There’s more banter in BG1 than you’d think, but you’ve probably never seen most of it

I’ve been going through the Wiki recently, while trying to think of party compositions for various next playthroughs. I noticed that Bioware put much more effort into creating dialogues between NPC’s than I thought.

Some of it seems quite hilarious, but also incredibly random. You‘d have to take combinations that are incredibly implausible for anyone to bring along.

Take Eldoth and Garrick. Apparently, only if you have both of them in your party and bring Alora, Alora will start complimenting Garrick on his music to piss off Eldoth.

In the original game, how many people will have seen this conversation? XP was capped at 89000, core difficulty was the default, and players were penalised for lowering the difficulty (to they still do that in EE?). The game was hard, so who was ever going to go near Sarevok with two bards and a terrible thief in their party? I know Alora got better with the Enhanced Edition, but originally she had bad starting stats and a lucky foot that didn’t work due to a bug.

Similarly, having Garrick, Eldoth and Skie in your party would lead to some sort of love triangle thay maybe two or three people in the history of the game will have seen. Also, the unlikely couple Alora and Edwin supposedly really like each other and talk a lot.

Meanwhile, the supposed canon party - which actually is a very likely party for a starting protagonist to put together - hardly has any interactions.

Just thought I’d share, in case you’re considering a new playthrough. The Wiki has some lovely descriptions. My favourite:

Montaron and Alora really dislike each other. Montaron thinks Alora is too much of a goody-two-shoes idiot, and Alora thinks Montaron is SUPER mean. She's not wrong.