In a recent appearance on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, prolific actor J.K. Simmons dove into his relationship with the games he's acted in. While not much of a gamer himself, the script for Portal 2 (where Simmons voiced Aperture founder Cave Johnson) seems to have left its mark on the actor.

"Tom Britney from The Westies, he texted me a week ago, a little video text of my character from Baldur's Gate," Simmons said when asked if he gets recognized for his videogame roles. "He said, 'I'm about to kill you.' Okay, well, good luck with that."

Host Josh Horowitz followed up by asking if Simmons enjoys playing games at all, and the answer was a firm no. "My hands don't work on those controllers," said Simmons. "I've tried⁠—my kids, of course, my twentysomething kids play them a lot. My wife, she'll actually get in there and play some Mario Bros. or whatever with them. I just, I cannot. No. Sorry."

But even if he doesn't play, Simmons does have a firm favorite among all the games he's acted in. "It was Portal 2, for me," he said. "Just because it was such a hilarious script. I could have done the feature film, or the play, or whatever. It was just such fun writing."

Simmons did, indeed, reprise his role as Cave Johnson for the 2022 Steam Deck tie-in game, Aperture Desk Job. Portal 2 writer Eric Wolpaw, who is credited with creating the character, also returned to the series to write for Desk Job.

Given the more siloed nature of their work on games, actors often have a wide range of engagement with the hobby. Deus Ex, Marathon, and Starfield actor Elias Toufexis is all-in on games, for example, while Silent Hill f actor Konatsu Kato streamed her first playthrough to much fanfare. Grand Theft Auto 5 actor Steven Ogg, meanwhile, thinks you should put away childish things and read Dostoevsky instead.

Larian Studios has reiterated that it is fully, 100%, without a doubt, donezo in the bunzo when it comes to new Baldur's Gate-related projects. It's latest statement was in response to a Dark Horse comics announcement that could have been interpreted as implying the studio's involvement.

On X, "The Everything App," Dark Horse announced that a yet-untitled comic series starring Karlach, our favorite BG3 companion, is coming down the pike. The issue: Dark Horse signed off its post by saying the project was "With [Larian] and [Wizards of the Coast]," tagging both companies.

Makes sense. I mean, Larian famously did make Baldur's Gate 3 and the character of Karlach in the first place. But the studio seems keen to head off any suggestion that it is involved in Wizards of the Coast's post-BG3 spinoff projects.

"Maximum hijinks are happening right now, but we’re not involved in any BG3 related projects," the official Larian account wrote in response alongside a picture of CEO Swen Vincke and writing lead Adam Smith doing some kind of script read-through. "As soon as we bust outta here, we'll share more about [Divinity]."

Ever since Larian revealed that it would not be making Baldur's Gate 4, there has been a popular conception that there must have been some kind of dispute or grievance between it and D&D owner Wizards of the Coast. Vincke, for his part, has insisted that the split was amicable, and that the developers were just creatively spent working in someone else's setting.

The quick, sharp way Larian distanced itself from any suggestion of its involvement in Dark Horse's upcoming spinoff is certainly eyebrow-raising, but it's also understandable that the studio would not want any misconceptions about its output to spread, regardless of the nature of its parting ways with Wizards⁠—I noticed at least one commenter say that they thought the studio's writing team may have been collaborating on the comic project before this exchange.

I, for one, am looking forward to Larian's next game, Divinity, set in its own fantasy world of Rivellon. If you'd like to catch up on the project, we've collected everything we know about the upcoming RPG in one place. We also have a guide to the Divinity series, including a recommended play order for the games⁠—spoilers, it's pretty much reverse-chronological order of release.

A CRPG in the vein of Baldur's Gate without a bird's-eye view camera sure sounds wrong, but it feels so right. If you're looking for something a little more Dragon Age and less Divinity for your next replay, Modder Relysia has gone and stuck an over-the-shoulder third-person camera in Baldur's Gate 3, uploading it to Nexus Mods last week, and it looks a lot better than you may expect.

In the brief showcase teaser, you can see the player wandering around the Undercity Ruins. Animations are a tad jittery, but because BG3's environments are made to be zoomed in and gawked at and shown off in dialog cutscenes, everything is at a believable scale. I'm not sure this would work in all of the game's environments to the same extent, but that it works at all is nifty.

You've always been able to get the camera up close in BG3, but it's always angled slightly downward, feeling less like a proper third person action game cam, and more like a compromise with its classico tactico overhead view. Even playing with a game pad, it's distinct from other videogame cameras.

The Nexus Mods page states that it's compatible with the WASD character movement mod, which we dubbed one of the best mods for Baldur's Gate 3, so if you wanted you could conceivably replay the game pretending you and your invisible cameraman have been isekai'd out of Dragon Age and into Faerûn. (Throw in the real time with pause mod as well if you're a true sick freak who rejects the turn-based revolution, comfortable in the knowledge that you'd rather die in four seconds than win if it takes four minutes.)

There are lots of settings, too. You can adjust FOV, offset, camera height, and even customize "horizontal tracking speed" if you'd rather the camera not immediately jerk around with your every impulsive movement. While it's true a third-person camera option was already achievable via Native Camera Tweaks or the WASD mod, having one that's so precisely customizable is a win for anyone who wants to appreciate that character they spent four hours customizing up close.

There are, somehow, those of us who still haven't played the hit 2023 RPG Baldur's Gate 3, and I know that because someone asked My Chemical Romance front man Gerard Way at a recent concert.

As spotted by IGN, the question came via a large paper sign made by fan KatanaLuciana, who recorded the interaction for TikTok. The sign caught the eye of a bandmember, who then tapped Way's shoulder to get his take between songs.

"No, I've only played Baldur's Gate 1," Way announced to the room. "Not that I probably wouldn't have liked 2 or 3. I did play the Icewind Dale expansion, but I just ran out of time, you know?"

Way's nerd bona fides are well documented—he's a longtime D&D player, once streamed Overwatch and discussed his love of D.Va, and co-created the Umbrella Academy comic series that later became a Netflix show—but I'm not sure he's talked at length about classic CRPGS. He clearly knows some ball, so we'll forgive him for remembering Icewind Dale as an expansion rather than a standalone game.

"Did you play Baldur's Gate 3?" he asked fans. "Is it good? I would assume so, the first one was a lot of fun. It was the closest thing at the time to playing D&D."

At risk of putting my foot in my mouth, if he loved crusty ol' Baldur's Gate at the time, imagine how Larian's modern masterclass would hit. The studio quickly caught wind of Way's interest, of course, and reached out to help correct the injustice.

".@gerardway of My Chemical Romance, what do you mean you haven't played the critically-acclaimed Dungeons & Dragons RPG, @baldursgate3," the official Larian account posted. "There's a code with your name on it if you fancy trying it."

Somebody get that man a Steam Deck, because I can't imagine a better game to pass long hours of touring.

Surprise, surprise. Our quizzes on the RPG that swept awards shows all through 2023 (and even into 2024) continue to be some of our most popular. Baldur's Gate 3 really left an impression on everyone, and even after finishing up our quiz on the final act, I'm already thinking about how I'll revisit the series with more trivia.

So until the brainworm inspires me again, I'm collecting all of our BG3-related quizzes in a single hub so you can take them as one big final on Faerûn.

I don't have any interesting loot rewards to give out for good grades, but I promise that anyone who does well gains instant approval with the entire party—except for Astarion. He's never amicable.

Brave the Baldur's Gate 3 quiz gauntlet

Test your knowledge on Baldur's Gate 3 books

Lightning round: Can you identify these Baldur's Gate 3 books?

I dug through every rotten basket and chest of drawers in the realm, stealing books from the rich and poor to expand my own collection. Even if you did the same I'm not sure you'll recall all five of these, but you'll at least get a good chuckle out of them.

Sort Baldur's Gate 3 classes by popularity

Lightning round: Put the classes in order by popularity

Baldur's Gate 3 has 12 base classes to choose from, but according to Larian's official 1st anniversary stats, we have a few clear favorites. Based on those official 1-year rankings, can you put all 12 classes in order by their popularity? You've got four minutes to complete three sets of four. Good Luck.

Vote in our Baldur's Gate 3 romance poll

Now kiss and tell, who was your favorite romance option?

I'll go first: Karlach is my wife now and forever, but I did kiss the Emperor in a heated moment of weakness. I save scummed like a coward when Karlach caught me. Now you tell me: which companion had your favorite romance in Baldur's Gate 3? I'm letting you only select two, so choose wisely.

And finally, who was your favorite non-companion tryst?

You already know I voted for The Emperor, no shame here. Tell us who you couldn't resist, but just pick one this time.

Do you remember that moment in Baldur's Gate 3 when you thought you were approaching the end, but then you arrived in Act 3's big city and realized you weren't even close? Because I sure do. I remember proudly announcing I was about to finish the RPG, only to spend another 100 hours methodically combing the city and kissing Karlach. Egg on my face.

The first and second chapters of BG3 felt big enough to be their own game, so I wasn't expecting Larian's final chapter to be the behemoth it was. I could've been normal about it, sure, but I somehow arrived in Act 3 ready to dig through more rotten baskets than ever before and talk to the whole damn city multiple times. By the time I had finally saved Baldur's Gate, I think I doubled my playtime from the first two acts.

