Baldur's Gate 3 Still Can't Get One Character Right, Even After Three Updates

is well-known for its memorable and often lovable characters, but there's one in particular who has proven to be consistently problematic across the course of its continued development. Although finished its early access period and had a full release in August 2023, it has continued to evolve since then, with regular updates addressing problems and complaints to improve the game. While many issues can be addressed with one-and-done fixes, not everything ends up being so simple.

Being on the receiving end of a major patch has basically been a basic qualification for being a character, although some have had more iconic problems than others. Gale's excessive interest in romance is one quirk that launch players tend to remember, while Shadowheart had a somewhat opposite experience, eventually getting patched to fix inconsistent triggers for late-game romance progression. Across the course of the game's update history, however, the character who seems to be most consistently prone to issues is Minthara, and it's hard to say if she'll ever completely stabilize.

Minthara's general struggles in might not be familiar to every player, as it's easy to never pick her up in a campaign. As an evil character, Minthara isn't eager to jump into a party that's committed to doing good deeds, and there's no official way to recruit both her and Halsin in the same playthrough. Clearing out the goblin leaders in their camp in Act 1 includes taking down Minthara, and once she dies, that's usually the end of any potential trouble she might cause the game.

Attempting to recruit Minthara, however, is where things can quickly get dicey. In the earliest days of the official release, Minthara seemed to simply be missing content and interactions compared to other party members, something that developer Larian Studios dealt with in the fifth hotfix for Patch 5 made an even bigger change, introducing new possibilities to recruit Minthara without having to engage in explicitly evil acts. This