PSA: You can trade with lots of Baldur's Gate 3 NPCs who aren't traders

The trade icon highlighted in conversation — (Image credit: Larian)

Here's a thing about Baldur's Gate 3 you might not know if you haven't played previous Larian games. On the left-hand side of the dialogue screen there's a row of icons, shortcuts that let you read back over the conversation, attack whoever you're talking to, or switch to another character who isn't in the conversation so they can get into position to attack whoever you're talking to. (Or pinch all the stuff behind them while they're distracted by whoever's doing the talking.) Sometimes, one of those icons is "trade".

Even NPCs who aren't flagged on the map as merchants and don't have a dialogue option like "show me your wares" can be traded with if this icon's active. A random druid in the Emerald Grove will just be carrying around a potion of healing, some mugwort, a book about vampires, and one carrot, all of which she'll happily sell you. Nearby, Rolan the tiefling has a scroll of detect thoughts should you need one.

You can even buy items right off questgivers who would normally hang onto them until you finish their job. If you really want those magic gloves Zevlor has, but don't want to either do his quest or pickpocket the guy? Offer him enough cash and you're good to go.

Not everyone the trade icon pops up for will be carrying much in the way of useful stuff, however. I suppose it adds to the authenticity of the world if a random githyanki will sell you a bloodstone, or one particular goblin will have five gold coins and a bone in his pockets to trade with. But where Divinity: Original Sin 2 had a tutorial pop-up to ensure players didn't miss this feature, Baldur's Gate 3 does not, and if you're not paying attention to the icons at all times, you might have missed it. So now you know.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.