I ran into a very odd problem on my second play-through of the game. I encountered Hiravras, recruited him and tried to replace Durance with him in the party. But when I did so, Durance disappeared, and Hiravras didn't join the party. Instead, he relocated to the main road in the location he's found in. I couldn't control him, but when I talked to him, I got his dialogue as a party member.

When I tried to swap him for Aloth instead, the same thing happened, only Aloth didn't leave the party. I skipped ahead to Dyrford and tried to check what will happen if I have a free spot in my party - but when I tried to leave Aloth there, I couldn't. The party selection screen showed an empty spot, but Aloth was still in my party when I confirmed it.

I'd never run into this before, so I'm very confused now.

What mods do you have installed?

I don't have any mods or anything of the sort.

So you've never used the console? I'm just trying to rule things out here, since mods and console commands are prime candidates for corrupt saves. If there are no mods and no console commands have been used, I can only think that your save -- you say this is a second play-through -- has become corrupt in some other way. There is no reason, that I can think of, for an NPC not to join the party in the 'inn' party picker.

I have used the console, but not on this save. A corrupted save does sound like a possible reason, although it beats me as to how or why it'd happen. Changing my party worked fine just yesterday.

The option is checked. Loading a save before meeting him, unchecking the option and recruiting him then seems to have solved the problem. At least, as far as replacing him with someone else is concerned.

I do wish I'd known it was even an option to level up your companions the way you want.

What happens there is that Hiravras gets a White March ability with automatic leveling, but without content of White March, the game starts doing rather weird crap. So if you level him up manually, it should all be fine. Bear in mind this doesn't only apply to him - I think Grieving Mother or one of the expansion's companion has the same issue with auto-leveling, so it's best to either wait for the patch or leave the feature disabled. You can respec them in inns.

You can even just create custom companions in inns, so you're not stuck with the NPC companions if you don't like them. On higher difficulties, I'd even recommend creating another tanky character asap, since the fighter you get early (I don't remember his name atm) is the only halfway decent tank among NPCs and having a second one can make some encounters much easier.

I know you can respec them, and create adventurers. But it's still nice to be able to level them up from the start. I've been considering getting White March anyway, but for now I'll just keep the auto-level option disabled.

Of course this was a really horrible bug to introduce, but irrespective of that, it's a good idea to check options in these games and set the choices you want. If given a choice, I always prefer to level up the characters myself, as the AI will almost always do something wacky. That also meant I thankfully didn't run into this pretty darn serious bug.

There are some very useful auto-pause options too, if you haven't noticed them.