Reduced the size of save files by removing summons that don’t exist in the game anymore.

Well, that seems like something that should have been done a long time ago, lmao. Good thing I went with druid first over ranger, it seems.

Fixed Thieves’ Tools in the camp chest or inventory of a companion who is waiting at camp not being accessible when lockpicking.

Ok, taking items from camp, I could see. Talk about useful, and I believe they recently did the same thing with quest items? Which I very much appreciate. Being able to leave that behind should clear up my inventory considerably when I get back to playing.

But…taking things from a non-present companion feels weird in my head. I’m sure I wouldn’t notice it; I give everything to the resident lockpick anyway, so it would just be clearing up stuff I misplaced in the impossible event that they ever run out.

But picturing it does break immersion a little bit. It’s fine, it wouldn’t have any real effect in the moment, it’s just…what an odd choice.

Poor Gale - we know your pain, sometimes it’s easy to read something into a situation that wasn’t there. We’ve sat him down and explained that if someone doesn’t offer him a shoe to eat every time, that doesn’t mean they never will. You’ll find him more likely to stick around now.
. . . .
Gale will no longer permanently leave the party if you don’t offer him any magic items while talking to him – unless you’re abundantly clear that you don’t plan on ever doing so.

Ok, this one I honestly do dislike. I’ve been mildly bothered by every change they’ve made to Gale’s personality, even though I know the one he started out with on release was literally bugged and was never intended to be like that. Because it was also unexpectedly convincing. There weren’t other characters I could think of that were genuinely likable people while also simultaneously being socially inept, grandiose little incels.

I didn’t even notice it until it was talked about online, because how Gale acted in his glitched romance was just how guys always act towards me irl. For the first time, every male gamer had to put up with everything *I* had to put up with, and they hated it, and I loved it. It felt believable. It was hilarious. I felt seen. And then they toned him down because he was bothering the playerbase.

This now, with the items and increasing his hesitation to leave in response to a situation you’re not taking as seriously as he needs it to be taken, this feels like more dumbing down.

This feels an awful lot like avoiding any player unhappiness by making sure it is impossible for anyone to experience a consequence unless they’re dedicated enough to manually and knowingly force it to happen. And that’s not what they initially wanted the game to be.

It still has hundreds upon hundreds of permutations, right down to differences in the inflection of a sentence, and the sheer dedication is boggling. But then they did things like remove any actual drawback to the tadpoles, of all things, because of the idea of unpleasant consequences that players would removed about.

It is ok to have a character that’s rash and presumptuous because his natural ability has given him an ego that far eclipses his social experience. It’s ok to have a character under such duress that they will make questionable, desperate decisions without consulting anyone, based on their presumptions about the player, whether or not those assumptions are correct.

That is an extremely realistic personality. And one that doesn’t tend to exist, because what if something happens that the player doesn’t like. Real people make choices. Let him have the ability to make stupid ones.