Baldur's Gate 3's latest hotfix quietly removes artifacts of a cut storyline never meant to be heard

Minthara, a fierce Drow Warrior in Baldur's Gate 3, looks pensive towards the player, illuminated by dim firelight. — (Image credit: Larian Studios)

Baldur's Gate 3's Patch 8 was stuffed full of wonderful things, like 12 new subclasses and a photo mode, but once it was out some players stumbled into new dialogue they had never heard before. A chat with a certain corpse revealed a snippet of a storyline that didn't actually exist anywhere else in the game. After some speculation over the last few weeks, Larian dropped a hotfix today that solves the mystery for good.

Tucked away in the patch notes for hotfix 31 is a fix that removes "some defunct dialogue that mistakenly made it into Minthara's Speak with Dead dialogue in Patch 8." Clips of the scene before it was removed have a lifeless Minthara revealing that she was going to be a mother—a story beat that apparently was never supposed to make it into the final game.

When Larian announced it would expand the endings in 2023, it said the team was "pretty strict" on what kind of things fit into the game. "If it isn't good—if it isn't fun to play—it doesn't make it into the game," it wrote.

Unused dialogue like Minthara's can be fun to speculate about, but it doesn't always mean something good was taken away. If Larian thought it wasn't interesting, it probably wasn't interesting. That said, I'd love to see the developers sit down and talk about all the stuff like this that made it far enough to be fully voice acted; if only to know why they didn't think it worked for the story they wanted to tell.

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Tyler has covered videogames and PC hardware for 15 years. He regularly spends time playing and reporting on games like Diablo 4, Elden Ring, Overwatch 2, and Final Fantasy 14. While his specialty is in action RPGs and MMOs, he's driven to cover all sorts of games whether they're broken, beautiful, or bizarre.

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