Baldur's Gate 3 Companions: Act 1 Guide - Game Scout

The first hours of Baldur's Gate 3 quietly test whether you will give its cast a chance. Astarion introduces himself with a knife, Lae'zel with contempt, and Shadowheart with a locked box of secrets, and every one of those first impressions is a setup the game spends the next eighty hours paying off. Recruit all of them anyway. You do not have to travel with anyone you dislike, but companions left unrecruited are stories you simply never see, and two of the best arcs in the game belong to the two least likable people on that beach.

The one recruitment most players miss is Karlach, because the Risen Road sits past the point where the main quest bends you toward the Grove. Walk north anyway and find her before you resolve Wyll's business, because meeting her changes what his story is about. The game never flags this. It rewards the player who explores people the way other RPGs reward exploring maps.

Every companion watches your choices and approves or disapproves in the corner of the screen, and those small ticks add up to whether they trust you, confide in you, and eventually offer their personal quests and romances. You do not need to chase approval with a checklist. Play consistently, and the companions who share your values will find you; the ones who do not will argue, and the arguments are some of the best writing in the game.

The part that is easy to underuse is camp. Long rests are not a health button: they advance companion stories, trigger the night scenes everyone talks about, and open conversations that exist nowhere else. Rest more often than feels efficient, and after anything significant happens, walk the camp and talk to every companion twice. The first exchange gets you their reaction; the second one, more often than you would expect, gets you the truth. The campaign rewards that patience directly, because half of what makes the story land later depends on conversations the game never marks as important.

Mechanically, almost any party works on the standard difficulty, so pick for story collisions instead of spreadsheet balance. Shadowheart reacts to nearly everything involving Shar, the githyanki and the Absolute, which makes her the single highest-value seat in the party for a first run. Lae'zel and Shadowheart together argue constantly, and you should let them, because that friction is a plot thread with an actual destination.

Beyond that, match companions to the region you are entering: bring Wyll and Karlach for anything involving devils, Astarion for the Underdark's stranger corners, and Gale whenever ancient magic is on the table. A useful habit is rotating your bench every few hours, beautiful in practice because the game writes party banter for almost every pairing, and some of the best exchanges belong to characters who otherwise never share a scene.

Baldur's Gate 3 lets its cast walk away, and it does not warn you. Wyll leaves if you side against the Grove. Karlach cannot join you at all on that path, and Lae'zel's patience has hard limits if you keep siding against her people. Companions can also simply die: if someone falls in a fight and the fight ends badly enough, or you never revive them, their story ends there. None of this is a design flaw. The willingness to let you lose people is what makes keeping them mean something.

Two names sit outside the beach-and-grove loop. Halsin must be rescued from the Goblin Camp before certain Act 1 events resolve, or his thread closes. Minthara can only be recruited on the dark path where you side with the goblins, which locks out most of the others, a trade almost nobody should make on a first run. And two more companions join in the later acts, which is all I will say about them here, except that one of them has been waiting a very long time to meet you.