Regardless if you’re in a multiplayer or single-player campaign, Baldur’s Gate 3 offers companions that can be recruited to your party and be controlled by you both in battle and the open world. These companions should follow the character that’s being controlled by the player if they’re able to. But it works both ways.
The custom-made character will follow the companions if they’re being controlled by you too. So you’ll always have your party following you as long as everything is working as intended.
However, we’ve received a bunch of questions regarding party members not following the controlled character, which we’ve researched to find all possible answers.
So, how can you fix companions not following you in Baldur’s Gate 3?
In order for a character to follow you, their portrait must be connected to yours. This can be done by dragging one portrait to the other until a link is created between them or clicking the G-key to automatically connect the characters. The two characters must stand close in order for the connection to work.
It’s important that the portraits stick to one another. You’ll notice a space between the portraits if they aren’t connected, but when they are there shouldn’t be any space between them at all.
If you have linked the portraits to one another but your companion still doesn’t follow you, there are other methods of getting them to follow you. When the official function doesn’t work as intended, you’ve most likely run into a glitch of sorts.
When your Baldur’s Gate 3 companions don’t follow you even though their portraits are linked to yours, there’s something wrong. This can be fixed by fast-traveling to any destination with your party, taking a long rest, or going to camp and then back to the open world again. Fast-travel with one character at a time if they don’t follow you automatically.
Traveling with all your characters to the same destination will ensure that they’re in the same exact spot, ensuring that they can be grouped once again. You can try doing this with your entire party, but there’s a slight risk of it not working since the characters don’t follow you.
If that’s the case, you’ll have to fast-travel one character at a time. To do this, double-click any character’s portrait on the left-hand side of the screen. This should move your camera to that character, indicating that you’re controlling that specific character.
Now open your map and select your desired destination to fast-travel to. Once the character has reached its destination, double-click the next portrait and do the same with the subsequent character until the entire party has been moved to the same destination.
Once there, connect their portraits. As mentioned earlier, clicking the G-key should connect all of the characters that are close to the character you’re currently controlling.
If none of these methods seem to re-establish your party, I recommend restarting the game completely to see if it works better once it has booted up again.
Why Your Baldur’s Gate Companions Stop Following You
In Baldur’s Gate 3, all of the characters currently in your party can be found on the left-hand side, where their portraits are showing.
The portraits can be used for a bunch of different things, such as managing newly reached levels, distributing loot by dropping it on the portrait, left-clicking the portrait for more options, and so forth.
This means that there’s a bit of activity in the area surrounding the portraits, which can lead to players accidentally removing the link between paired characters.
The same thing will also occur if you accidentally press G on your keyboard, which either connects or disconnects the group members from one another.
Most commonly, characters will stop following you when you’ve moved too far from them without them being able to follow. This often happens when some of your characters can jump further than others, which results in the weaker jumpers being left behind and disconnecting from the group.
Sometimes, a character will stop following you even if the portraits are connected just because there’s something blocking the character from reaching you.
Double-click the character’s portrait and manually move it to you. You should find items that can teleport characters quite early on (Misty Step) and these will come in handy when weaker characters can’t make long jumps.