Baldur’s Gate 3 has come a long way since its release, but one of its followers is still sorely lacking when it comes to backstory. Baldur’s Gate 3 has seen numerous patches since it first came out, introducing everything from minor bug fixes to massive new content drops. Most recent was Patch 8, the final major update to Baldur’s Gate 3, which introduced several new playable subclasses among many other new features. Although the patch didn’t introduce much new story content, it does signal an end to updates that do, meaning that BG3‘s story is now in its final draft.

But Patch 8 – along with almost every other patch for Baldur’s Gate 3 – has left one character in the lurch. Although this character isn’t technically a party member, they are semi-recruitable; they’ll show up around camp and interact with your player character regularly. They can even play a role in a pretty major quest, if you play your cards right. But if you don’t, this follower winds up feeling like a husk of a human being. And they’ll probably never be able to realize their full potential now that Larian is done updating BG3‘s story.

Yenna Doesn’t Have Enough To Do In Baldur’s Gate 3

Yenna Is Usually Just A Failsafe

Baldur’s Gate 3 has done Yenna dirty. Yenna is an NPC you first meet as soon as you enter Rivington. You have a brief interaction with her, which you may choose to resolve in a few different ways, before she disappears, only to pop up later back at your camp. You can talk to Yenna (or even to her cat, Grub, if you have speak with animals), but Yenna doesn’t seem to have any particular role in the story unless you satisfy a set of very particular conditions.

Yenna basically exists as a failsafe. Minor spoiler here, but in Act Three, the shapeshifter Orin will kidnap a character from your camp, usually whichever companion you have the lowest relationship affinity with. However, if none of the eligible companions (Lae’zel, Gale, Halsin, or Minthara) are at camp, either because the player never recruited them or they’ve died without being resurrected somewhere along the way, she’ll take Yenna instead.

She’s barely even a character, but she has the potential for so much more.

But if that doesn’t happen, Yenna’s story is severely lacking. She’s either killed by Orin, or saved by the player, at which point she starts inexplicably selling soup. Other than that, though, she just hangs around camp with stock-standard dialogue. She’s barely even a character, but she has the potential for so much more.

How Baldur’s Gate 3 Could Make Yenna Better

A Simple Sidequest

We only know three things about Yenna: her mom’s missing, she has a cat, and she likes soup. If BG3 were only to seize on that first point, it could make Yenna a much more interesting character with a real arc. The first principle of character writing is that every character needs a want – in Yenna’s case, that’s to find out what happened to her parents. All the game really needs is a quest that encourages you to find them, dead or alive, and she’d instantly become a better character.

A short sidequest might send you to find Yenna’s mother, with variable results. Either you find her alive, and Yenna can go off and live happily ever after – or you botch it, she dies, and Yenna mourns. She can then pop up elsewhere in-game – perhaps selling her soup at the Elfsong Tavern with her mother’s help if she survives, and selling it at your camp if she’s not. The only question is what actually happened to Yenna’s mother. It’d be thematically appropriate if she were also kidnapped by Orin, but it might be interesting if the game explored other story avenues with her kidnapping.

Maybe she was a victim of Cazador’s vampire spawn, or she got sucked into a scam in the Lower City, or she went off fishing and got attacked by a sea monster – any of these would give Yenna real stakes, real purpose, and a real character arc. She doesn’t need a lot of editing, but she needs something to make her feel like a little more of a character instead of a game mechanic in Baldur’s Gate 3.