Karlach approval bug

[Bi$harp]

There's a bug where Karlach's approval value won't go up when you pick options she approves of. I ended up missing all of the romance flags because her approval was stuck at zero.

At first I just thought her approval was supposed to go up slower than the others or something. Since the stupid approval meter doesn't have any kind of numerical value displayed it on and is just a vague spectrum I just assumed it was going up just very slowly. It wasn't until I checked her character sheet halfway through Act 2 that I realized her approval was still at neutral and that this was actually an issue with the game.

I managed to find a fix on reddit where you remove her from the party, save, then reload. That worked and now the number is going up like its supposed to. But it's starting from almost zero so it's like she might as well not have been in my party until just now even though I've had her with me since early on in Act 1.

I know I'm not the only one running into this, there's a lot of people on reddit also talking about this bug. I'm really pissed off about it because this bug has directly impacted how I experienced the story. Especially since I had locked on to Karlach as my choice for a romantic interest very early on and I rejected every other character in favor of her not realizing I was being locked out of the romance options for her by the bug.

P.S. Since I missed all the flags that I didn't find out about until later, like kissing her after the second upgrade and the cold water scene does this mean I officially cannot start a romance with her now even if I finally get my approval value up?
In other words, can I still start a romance or am I going to have to resort to save editing?

[Hexedene]

Same thing happened to me. Very frustrating because I didn't notice it until I looked at her approval rating. I assumed she liked me since she approved of pretty much everything I said

[Hexedene]

I tried the workaround and her approval meter vanished. Like it was completely reset. 3 approvals since then but its hard to tell if the meter is moving :( It would be nice to have numbers when you hover over the meter as well as a history of what they hated/liked

[GODzilla]

Same thing here and same thing in this reddint thread:

https://www.reddit.com/r/BaldursGate3/comments/15ixyx4/karlach_approval_broken/

Karlach whole interaction is more or less broken with this and I hope this gets acknowledged at some point and, more importantly, fixed.

[LoLolichanTTV]

I am having this same problem but with Astarion. And the workaround doesn't work for him sadly :( I get the approval notifications, but he is stuck at neutral no matter how many hours i put in.

[GODzilla]

Well for me it eventually turned out to just be slow progress and it started to go up later. I feel like the progress of her personal quest in act 2 was some kind of catalyst, maybe not.

Since I never actually went with Astarion I cannot tell how early or late his personal stuff triggers anything. I know there is something he wanted me to help him with in act 2 (being vague here to avoid spoilers), which I didn't do because I didn't care about him. ^^

[Arashi Tempest]

This same thing is happening with Astarion for me. I've tried just about everything, but even though I've picked absolutely every choice he approves of, my rating won't go up with him.