That's an extreme case (probably inflated by the Magic Mirror, too), and today's quiz doesn't assume you're that miserable over being thorough. It does, however, pose a challenge for those of you who just beelined it to the end.

So, assuming you've conquered our quizzes on BG3 Act 1 and Act 2, it's time to finish the fight with another round of trivia on the game's final chapter. Today I'm finally asking: How well do you know Baldur's Gate 3's third act?

When you're done, let us know how you did in the comments below and share a little insight into your playtime! Did you refuse to move on until you did everything humanly possible, or did you book it to the end?

Baldur's Gate 3 is a phenomenal game—noteworthy not just for being a very good RPG, but also several brilliant performances and a heck of a lot of mocapping. Having spoken to some of its cast myself in the past, I can speak to the thought and weight they've put behind their work.

As can Alix Wilton Regan, voice of the female inquisitor in Dragon Age: Inquisition, who recently spoke with GamesRadar+ at the BAFTA game awards: "Video game acting is, at times, hard, demanding, and also challenging, and it's also joyous, and it's filled with, literally, blood and sweat and tears, especially if you're on the [performance capture] stage."

That can be hard for certain videogame companies (cough cough, Amazon Games) to remember, especially during the industry's current obsession with AI, which could cut out all sorts of creative "middlemen" such as writers, actors, artists, and QA testers. Heck, let's get rid of developers while we're at it—you get the picture.

"Video game actors, they deserve their flowers, because we help pull the audience in to elevate the writing, the animation, the direction, the tone," Regan continues. "I give a massive shout-out here to the Baldur's Gate 3 crew, because they were the ones who made all the other video game actors sit up and take note and realize, 'Yeah, actually, we are loved, our work does have value, and we too deserve to stand up and be counted.'

"I've literally said this to, like, Jennifer English's face, or Neil Newbon. I've been up to Ben Starr, and I'm like, 'You changed the game.'"

The unwarranted disrespect towards videogame actors isn't anything new, mind. Take this quote—fittingly, from BG3 star Neil Newbon himself—speaking to Entertainment Weekly last year: "I had conversations about, 'That's going to look really good when we get the real actors in.' I was like, 'What do you mean real actors?' I'm a real actor. I went to the f*cking Edinburgh Festival, man!"

And while I don't think actors aren't appreciated by people who are into videogames—if you've played enough, you almost certainly have favourites—I will admit, it's nice to see Baldur's Gate 3 doing well enough for Neil Newbon to snap up an award while competing in the same category as movie star Idris Elba.

It has been almost three years⁠—33 months, to be exact⁠—since the release of Baldur's Gate 3, and in that time, we could not stop playing it on Steam Deck. It has only fallen out of the platform's top five most-played list in four of those 33 months. Even then, Larian's masterpiece has never left the top ten.

Valve keeps a running list of the most-played games on Steam Deck that's available to the public, and you can sort by weekly, monthly, and yearly winners, with the list updating each week/month/year. After seeing Gaming on Linux's coverage of April 2026's most-played, I decided to go back into the archives, with occasional gaps filled by Steam Deck HQ and Steam Deck Gaming on YouTube.

There's a lot of takeaways to be had from the data⁠—I've got to dust off my gunbelt and spurs and put this stuff into an Excel spreadsheet or Gdocs equivalent⁠—but something that really surprised me is how doggedly Baldur's Gate 3 has stayed near the top. Some stats that wowed me:

• BG3 held the number one most-played spot for six straight months after launch, a record only surpassed by Balatro at 7 months⁠—at least going back to August, 2023. I'd like to see how Vampire Survivors did in 2022. The runner-up? Stardew Valley with four nonconsecutive months at #1.
• BG3 stayed in the top five for exactly two years straight after launch, only dipping to number six for the first time last August.
• The lowest BG3 dropped was number eight last October, but it's had a rebound, staying in the top five most-played games so far this year.

This all fascinates me, because Deck has never really been the best way to play Baldur's Gate 3: It's not on our best Steam Deck Games list, and it tends to punish the handheld's poor little APU while sucking up every last drop of battery. I remember getting around 20-30fps on Deck around launch, a compromise I lived with because I was traveling for work at the time.

But BG3 controls well on a gamepad, and I've yet to see how its native Linux port improved things. Being a turn-based game as well, poor framerate isn't as detrimental to the experience as it would be in a fast-paced action game.

It speaks to the all-encompassing popularity of Baldur's Gate 3 that people just gotta have it, even on the go, and nearly three years on. I've arranged links to the most-played games by month lists since BG3's release below, with Baldur's Gate 3's placement highlighted. Valve doesn't make historical data like this readily available, so I relied on Gaming on Linux, Steam Deck HQ, and Steam Deck Gaming.

2023 (Overall: unordered top 12)

• August: #1
• September: #1
• October: #1
• November: #1
• December: #1

2024 (Overall: #4)

• January: #1
• February: #2
• March: #4
• April: #4
• May: #5
• June: #5
• July: #4
• August: #3
• September: #2
• October: #2
• November: #4
• December: #5

2025 (Overall: #4)

• January: #3
• February: #3
• March: #3
• April: #3
• May: #2
• June: #4
• July: #4
• August: #6
• September: #7
• October: #8
• November: #7
• December: #4

2026 (Avg. #4 so far [surprise])

• January: #3
• February: #4
• March: #5
• April: #4

You say "Astarion backstory" and I'll show you a very long list of fanfics, but for anyone who's already exhausted that catalog: today's a big day. There's going to be an official prequel novel for your sad, sexy Baldur's Gate 3 boyfriend this September. Oh and yes, Neil Newbon's recording the audiobook version, obviously.

As reported by Polygon, Wizards of the Coast and Random House Worlds have announced a partnership to publish four projects "centered around [Baldur's Gate 3's] immersive lore and unforgettable characters" this year beginning with Baldur’s Gate 3: Astarion—though the other three are a cookbook, coloring book, and journal—and plans for more collaboration to be revealed "for 2027 and beyond."

"This prequel novel, published by Random House Worlds, takes place prior to the events of the 2023 game, and follows the fan-favorite High Elf during his years of servitude under the vampire lord Cazador Szarr," Polygon reports. "Baldur's Gate 3 senior writer Stephen Rooney consulted on the project in order to ensure consistency with the game's lore and world-building."

My first thought on hearing that a massively popular cultural phenomenon RPG is getting a prequel tie-in novel might have been "oh no, we've reached the WotC cash grab part of the popularity cycle." I was immediately reassured, though, because this thing is being written by T. Kingfisher. She's the wildly prolific and deservedly popular author of horror series What Moves The Dead, twisted fairytales like Thornhedge, and romances like the Paladin series.

If I had asked a bunch of BG3-loving fantasy readers (a nigh circle-shaped Venn diagram) who would be their fancast to write about their beloved vampire, I can say with full confidence that Kingfisher would have topped the list, Family Feud style. Not just because she publishes with eye-watering frequency, but because she's tackled themes like abuse, trauma, and autonomy in her work, all of which are relevant to Astarion's story.

Exploitation of the runaway popularity of Wizards IP though it may be, our guy's in about as good of hands as I could have asked for. Also, she's been romancing Astarion basically since launch.

As for whether or not you need to have played BG3 before reading Astarion's story, well, I think you should play it anyway if you haven't. You've got till September which is plenty of time for that Honour Mode run. In Kingfisher's opinion:

"The problem here is that if you play BG3, this book is 'wow, it’s the tragic backstory!' If you don’t play it, the book is 'wtf, why did Kingfisher write a book about this vampire being tormented that has such a downer ending?!?'"

Here's what else Random House and Wizards announced for this year:

• (July 21) Baldur’s Gate 3: The Necromancy of Thay - A blank notebook recreation of the in-game item
• (Summer) The Official Baldur's Gate 3 Coloring Book - 40 black & white illustrations by Jaki King
• (November 3) A Feast for a Tenday: The Official Baldur’s Gate Cookbook - 65 recipes by Andrew Wheeler

Two and half years since Baldur's Gate 3 released, and players are still finding new ways to bend & break Larian's preposterously flexible RPG. Indeed, far from running out of bizarre exploits to discover, the glitches and hacks are if anything becoming weird and more impressive.

Take this wild exploit discovered by BG3 YouTuber ProxyGateTactician, which essentially allows players to "Time Travel" back through the RPG. Oh, and it reveals four naked Gales who are hanging around your camp the whole time, which isn't strictly related to the glitch, but who wouldn't want to hear about that?

While ProxyGateTactician discovered the exploit, the job of explaining how it works was left to fellow YouTuber SlimX. Normally, once you've completed an Act in Baldur's Gate 3, you move on to the next area never to return. But SlimX explains that by performing some convoluted Resting shenanigans during the opening of Act 3, you can prevent the cutscene in which you're attacked by the Gith from activating, which re-enables the use of waypoints in Act two.

