss to their overall party structure and survivability.

With the release of Patch 5, Larian added a way to side with the good guys and recruit Minthara simultaneously. Before players kill Dror Ragzlin, they can navigate to Minthara's room at the side of the temple. If they start combat and knock her out non-lethally, she will show up during Act 2 in Moonrise Towers, and they can then save and recruit her.

Now that there is a second way to recruit Minthara without slaughtering throngs of