Thanks to a bug, players have found a 'realm of naked men' in Baldur's Gate 3

Gale, without a shirt, smirking
(Image credit: Larian)

We've been making jokes about Baldur's Gate 3 being a horny game, though frankly I think it could be even hornier. I did not, however, expect it to contain a row of naked men who can spontaneously appear and just stand there looking vacant.

Players have stumbled onto this bug in various ways, usually while having a long rest, sometimes in co-op, and sometimes when one player gets disconnected. While the player-characters sleep on their bedrolls, dreaming about the mysterious guardian who protects them from being turned into mind flayers, six butt-naked gentlemen stand protectively over them in a line—a couple of them with their feet in the campfire, which they don't seem to mind.

This bug's also been encountered during character creation. What one player has dubbed the realm of naked men can become visible to the left of the spot your PC stands while you customize them, this time a gang of eight human men who hang out in a little cluster around a single fully clothed dragonborn—who looks like the default appearance if you choose to play as the Dark Urge. Maybe these mannequin men are used to store customization options as you flip back and forth between choices?

Behind them is a pocket of the dream guardian's realm, which looks like a bunch of floating islands. Since character creation ends with the option to personalize your guardian, perhaps these placeholder pals are also used to store customization choices for them. Which might explain why they're showing up in camp during long rests, having been evicted from their home while that space is used for one of the dream guardian scenes.

Or maybe they serve some other purpose. Larian said on Twitter "they also silently judge your character creation choices, but don't tell anyone about that." Look, Larian, if I spend half an hour trying to make my guardian look like Karl Urban that's my choice and I won't be shamed by you or your squad of weird naked dudes. 

Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

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.