If you return to the Shadow Cursed Lands, however, you'll find a very different scenario compared to how you left it. Last Light Inn, for example, is full of aggressive shadow creepers that will start battering you the moment you arrive, while other characters are attacking random enemies and, in some instances, even their own allies.

The reason this happens is complicated. But basically, moving to a new Act in Baldur's Gate 3 causes the game to delete the level cache file for the previous area, which contains all the world state data for that area. If you then return to that area, the game reverts to what is essentially factory default setting for it (which is not the same as the play-state when you arrive at that act in the first instance). As a result, NPCs may be scattered around in weird locations, and characters who should be invisible or inactive might be extremely visible and very much active.

Which brings us to Gales au naturel. Again, the reason there are so many Gales hanging out while, er, hanging out is convoluted. But basically, there are various plot and romance scenes in Baldur's Gate 3 that necessitate multiple versions of Gale. Some of these are doppelgangers, while others are spectral version of him.

These multiGales are always present, but they are invisible and inactive in the game world unless you meet the specific criteria that requires them. Yet the Time Travel glitch makes them all reappear, clustered together in your camp like emperor penguins huddling for warmth. There's also a fifth naked man among them, though he is technically not a Gale. Why is he bunched up with the nude Gales? Who knows. Maybe he thought it was a game.

Once you've backtracked to Act two, you can also use a separate glitch that SlimX details to travel back to Act one, which is similarly discombobulated as the game frantically resets the table to accommodate your unexpected return.

Why would you want to do this? Well, aside from the obvious answer of four naked Gales, you can also farm XP from these areas by fighting enemies who have reappeared and respawned. Whether or not you can actually take this forward into Act three isn't clear, given that travelling backward involves skipping some major story events. But even if you can't do it right now, I'm sure someone will discover a glitch than ensures you can soon enough.

Astarion from Baldur's Gate 3 is certainly up there in the hall of fame of killer RPG companions—not just because he's literally a killer as a vampire, but because he's a nuanced, complicated character performed by a very talented actor. It's no shock that Neil Newbon, who played him in Larian's finest, received awards for his work.

But he's not really interested in retreading the same ground. That's per a recent interview with FRVR, where the actor explained his reasoning while discussing David Bowie: "I think he understood that extreme repetition breeds stagnation as an artist … I always liked that about him as an artist, that he was constantly trying out new things."

As a matter of fact, it's Bowie's influence on Newbon that's encouraged him to mix things up: "I've definitely avoided a few roles recently not because they were bad projects or anything, just because they, for me, the character—they kinda want the Astarion thing.

"It was just like, 'Well, I don't really want to do that again. It's too close to the character I've already done, I don't think I could offer anything necessarily that's interesting to this particular character'." In the specifics, it's more about the role itself than the actual timbre of his voice, though: "That’s a different thing, I’m talking about when people say: 'This character’s just like Astarion!'"

This is actually something Newbon's expressed before, speaking in a separate interview last year with YouTuber Luality. Back then, he said that "I'd love to play Astarion again, but I wouldn't necessarily enjoy playing an Astarion-like character."

It all makes sense—after all, Newbon really seems like he adores the craft, and I cannot imagine a worse torture than being stuck in the same type-cast venn diagram of flamboyant and tragic for the rest of your acting career. Torture for him, mind—dulcet tones for us, but I'm certainly glad he's able to stretch his legs. For instance, as a religious space insect in Starfinder: Afterlight.

Back in February, Larian rolled out a small update for Baldur's Gate 3 that aimed to fix a few crashes, technical issues, and in particular, corrupted saves. And it worked! Except, well, it apparently also broke a few things along the way. So you know what that means: A new hotfix to fix the old hotfix.

"Our last small update, which aimed to resolve some lingering corrupted savegames, seemingly also introduced performance issues that triggered crashes for some players," Larian explained. "A hotfix is now rolling out to resolve these. Thank you for your patience!"

It is indeed a very small patch, coming in at under 100MB in size, although some players on Steam are finding the process of actually installing the patch to be rather drawn out.

Overall, though, the reaction to the update seems quite positive, at least to the extent that people in the comments are complaining about other things, like long-standing unrelated issues with the game and why doesn't Divinity have a release date yet? The usual thing, really.

The latest Baldur's Gate 3 patch—hotfix 36, for those keeping score—is live now. As for what it actually does, here's the full lowdown:

• Fixed a framerate drop and eventual crash when loading a savegame.
• Fixed several crashes.
• Fixed a bug on Xbox where tooltips in the Inventory and Trade windows wouldn't display correctly.
• Fixed a bug on Mac preventing you from progressing past Character Creation after starting a character introduction cinematic on Honour Mode.

If the reams of art and lovelorn fanfiction are anything to go by, Baldur's Gate 3's romance system was one of its most successful parts. Keep, Larian, your remarkably complex imsim-y RPG gameplay; we just want to kiss vampires.

But did you know that, in the fantasies of BG3's writers, it would have been possible for others to kiss vampires*? In an interview in the most recent edition of Edge magazine, Lae'zel's writer Kevin VanOrd admitted that the BG3 romance system we got is not, perhaps, the BG3 romance system of his dreams.

"We had a lot of great ideas that never made it into the game because of time constraints", said VanOrd. For instance, what if the romance system had a kind of platonic equivalent? "I would love to have a friendship system in addition to a romance system, where you get special events like dates."

I absolutely would have found Gale more tolerable if he had tried to get me to join his five-a-side football club instead of relentlessly trying to bone me.

Also? "I think it would have been really cool for characters to have romances with each other, outside of the player," said VanOrd. I've never agreed with anything harder. One of my favourite parts of Mass Effect 3—a pretty flawed game, all told—was that characters like Tali and Garrus would kick off their own little romance plotlines if you weren't buttering up either of them. It was cool! It made the world feel more alive, and it made my character feel less like the centre of the entire universe.

But make no mistake, VanOrd isn't glum about how BG3's romance system turned out in the end. It's just that, like possibly ever game dev who ever lived, he would have done more given more time.

He's still rather chuffed at how much the game's characters continue to set the internet on fire and, yes, he has seen your AO3 smut: "Something that makes me happy is getting to see all the wonderful artwork—safe for work and not safe for work—with which players interpret the characters."

*Yes, I know Lae'zel and Astarion hook up if you reject them. Please do not send me emails about this.

Is there any greater love than that between a weird fascist space alien and the victim of a cult abduction? There is not. That's why Romeo and Juliet is probably about exactly that, and it's why gamers over the globe can't get enough of Shar'zel. Lae'zart. Lart.

They love it when Shadowheart and Lae'zel in Baldur's Gate 3 kiss, is what I mean, which is a thing that can happen if you choose one or the other as your player character and work real hard at it. It's a classic enemies-to-lovers thing, as Shadowheart gets over her hatred of Githyanki, Lae'zel gets over her hatred of everything, and each realises the other is a total worm-brained smokeshow. Happily ever after.

In a recent chat with Edge magazine, Lae'zel's writer Kevin VanOrd said that, actually, writing the pair's romantic arc wasn't as tough as it might initially sound. With both Shadowheart and Lae'zel working their way around to questioning the systems they were raised under, John Corcoran (Shadowheart's writer) and VanOrd realised "we were writing the same story from different directions, and so that allowed us to reframe their initial clash and inform their later conversations."

They had a whole bunch in common, in other words, which is a pretty decent basis for a relationship. Just, you know, once they'd both gotten over themselves a bit. That part could have taken longer, actually, as VanOrd remembers that his earlier versions of Lae'zel were even harder to handle.

"If you can believe it, she was more aggressive initially. But I realised that you wouldn’t want her around, that you wouldn’t want to engage with her," so we got the (slightly) more chilled version of the character we know today. Early access helped with that, as players were able to tell VanOrd that Lae'zel could be a bit much. "For me, the feedback mostly confirmed things I knew already. It gave me confidence to go in the direction I already wanted to go."

If you're not a fan of random violence and sadism—you know, a nerd—the words "Astarion disapproves" were probably burnt into your retinas like the afterimage of a nuclear blast when you finally rolled credits on Baldur's Gate 3. Your party members in that game always have a goddamn opinion on your decisions, and Larian communicated it in time-honoured fashion: little pop-ups like in Dragon Age or Knights of the Old Republic 2.

In the latest issue of Edge magazine (via GamesRadar), one of BG3's writers, Kevin VanOrd, reflected on its use of that system, and also copped to the fact that one of its key advantages is it skips, like, a whole bunch of writing.

"We can’t have every character reacting to every situation," said VanOrd, "otherwise we would be working on the game forever. So this is a way of showing how they feel without writing new dialogue."

It's also, kind of, a violation of that fundamental Larian design philosophy of letting players do whatever the hell they want—you're never going to get Astarion to approve of charity and kindness (at least early on) just like you'll never get Wyll to clap when you kick a child in the shins.

"Sometimes the answer is to just let the player break the game, but when it comes to party members, usually not," says VanOrd. He's right, of course: letting me cunningly stack boxes to sequence-break some quest or overcome an obstacle makes me feel like a genius. Letting me romance Wyll after massacring the Druid Grove would feel like a bizarre cop-out.

