It's the bad Twilight Fanfic character who really needs to be staked. Vampires are so last decade!
What really gets me about him is, like, most Twilight-y characters are at least young-coded, even if the character is 300 years old or whatever they look and act like a teen or twenty-something (c.f. Twilight, Buffy, The Vampire Diaries, etc.), which is part of why they work, weirdly enough. But he sounds and looks like he's in his late 30s or early 40s (were he human), so the whole "regretful vampire" deal just makes him kind of seem like a nonce!
Gale - it's more the voice acting rather than the writing that makes him a tit.
Right? Did they have to get someone who sounds like Richard Ayoade's character from The IT Crowd?
I very much hope that things get better by release, but the stuff I hear has been Very Not Good. That's a very serious issue when "has good companion stories" is one of my favorite things in many CRPGs.
I will say, things have improved over the Early Access.
When I got in, which was fairly early on, all of the companions were completely rude and obnoxious (fine for Lae'zel, less so others). There was also a weirdly grimdark air to the writing in general, and you often had "only bad choices" situations (even where there were obviously better choices just not allowed), which is fine for say, DOS2, but not a BG game set in the FR.
This caused Larian to receive an awful lot of extremely negative feedback. And they did acknowledge this, though they initially tried to excuse it as "We're only adding the 'evil' companions in EA because normally they get ignored". The community came back with "Evil doesn't mean they have to be an insufferable prick!". And over the patches, they've improved a lot, though two of them are still introduced in ways that aren't great. They've also provided a lot of better options for resolving situations and slowly moved away from the "Every single non-companion NPC is a total wanker/buffoon/lying to you" approach that DOS1 and DOS2 veered dangerously close to.
There's a serious mechanics problem at the moment where a lot of the companions have backstories which only advance when you take a Long Rest, but:
A) Only one companion's story can advance per long rest (in general)
and
B) The game wants you to minimize long rests.
So you get a bizarre situation in Early Access where if you actually want to have the companion's story advance you have to Long Rest far more than you need to, accidentally trivializing combat. Hopefully that gets resolved before launch, but it's persisted through the whole of EA.
They've got a long way to go in 8 months, and I'm honestly scared for the quality of Acts 2/3 given how much still goes wrong in Act 1 despite ultra-heavy testing. But it's one of the better CRPGs for offering multiple solutions and multiple approaches to problems/quests/etc already.