It's a system with issues, though. In real life, love is not really a matter of filling someone's approval meter until they fall for you; it's weird and illogical and often very embarrassing for everyone involved. Reducing the whole process to accruing enough niceness points risks making it all feel a little hollow.

That's why Larian still busts out the D20 at critical moments: "If a character trusts you enough, they’ll go along with whatever you say, but if you need to convince them, that’s when it becomes a dice roll." It keeps things at least a little random (and, hey, those dice rolls do get easier if a character really likes you).

I don't envy VanOrd or any writer for a big and complex RPG. Fitting in a natural-feeling romance in a game that allows so much player freedom has gotta be tough. "Sometimes I yearn for linear storytelling," says VanOrd. Yeah, I bet!

Modding is one of PC gaming's greatest pleasures. It's also a pain in the neck, especially as you go back and tinker with old games so they can be enjoyed on a modern system. All too often, it turns into a tangle of compatibility issues and bugs that you may have even introduced yourself with the wrong combination of mods; if your particular poison is the original Baldur's Gate games, though, you may want to take a look at EET Mod Forge.

The web-based tool is a mod manager of sorts that gives you some information about how your game will look and warn you away from gamebreaking mod conflicts, whether you build off one of the site's preset modlists or make your own. It's billed as an "install order builder," and features 640 different mods so far.

It just got a big 2.0 version about a week after its initial release, both of which were shared by creator anprionsa on Reddit. The new overhaul lets you preview NPC portrait art in case "multiple mods compete for the same portrait," and tracks in-engine caps for certain things, like kits, so "you know before you install if you've exceeded a limit."

There's also a new preset, "Mod Forge Ultimate," which piles a mind-bending 475 mods into one list—the update notes state that "every single install category was reviewed mod-by-mod with component-level conflict resolution." If you're wondering how someone could be warping their install so much that they'd need a tool like this to keep everything straight, there's a particularly extreme use case for you.

Toying around with the old-school games still might not be as straightforward as dropping Thomas the Tank Engine people into your Baldur's Gate 3 save without so much as leaving the main menu, but this tool signifies that the mod scene for the classics is still going strong and finding ways to tone down the esotericism for newcomers. Anything with the power to stop my saves from breaking is a welcome boon indeed.

Last year, we issued a challenge to Baldur's Gate 3 fans with a quiz on its massive first act, and many of you passed with flying colors. I briefly entertained the idea that we made it too easy, but after some reflection, I don't think that's the case. Y'all are simply tadpole-brained like it's 2023 and fresh on your mind, and you know what? That's fine. I'm right there with you.

Much like our US Editor-in-Chief, Tyler Wilde, I've got a bad habit of making new BG3 characters and abandoning them before the journey really gets going. I've already beaten the game once, so it's not my biggest crime, but I really want to see a Dark Urge run to completion, and I've yet to make it happen. Every Durge I make winds up lost somewhere between breaking Halsin out of Goblin Camp jail and picking on True Soul Nere.

But I think this latest attempt could be it. It could really be the one, as I've finally crawled my way out of the Underdark and into the Shadow-Cursed Lands. Making it across the first act finish line was key for me, because now I'm in love with the RPG again like it's my first time in Act 2. Making it here reminds me why Act 2 is my favorite of the three—it's the ambience, the dread, the creepy crawly darkness that bites and hisses if I linger long. That's my jam.

My Durge seems well on his way to having a public crashout in Ketheric's backyard, but I'm still having a great time watching it all happen and ready to use this as an excuse to talk more BG3 with a new quiz on Act 2. If my Durge holds it together long enough to reach Act 3, you may hear from me again.

Until then, I have to ask: How well do you know Baldur's Gate 3 Act 2? Have you explored every nook and cranny of the shadows? Did you investigate every rotting basket, exhaust every conversation, and kiss kill anyone who dared to challenge you?

If you're up for the challenge, you've got 20 minutes to answer 20 questions about Baldur's Gate 3 Act 2. Let us know how you did in the comments below, and share a few of your favorite moments from the second act.

The birds are shining, the trees are singing, the sun is swaying in the breeze: it's the year 1999, and Baldur's Gate has just got another patch. Everything is perfect, and nothing hurts.

Wait, no, my mistake. It's 2026, and everything is bad. Good news, though: the Baldur's Gate patch thing is actually true. 14 years after it released (and 28 years since the original came out), Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition has a new 2.7 patch in beta. So too do Baldur's Gate 2: Enhanced Edition and Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition. "We’re truly sorry it took this long," write the devs. "With 2026 marking 14 years since BG:EE first launched on PC, we want to thank you for staying with us on this journey."

Which, let me be the first to say: hell yeah. Old bangers getting new patches? I'm all about that, and this new update has at least one fix that's very significant for me specifically (you have to be allowed to write a news post just for yourself sometimes—keeps morale up). Specifically, 2.7 brings native Apple Silicon support to the majority of Beamdog's Enhanced Edition suite—no more running the Intel build via Apple's Rosetta translation layer, like some kind of mediaeval serf.

The patch also makes the games' Steam cloud functionality work like, well, every other game. Up to now, getting cloud saves going on the Infinity Engine collection required checking a box in the in-game settings—now it's entirely dependent on whether you activate them in the Steam client. It might not sound like much, but it's happened more than once that I've installed the games and worried that my saves had been lost before remembering I have to go and check the Steam cloud box in settings to get them. So, you know, I'm spared ever having to face that trauma again in future.

The patch also integrates some community translations, should you have a hankering to experience BG2 in Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, or Ukrainian. Or if you want to enjoy Icewind Dale in Hungarian or Japanese. You can check it all out by selecting the 2.7 beta in the properties of the games in your Steam client.

The only bad news is that Planescape: Torment doesn't yet have an equivalent beta, but Beamdog says it hopes to get that going later on. More promisingly, the studio detailed its philosophy towards similar updates going forward: "Our goal is to keep these classics running smoothly amid evolving technical requirements and operating systems on both PC and mobile… We’re focused on improving the overall quality-of-life experience."

So no sweeping overhauls—which you wouldn't want for these classics anyway—but maybe some more tweaks to keep things ship-shape down the line. My incredibly pernickety request? I'd like an easy way to toggle BG1's original UI back on in place of the Siege of Dragonspear one that replaced it when I bought that DLC. Why? Nostalgia. That's really it.

Baldur's Gate 3—a videogame about dressing up hot elves—had fans scratching their heads earlier today when it suddenly pulled down north of 100 MB with no explanation whatsoever. What could it be? What could it mean? What's Larian up to now?

Valid questions, and they all have quite underwhelming answers if you're of a "Why can't it be Christmas every day?" sort of spirit (as am I, comrade, as am I). No, the studio isn't preparing the ground for a surprise patch 9, nor is it gearing up for a shock DLC or some kind of Divinity tie-in thing. Or at least, if it is doing any of that, it's sure as hell not telling anyone about it.

It's just, you know, doing patch stuff: fixing crashes and ironing out glitches. Well. Fine.

The good news, though, is that some of those fixes will be quite meaningful if you fell victim to the bugs they squash. After teasing "Bet you thought you’d seen the last of these," on the Larian Discord, the studio wrote that "As it turns out, a few crashes and technical issues were still knocking about, so if you were getting stuck while loading saves, or trying to progress from Act 2 into Act 3, your corrupted saves should now be fixed!" That's as much as we're getting right now, in terms of patch notes.

That last one is especially heartbreaking for honour mode players. I took a crack at BG3's ironman difficulty a few times last year, and it was bad enough when I got vaporised by Zhentarim six hours into Act 1. Getting all the way to Act 3 only to find you can't load your save? I'd lose my mind, and it's not too hard to find examples of such players asking for help with corrupted saves in Act 3.

So hey, good news: those saves should work now. In fact, at least some players already report they do. "This update fixed my Honor Mode save, now opens again. BLESS YOU LARIAN" wrote a user named bladesmantis on Reddit. "My run that crashed at 75% on every load is now playable after updating. Blessed" writes another user, stahnke_as_pho. A lot of blessing going on. Larian's saving throws must be through the roof.

Larian recently streamed Divinity: Original Sin 2, the studio's last RPG in the Divinity series before it made Baldur's Gate 3. During the stream, communications developer Aoife Wilson brought up the topic of hints in D:OS2 about what Larian was working on next.

"Originally the reference to BG3 was very explicit," Larian CEO Swen Vincke explained while plotting out his next move in the famously flammable oil fields of the Blackpits area. "We did it very last-minute because we actually, in the summer when D:OS2 shipped, we wrote the first draft of BG3 because we had a contract with Wizards of the Coast and we needed to do it then. It was very bad."

The hints ended up quite opaque. In the epilogue of D:OS2, your party member Fane can mention that octopuses are secretly plotting, and the necromancer Tarquin talks about "a mysterious race from another world—beings that feed on minds." Both are references to mind flayers, but not ones you'd notice unless you were looking for them. In retrospect, the jars of mind maggots scattered around D:OS2 also seem like nods to the tadpoles of BG3.

Tarquin the necromancer also brings up "Gustavchen", the written language of the beings from another world. In development, BG3 was called Project Gustav after the name of Vincke's dog, which is why the default name for the player-character is "Tav".

The references go both ways. In BG3, there are a couple of nods to Tarquin's worldhopping adventure. A letter from the cleric Lenore De Hurst to the wizard Lorroakan discusses a man named "something with a T and Q... Tuqueen?" who uses strange magic, and a note in the House of Grief also describes him, going by the name "Marco Creenn", which is an anagram of necromancer. After that the trail goes dry, and perhaps he returned home to Rivellon. We'll see if he shows up in Divinity.

Have you heard? There's a Baldur's Gate TV show coming, headed up by Craig Mazin of Chernobyl and The Last of Us fame. That's either great news or terrible news depending on which precise Larian developer you are, but either way it's a significant enough occasion to warrant marking, if you ask me.

I decided to mark it with a quiz. But which quiz? We've had BG3 quizzes before, and the game is so dog-eared from repeat playthroughs by fans that it's difficult to come up with something truly challenging.

Then it hit me: gnomes. Gnomes are great; they're literally just weird little guys, and BG3's gnome characters are some of its finest. So here it is: the definitive, be-all and end-all quiz about the gnomes of Baldur's Gate 3. Warning: it's actually quite hard.

HBO is cooking up a Baldur's Gate TV show helmed by Chernobyl and The Last of Us (the show) creator Craig Mazin, and boy you better believe that people have feelings about that. With Larian decisively moved on from Dungeons & Dragons and the new series likely featuring a whole new adventuring party anyway, can it rightly be called a Baldur's Gate game? And if it can, can HBO and Mazin be trusted to do it justice?

Well, depends who you ask. For instance, if you ask Larian CEO Swen Vincke, the future seems pretty bright, all things considered. In a post on X, Vincke said that "The endings of BG3 were created so they could serve as narrative soil for new adventures," so a series that builds on them makes perfect sense.

Even more promising, despite Larian having no official involvement with the series, Mazin and co are apparently in touch with the studio: "Craig did reach out to ask if he could come over to the studio to speak with us," wrote Vincke. "From the conversation we had, I think he truly is a big fan which gives me hope."

Hooray! Perhaps the Baldur's Gate show will be… good? Well, here's me dropping the other shoe: at least one Larian honcho is less keen. Publishing lead and serial tweeter Michael Douse reacted to news of the series thusly, "I've spent the last eight to 10 years of my life with the writers & creators of Baldur's Gate 3 and they're the most incredible storytellers & creators in the space… I genuinely don't think anyone can trump our writers."

To be clear, Douse isn't out here declaring the show is going to suck. Or at least, not directly. He certainly is retweeting quite a lot of people saying they won't watch the show (I don't believe that for a second) and reacting to news of the show with (one hopes) jokes about suicide. So, you know, not really an endorsement.

But amid threats to "crash out on main," Douse pitches himself as, well, maybe not a cautious optimist, but not a full-blown doomsayer either. "Don't abandon hope, but do expect the world. That's the job."

So where does that leave us? You do you, my friends, but personally the news that Mazin and his team are at least in touch with Larian gives me a little bit of optimism. I'm not quite in a space to start posting Gomer Pyle gifs over the show's announcement. And if it sucks? We'll always have the game.

Larian's community-focused Channel From Hell normally hosts videos like livestreams and developer interviews. The latest upload is a bit different. Borrowing the chill beats aesthetic every videogame from World of Warcraft to Victoria 3 has riffed on, Larian presents Chill Demonic Beats To Long Rest To, half an hour of a relaxed version of Raphael's Final Act playing while Spud Gun Studios' animated versions of the origin PCs relax at camp.

Wyll plays fetch with Scratch while Karlach tries to get a drink out of a keg, Shadowheart meditates, Astarion paints, Gale studies, and Lae'zel plays hacky sack with a mind flayer's severed head. Just camp things! There are a ton of easter eggs hidden in the video too, like the sign pointing to Baldursgata, a real place in Iceland whose street sign was discovered by Baldur's Gate fans years ago.

If you remember the video Larian released to celebrate the official launch of mod tools, in which the Wizard of Mod unleashed chaos on the Forgotten Realms including a plague of giant rabbits and also human noses for githyanki, there are plenty of references to that here—including a giant rabbit that fetches Scratch. (BG3's best boy can also sometimes return with Barcus instead of his ball.)

The Wizard of Mod, with his eightball staff and traffic cone hat, pops up to turn Shadowheart into a tabaxi and make Karlach look like Let Me Solo Her (here's the Elden Ring and Dark Souls Gear mod, close enough). Gale practices his mage hand cantrip on stew ingredients including a boot, presumably a magical one, and then pulls a Glock. Astarion's paintings include a Karlach so saucy it's censored, Larian CEO Swen Vincke, and Handsome Astarion.

Bless them for still doing fun stuff like this—as if I needed motivation to get back to my honor mode playthrough. Meanwhile, Larian's next game Divinity looks like it'll be learning a few lessons from Baldur's Gate 3 and trying to improve on a few areas, with companions who feel more like a natural part of the world, and hand-crafted loot.

I played the first act of Baldur's Gate 3 a few times in early access, which is why I'm always slightly surprised on subsequent playthroughs that there aren't a bunch of mind-controlled anglers protecting the dying mind flayer you encounter near the start of the game. They were cut in the final release, along with a bunch of dialogue and scenes, much of which has now been restored by modder HyperspaceTowel.

"This mod brings over 100 conversations and more than 1000 lines of voiced dialogue back from the dead", says the description of Early Access Scenes Restored. It restores a lot of companion reactivity in particular, enabling extra responses to, er, what you see behind the barn door. It's mostly dialogue for Astarion, Shadowheart, Gale, and Lae'zel, since Karlach and Wyll had different voice actors in early access, though a smaller amount of their dialogue has been restored by splicing existing lines of audio.

HyperspaceTowel plans to continue work on this mod, restoring more scenes including the one with the thralls on the nautiloid from the tutorial—another thing I always forget was removed until I start a new game. I can see why you'd want the prologue to be shorter, given how much people complain about tutorials, but I do miss hearing the poor brainwashed suckers ramble about rats in the flour and bulls on the loose while dragons and imps battle around them.

Apparently one issue with this mod is that it can interfere with how Gale's beard looks, though that's fixed with a mod you should already have: Gale's beard fix, which prevents his chin from clipping right through his flavor-saver.

You can get Early Access Scenes Restored from Nexus Mods. It's recommended you install it before starting a new playthrough, since a lot of what it restores is right at the start of the game, and then don't uninstall it mid-playthrough since the new characters and camp events it adds will need to hang around.

In a game packed with interesting items that can be used for all kinds of productive and/or sinister purposes, one of Baldur's Gate 3's more flavorful bits of enchanted ephemera is the Iron Flask, an item you can find early in the game that, as its tooltip says, "can hold friends and foes." The only way to learn what it contains, however, is to throw it—at which point you'll discover the spectator that was imprisoned within is very much a foe to you and everything else in the vicinity. And then presumably you'd be hit with one of its many beam attacks.

Unfortunately, the Iron Flask's potential for Poké Ball shenanigans is limited by the fact that it's single use, dashing our collective hopes of collecting our least-favorite NPCs and forcing them to fight the game's most horrible creatures—until this week. Modder ForKiramay has released the Binding Arcane Lattice Lock, or "BALL," a throwable item allowing you to "capture non-player characters inside a ball and free them later (or don't)."

If you're wondering what kind of person would want to trap a Baldur's Gate 3 NPC in an orb just to carry them around indefinitely, just spend an hour or two on the BG3 subreddit. You'll learn plenty.

To collect a character in a BALL, you've got two options: You can do the straightforward thing and chuck it at your desired entity, but ForKiramay notes that, understandably, "neutral NPCs sometimes take offense to being hit in the head." To avoid aggravating your new captive comrade, you can instead use the Gotta Catch 'Em All spell provided by the item to fire a beam at your target and capture them remotely.

I can't say for certain, but I expect somewhere in the world a Nintendo lawyer just felt a tingle.

ForKiramay warns that they "did NOT put safety rails" on their legally nonactionable creature collection sphere, and that capturing plot-relevant NPCs can easily break the story. Likewise, they recommend against moving a captured NPC between story acts, which I can only assume creates the possibility for a cascading breakdown of causal determinism.

But hey, if it means I can use Elminster in a mock Pokemon battle, I think it's worth the risk. The BALL Character Capture mod is available on Nexus Mods now.

Baldur's Gate 3, you may have heard, was quite a good videogame. Good enough to make PCG history, even. But not every part of it shines equally. Wyll, the origin character and (if you're not playing as him) party member, is notoriously a little underbaked. He's so straightforwardly good as to be, well, maybe a little dull, and he even gets outshone by other characters in some of his own big plot scenes—not because of a deficit in his performance, but because of how those scenes were written.

It turns out that Wyll's writer, Kevin VanOrd (who also wrote Lae'zel, by the by), knows just how fans feel. In a Q&A on Reddit, VanOrd wrote in response to a question from a disappointed Wyll-liker that "I wish Wyll had gotten more content and a more fulfilling arc too." Alas, it sounds like circumstances conspired to make that difficult, if not impossible, to do.

"We weren't connecting with Wyll's early access recruitment and initial questing," writes VanOrd, "so we started over at a point when most of the other companion stories were fairly solid." Way back when, before BG3 left early access, Wyll was a different sort of character and even had a different actor, Lanre Malaolu. But it all changed relatively late in the process. "A lot of decisions came later in development than was ideal," writes VanOrd.

To some extent, Wyll fell victim to bad luck and cuts. "There was a key situation near Baldur's Gate that I intended to heavily involve Wyll in (the Red War College) that got cut," writes VanOrd. "We eventually tied him to Duke Ravengard and started to work on that element of his arc just in time for me to get unexpectedly ill. I was out of the office for quite a while, and again after the epilogue's release." That illness made it difficult to give Wyll more stuff to do in post-release patches.

"Wyll's content is sparser than I'd have liked as a result. He's also split into two stories, really—the Mizora story and the Ravengard story, and that might have been a mistake in hindsight." I'm actually not sure I agree with that. The tension between those two sides of Wyll, represented by Mizora and his honourable pops, is probably the most interesting thing about him to me, it just never really comes through enough in how he's written.

Anyway, VanOrd also has his regrets about Wyll's endings. "I also wish I could given him a stronger endpoint—it always bugged me that he can end up just as he started, as the Blade of Frontiers, without any meaningful difference." Then again, sending him and Karlach off to be superheroes in hell is pretty heartwarming.

"All that said, I love the Blade and I am really proud of him, his sincerity, his good nature, and his eager heroism. I'm truly sorry I didn't give you more quality time with him." Also, he can eldritch blast people off cliffs, so he's still precious to me.

Two years on and it's still Baldur's Gate 3's world we're living in. Every new RPG is measured against it, and Larian's next game, Divinity, is still hotly anticipated even amid criticism of the studio's admission of experimenting with generative AI.

Until Larian unveiled Divinity, we didn't know what it was doing next—only that it wouldn't be Baldur's Gate 4. At GDC 2024, about nine months after BG3's release, Larian boss Swen Vincke dropped a bombshell: The studio would not make an expansion pack or sequel to its most successful game to date, and was parting ways with Wizards of the Coast and D&D entirely.

But they sure took their time saying goodbye, huh? Cyberpunk 2077 is the only recent singleplayer game I can think of that has received more free, post-launch additions⁠—and that was in response to a deeply compromised launch. Baldur's Gate 3 started on top, and just kept climbing.

Before Vincke's early 2024 farewell, BG3 had already gotten the überhard, permadeath Honour Mode, as well as an expanded, playable epilogue. Here are some highlights from after:

• New evil ending cinematics
• Modding tools and an in-game mod manager/browser
• Console cross-play
• Photo mode
• 12 new subclasses, one for each new base class

Taken together BG3's post-launch support feels like a diet expansion pack, or a reprise in all but name of the "Definitive Edition" updates for Larian's Original Sin games. It's been a rare delight to be pleasantly surprised over and over again by improvements to one of my favorite games.

The playable epilogue is a treat, but as a sweaty buildcrafting boy, Honour Mode and the new subclasses have been the most transformative for me. The former reminds me of the Hardcore/Survival modes in Skyrim and the Fallout series, which introduce requirements for drinking, eating, sleeping, and sometimes even save game restrictions.

They all make the game more difficult, but not by increasing the reaction speed requirements or ballooning enemy health bars into war of attrition territory. They instead inject more consequences into small decisions. You have to think, plan, and engage with the game on a deeper level, and when you take a risk, the stakes feel more pressing.

In an RPG that invites replays while encouraging mastery and familiarity, I find these conditions very grounding and immersive: You can't take the same things for granted anymore. The game demands more from you, but that means you get more out of it. The new subclasses are the perfect tools to handle such a challenge in BG3. The College of Swords Bard, available from day one, remains the Baldur's GOAT in my book. But new additions like the Hexblade, Bladesinger, and Arcane Archer come close, while also just being plain fun.

The new subclasses added this April seem to signal the official end of Larian's major additions, but the party doesn't have to stop. Modding continues apace, and even aside from user-made additions, Baldur's Gate 3 is so malleable it demands you return to it again and again⁠.

Now's as good a time as any for a replay. And if you're one of those people who got 20 hours in at the end of summer 2023 and always meant to go back⁠—we have a few of those at PC Gamer⁠—just make a new character.

There's a really good build guide I can recommend for you. Just don't run with that version of the Swords Bard, I've been meaning to update it⁠—Bard 6 / Thief 3 / Champion 3 is "What's Not." Bard 10 / Fighter 2, trading Hand Crossbows for The Dead Shot and Band of the Mystic Scoundrel in Act 3, is officially "What's Hot."

Baldur's Gate 3 has dialogue. A LOT of dialogue. Heaping, great stonking helpings of dialogue. This was to be known already, given the sheer volume of NPCs you talk to when you're running around in the thing—'tis a fact that is self-evident.

But did you know exactly how much spoken dialogue, down to the very second? Well, one fan, who seems to've done the legwork, is able to answer that question: 236 hours, 55 minutes, and 45 seconds.

User Everwhite-moonlight on the Baldur's Gate 3 subreddit has compiled a spreadsheet that tallies not only the hours spoken by each character (and their respective voice actor), but also the amount of files they speak in.

For example, Amelia Tyler, who voices the game's silk-toned narrator, is understandable top billing at 14 hours, 43 minutes, and 55 seconds of chatting—over a brain-boggling 7,629 files. Hilariously, Astarion takes the prize for biggest yapper in all of Baldur's Gate, just one hour shy of beating out the main character's literal inner monologue: 13 hours, six minutes, and 23 seconds.

Larian's work is even more impressive when Everwhite-moonlight tallies it up, though: "There are about 173,642 voice files in the game with the combined length of about 236 hours, 55 minutes, and 45 seconds; that's nine whole days and 20 hours worth of only voice lines spread across around 2,068 characters!"

There are a few smudges in the process, mind—with Everwhite-moonlight asking folks to help make the list even more accurate: Hunting down missing voice actors, cross-referencing with other files, and figuring out who is to be properly credited for voicing four separate Giant Rat entities:

"There are four instances of a character named 'Giant Rat', and there are four actors credited to have played 'Giant Rat'. I have separated the Giant Rat UIDs and could tell they are played by four different people, but I don't know which one is which." I also experience similar frustrations sorting out my save files.

Anyway—it's some mighty impressive work, and it's great fun to find out how the game's many voice actors rank with each other. For example: Actors Bethan Dixon Bate and Andrew Spooner apparently have clocked almost three whole hours playing beloved Baldur's Gate 3 character and fan favourite, "Rat". Or, well, multiple rats that they happened to voice—but I'm going to pretend that there's a hidden rat companion somewhere because I want it to be true. After all, this game still surprises me even years later.

Baldur's Gate 3 has become such a phenomenon since its release in August 2023 that, at least for me, it honestly feels a little difficult to remember a time when the internet didn't vibrate with strong opinions about Astarion and Gale. But it's true: the game is closing in on its third Christmas and, to mark the occasion, Larian has paid tribute to some of the over 10,000 mods that people have created for it.

Yes, Withers' Big Naturals are in there.

In a community update on Larian's website, the studio said that "before we close out on 2025, we’re looking back at some of the best moments brought about by your mods!" Mods which have "caused tears, laughter, and pain. Lots of pain. Like getting rammed in the ankles by a muscle car pain." In particular, it's called out a set of mods used by Larian's Aoife Wilson in the studio's own streams of the game.

I strongly encourage you to check out the full list and the entire Mod.io collection Larian put together of the ones it's been using, but my personal favourite of the whole bunch has gotta be Car Wildshape. "Gives the ability to any player character to turn into a car," reads the mod's own description, in a tone which I can't help but read as slightly patronising.

By my eye, it gives your party members the ability to transform into a 1996 Lada Riva or something similar, and then to pounce on you at inopportune moments and grind you beneath their vulcanised rubber wheels. It's like that one Stephen King book: Revival.

Larian also tips its hat to BaldGate3, which makes all your beautiful party members powerfully, heroically bald. Does shouting out this mod suggest it better matches Larian's true vision for the game? Yes.

And, finally, a particular moment of recognition goes to that one mod which scatters over 100 enormous rabbits across the game for you to find. Think of them like after-battle treats.

Anyway, the real treat of the update is a bonus message from Larian's armoured CEO Swen Vincke, who donned a Santa hat to admire the "over 10,000 mods and over 350 million [mod] downloads" Baldur's Gate 3 can now boast. "From giant bunnies to giant, uh, not going to do that, it's absolutely amazing." Come on, Swen. We all know what you were going to say.

There's been a deep, unfortunate friction between voice actors and videogame studios, recently—the looming spectre of AI hangs large over everything, with some bigwigs salivating at the idea of getting infinite performances out of people without actually paying them.

That is, despite the fact that—aside from efforts so far mostly being bland as all hell, and confusing for the actual voice actors—players seem to have a deep appreciation for human performances. This is especially the case with Baldur's Gate 3, where performers like Neil Newbon and Amelia Tyler have gone on to become evangelists for the game.

Speaking with our friends over at GamesRadar during the Golden Joysticks, Karlach's VO, Samantha Béart, says they've noticed this discrepancy first hand: "There's a weird disconnect between, maybe, developers' attitude towards where we fit in the ecosystem—where we're not actually part of the team—versus the players, who very much see us as the forefront. More like film and TV.

Logistically, there is somewhat of a point behind that—Charlie Cox, voice of Gustave from Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, has repeatedly gone on record to say that while he's happy to receive his laurels, he didn't spend all that much time in the recording booth; instead highlighting mocap actor Maxence Cazorla as a huge talent behind the character.

In other words, how involved an actor is in any given game is going to depend on the game itself. Baldur's Gate 3's cast did a huge amount of mocap work, and would often bounce ideas back and forth between their character writers in an involved process.

Other times, as was the case with Cox, you show up for a couple days' work, knock something out in the recording booth (something very, very good, mind—Cox is an exceptional actor), take your paycheck, and then get very confused when people ask you about your character, bless.

But it's also true that voice actors get hard done by, even before bosses at studios started claiming AI was fine because games apparently "don't really have acting", which is an actual sentence uttered by the CEO of Amazon Games.

As for how they push back against that brand of nonsense, Béart tells GamesRadar that: "I feel like we weaponize social media and algorithms to do that. Because I think we're still seen as outsources for a lot of the time."

Baldur's Gate 3 is well over two years old and its developer is no longer making major content additions, but its players are still finding fresh and exciting ways to crack open its ruleset towards their own gamebreaking ends. This week, as spotted by GamesRadar, BG3 players have found a way to recruit a fighting force of the most powerful beings in Larian's version of Faerun.

It's children. They're building armies of children.

The process is laid out in a YouTube short from BG3 aficionado and seeming evil mastermind Morgana Evelyn titled "Child Labour is Unbeatable." That name alone should tell you what kind of moral dimensions we're working with here. If the idea of conscripting a horde of combat orphans doesn't pass your ethical sniff test, you probably won't enjoy where the rest of this goes.

To pull this off, you'll need a level 7 Companion character with access to the Dominate Beast and Polymorph spells. With that character, you'll need to select your ideal child combatant—or because they all perform identically, any child combatant—and polymorph them. Once they're in sheep shape, hit them with Dominate Beast, and then travel to your camp.

Once there, Morgana recommends enabling turn-based mode, because the timing windows here can be particular. Dismiss the companion who did the spells on your chosen child from your party, and wait until you see the notification that their concentration has ended for the Polymorph and Dominate Beast spells. Once it has, re-recruit them before the spells expire, quickly leave camp, and immediately save the game.

Once you load that save, that companion will now permanently have a child follower. Why, you might be asking, is that a good thing? After all, children aren't renowned for their battlefield prowess.

That's where you and whoever distributes battlefield renown would be wrong, and—Morgana concludes—you likely have German media law to thank for it. As Germany's Unterhaltungssoftware Selbstkontrolle explains, German law requires products to be rated for appropriate ages, and holds providers of digital content responsible for ensuring that children aren't exposed to "material which is likely to harm the development of children or young people."

That harmful material, according to Germany's Youth Protection Act, includes depictions of "serious physical or mental suffering in a manner that violates human dignity" or are "likely to seriously endanger the development of children or adolescents." In this case, we're counting "children dying" as a violation of human dignity that, if it was portrayed in a game, could prevent it from being advertised or distributed, or force retailers to pay a fine for selling it.

Aside from its being frowned on by most ethical frameworks, Germany's laws and similar laws elsewhere are why killing children tends to be impossible in games—Baldur's Gate 3 included. Morgana probably shouts out Germany's laws specifically because of a brief controversy that bubbled up online after Steam started mandating ratings for its German store in 2024.

In BG3's case, the particular way in which Larian tried to make children unmurderable makes them terrifyingly potent in a fight if you can find a way to get them into combat under your command, like with the method above.

As you'd expect, your child conscripts are unkillable. But more than that, because they generally aren't intended to be in combat in the first place, they ignore BG3's combat initiative order. In other words, they have infinite attacks.

I might object to the methods, but I can't deny the potency.

We are bearing down on the final weeks of 2025, and somehow—somehow!—Baldur's Gate 3, a game that released more than two years ago (more than five years ago, if you count the lengthy early access stretch) is still banging the table at The Game Awards. It's reached the point where even developer Larian Studios seems a little baffled by the whole thing.

A quick recap: Baldur's Gate 3 ran the board on Game of the Year Awards in 2023, taking the big crown (and numerous other laurels) in the Steam Awards, The Game Awards, and the Golden Joysticks. It then continued to rumble in 2024, taking five trophies including Best Game and the Player's Choice awards at the 2024 BAFTAs and four more—including, again, Game of the Year—at the Gayming Awards.

It got to the point where Larian boss Swen Vincke was almost asking the world to please stop giving us awards, because the seemingly endless stream of accolades meant the development team "can't get closure. And you want to have closure at the end of a project." And then a month after that Baldur's Gate 3 won the 2024 Hugo Award for Best Game or Interactive Work, because sure, why not.

But now it's 2025 and surely Larian must be due for a break, right? Wrong. Baldur's Gate 3 isn't in the running for any awards related to 2025 releases at this year's Game Awards, but it is up for the Best Community Support trophy, alongside Final Fantasy 14, Fortnite, Helldivers 2, and No Man's Sky.

"It's a complete honour to have been nominated for Best Community Support again this year, but really, this nomination is a testament to your continued passion and enthusiasm for Baldur's Gate 3," the official Baldur's Gate 3 account wrote in response to the nomination on X. A measured statement. Nice. Normal.

The Larian Studios account had a slightly more bemused take on the situation, however.

Hey, it's a fair question, but the answer is obvious. For all the talk about "closure" and moving on to new things, Larian has continued to hammer out major updates for Baldur's Gate 3 over the two years since the game came out.

The whopping Patch 8, released in April, was the last major update, but there have been a few hotfixes since (such as the one that fixed "teeny tiny legs" syndrome) and in September the studio rolled out native Steam Deck support for Baldur's Gate 3, providing "better framerate, lower loading times, and smoother gameplay" on the handheld—a pretty big update in its own right that happened thanks largely to the efforts of one guy at the studio who started work on the project in his spare time. I'd call that award-winning community support, alright.

The Game Awards 2025 takes place on December 11. You can vote for your favorites now (and I really do think it'd be nice to throw one more bone to BG3) at thegamewards.com.

The idea of "canonicity" in RPGs is an odd one, given the whole point of both videogame and tabletop RPGs is that the players decide what the main characters do. But sequels, spin-offs, and sourcebooks have a habit of choosing particular outcomes as the "real" ones—unless it's the Elder Scrolls, where every ending of Morrowind happened at once.

Baldur's Gate 3 had to deal with characters from Baldur's Gate 2 having canonical events happen to them between games, like Minsc and Boo being turned to stone or Viconia and Saarevok backsliding into evil, and now the cast of Baldur's Gate 3 are in the same boat. The latest Forgotten Realms supplements, Adventures in Faerûn and Heroes of Faerûn, move the timeline on from 1492—when BG3 happens—to 1501, and hint at the fates of its cast.

Quotes from Karlach crop up throughout Adventures in Faerûn and she appears more than once in the art for both books alongside Astarion, Shadowheart, and Minsc. And in none of those illustrations is she a mind flayer or a pile of ash—two of the potential outcomes for her in Baldur's Gate 3.

The best ending for Karlach is that she returns to Avernus with the Infernal Engine still burning away inside her chest, which a lot of players weren't happy about, and in the epilogue Larian added post-launch she mentions finding blueprints for something that could prevent the timebomb in her chest from blowing up. Seeing her run around the streets of Baldur's Gate, fight a remorhaz with Astarion and Shadowheart, and generally be a heroic adventurer who doesn't have a gaping hole in her torso, makes it plain that Karlach's canonical ending is the good one.

Funnily enough, the same pictures depict Shadowheart with dark hair and bangs, which isn't how she looks in her best outcome in BG3, where she dyes her hair white and parts her hair in a way that makes it look like she didn't just go through a messy breakup. But hair color isn't proof that canonically she never gave up on worshipping Shar, and it's entirely possible she just changed her mind about being a silver fox.

Although if you helped Shadowheart achieve her redemption arc it's entirely possible that in act three you told Dame Aylin about the jerk wizard Lorroakan who wants to steal her immortality, and she wrecked the dude as he so richly deserves. According to Adventures in Faerûn that didn't happen, and Lorroakan is still alive and holed up in Ramazith's Tower. However, it's mentioned that he was "Humbled by a recent failed bid to achieve immortality through undisclosed means," so at least he didn't succeed. Presumably the canonical PCs lied to both him and Dame Aylin, preventing the conflict from ever happening.

Astarion gets his own supplement in a digital add-on called Astarion's Book of Hungers, which includes rules for playing a half-vampire dhampir as well as a string of adventure outlines where you get to hang out with everyone's favorite vampire spawn, although these are noted as being set before the events of the videogame. No canon conflict there.

It's not all videogame characters in these books, of course. The heroes of the D&D cartoon make another appearance, just like they did in the movie Honor Among Thieves, looking slightly older and perhaps a bit more competent. Elminster rates a mention too, though he's said to have been missing for a few years, which conveniently explains why he's not around to solve whatever problem your own players are involved in.

Baldur's Gate 3 cut content sleuth SlimX has uncovered the most important missing piece of Larian's RPG yet: A couple lines of dialogue where Tiefling refugee and budding YA novel protagonist Arabella makes fun of immortal camp moocher Withers. Not only that, but SlimX has also made a mod restoring the scene available for free on his Patreon.

Have you ever wondered why Arabella calls Withers "Bone Man?" Me either. He is a Man very self evidently made of Bones, so we're not exactly solving a riddle for the ages here. Still, Arabella's patter with Withers is a charming, unexpected bit of writing that punches above its weight in shading more depth into both characters: Withers clearly has a soft spot for children, and Arabella has no problem chopping it up with an immortal watcher. Seeing more of that relationship is certainly welcome.

After finding Arabella's dead parents but before telling her about their fate, she was supposed to have a brief back-and-forth with Withers at the party camp where she tweaks his nose and settles on the Bone Man nickname. "I am not a 'skellie,' thou shalt call me Withers," the reluctant avatar of cosmic judgement peevishly intones. "'Withers?' I'm not going to remember that! I'm calling you 'Bone Man,'" Arabella cheerfully replies.

It looks like the scene wasn't intentionally cut from the game, but is hidden by a scripting misfire that makes it so the requirements for seeing it are mutually exclusive, making it impossible to access in normal gameplay⁠—it's similar to how Karlach's romantic daydream about Dammon is fully in the game, but can only be accessed before even meeting the blacksmith. SlimX's mod just makes it so the scripting behind the scene proceeds as intended.

This is pretty small potatoes for the YouTuber, though: SlimX has a huge back catalogue of BG3 scripting and cut content archeology that explains how some of the game's more obtuse or behind the scenes mechanics work and sheds some light on earlier versions of its story. A particularly fun bit of cut content is the Druid Grove's Oscar-worthy scammer, who feels more at home as a troll moral choice in an Obsidian game.

I might be a Baldur's Gate 1 stan, but it's undeniable that Baldur's Gate 2 is the more important of BioWare's original duo of games. Heck, it created a mould for RPG design that studios still embrace today, at least in part. Just look at recent RPGs like Avowed or The Outer Worlds 2, and it won't take you long to find the BG2 DNA.

But BG2 didn't emerge in a vacuum, and in a recent chat with Slandered Gaming it emerged that—while we can thank BG2 for a lot of our favourite RPGs since—we have a whole other game to thank for BG2. That'd be Final Fantasy 7, which lit a fire under BG2 director James Ohlen to go all out with the game's structure and companions, per Trent Oster—who worked on the original Baldur's Gate and has since become CEO of Beamdog, the studio behind the BG1 and BG2 Enhanced Editions.

"So, James had played Final Fantasy 7, and they had character interaction and romance, and he was scared shitless," recalls Oster. He had good reason to be—BG1's companions had their enduring standouts (Minsc, most famously of all), but they were ultimately just collections of barks, to be swapped out and ditched the second you met someone better or they got gibbed by an errant critical hit. They were tools, not things you cared about.

That is to say, they were a far cry from your pals in FF7, who you grew very attached to indeed. "[Ohlen] literally said, 'These guys kicked our ass. This is how a game should be. We don't know what we're doing.'"

Which is how you go from your party in BG1 consisting of folk like Ajantis, whose entire character was just shouting "By Helm!" whenever you selected him, to the whole plotlines that your comrades got in BG2—the first seeds of the loyalty missions that would reach full flower in Mass Effect 2.

It wasn't just companions, though, it was also how the game was structured. "With the setting as well," recalls Oster, "Baldur's Gate is kind of linked to one map, whereas in Baldur's Gate 2 it's kind of like a rollercoaster through some of the most great places in the realms—you're in the Sahuagin city, and you're in the Underdark, you're just hitting all these high spots that you've always read about in books."

If you've not played the OG BG games, it's hard to overstate how different they were, structurally. BG1 consisted in the main of a vast amount of bland 'generic countryside' maps.

Now, to be fair, pretty much all of them would be dotted with a few interesting or funny encounters, but there was barely anything to distinguish them from one another. BG2 carted you from setpiece to setpiece. I still remember the Windspear Hills, or Waukeen's Promenade, or Ust Natha. I don't really remember places in Baldur's Gate beyond, uh, Baldur's Gate itself. And it turns out we can thank Square for that.

Classic RPGs make up some of the most formative examples of late '90s to early 2000s PC gaming in my memory, but I also remember when they weirdly disappeared. If you loved games like the original Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, or Planescape, and also wondered why we stopped seeing these kinds of titles for a bit there, well it turns out you can blame physical retailers for the decline in Dungeons-and-Dragons-style PC RPGs.

The Infinity Engine was used to power isometric roleplaying games like the ones above. It allowed game devs to take many of the sentiments and mechanics used in DnD and translate them to videogame experiences. It allowed a lot of people to have these kinds of adventures for the first time, especially when good Dungeon Masters are always so hard to find.

"The reason we stopped making Infinity Engine games was because retailers told us no one wanted to buy them," says Josh Sawyer—who now serves as Obsidian's studio design director but cut his teeth working on games like Icewind Dale—during his keynote speech at GCAP 2025 in Melbourne, Australia. "We asked if we could see the research and they basically told us to trust them" he adds to sad chuckles from the crowd.

It seems odd for retailers, especially physical ones, to have so much power in today’s world, but Sawyer explains it was a very different landscape. Back then, retailers had a lot of power over game developers because if they wouldn’t stock your game there weren’t any other options.

Not only that, but storage, taking up shelf space, and displays meant retailers could be very picky about what they stocked in order to maximise profits. They’d even force companies to buy back games if they weren’t selling.

With this power, brick and mortar stores were able to put the pressure on and change the landscape to suit them, not necessarily the consumers or the developers.

Now we have much more digital distribution, which Sawyer says gives developers of all sizes far more power and agency in the scene. While there’s no guarantee you’ll get sales, at the very least you can still list a game on a platform like Steam, where people at least have a chance of seeing and buying it.

I loved the idea of Dungeons and Dragons when I was young, but can't claim the same about playing it. Because I didn't play it: Circumstances—small town boy, limited circle of friends, not very outgoing—meant that while I could and did spend hours poring over rules, sourcebooks, and even a few modules, I got very little in the way of actual playtime. A good, deep D&D adventure as I imagined them to be—basically Mazes and Monsters, minus the moral panic psychosis—was out of reach.

The first Baldur's Gate changed all that, with great dungeons, an epic quest, and most important of all, a deep cast of characters with their own thoughts, beliefs, and personalities—and who, just like in the real world, would sometimes gel or clash with their fellows in unexpected ways.

Some became fast friends, others would try to literally murder each other, and a handful would just throw their hands up in disgust at my obvious incompetence and leave, after giving me a good telling-off of course.

Baldur's Gate 2 raised the stakes with a more focused cast and wider range of interpersonal possibilities, plus an unpleasant kickoff that reminded me just how much these characters meant. Discovering that two beloved* party members from BG1 (your mileage may vary on that point, but they were with me from start to finish in the first game and would've been for BG2, too) had been killed in pre-game events—irretrievably, irreversibly, no-resurrecting-thing dead—was a genuine gut-shot: We're supposed to be the heroes, and now a third of us are just... gone.

It took a while to get my head around that, but I was fortunate enough to find a new companion of poise, ability, and coolness while making my way out of that first dungeon: Yoshimo, an immediately likeable bounty hunter who proved his worth a dozen times over on our adventures across Amn. And then, after weeks of camaraderie and good times, he screwed me!

I was less upset about Yoshimo's betrayal than I might otherwise have been for two reasons. One, potential spoiler here⁠—but come on, it's been exactly 25 years⁠—it wasn't really his fault, right? Lawyers call it "The Geas Defense." Two, speaking of spoilers, that major twist had been spoiled for me weeks earlier by a jerk in a Baldur's Gate 2 IRC channel. I was seriously pissed off at the time and yes, I still harbor a grudge.

Anyway, even though I knew it was coming, I was still heartbroken in the moment. Yoshimo was such a good guy, a solid all-arounder, and I'd grown genuinely attached to him and his presence in my party. It wasn't the betrayal that hurt, it was knowing that—like Khalid and Dynaheir, victims of the madness of Irenicus—he was gone forever.

Party down

It sucked! But it's also at the heart of why Baldur's Gate 2 was, and is, so special to me. No game before or since has so perfectly captured the sense of a gang of pals (or occasional allies of convenience) roaming a massive fantasy world, butt-kicking for goodness.

And what a gang it was: The bloodthirsty berserker Korgan, occasionally setting aside his evil ways to mack on Mazzy Fentan, the halfling fighter desperate to be a paladin; sad Aerie and her broken wings, Valygar and his family problems, insecure Anomen, old friends Imoen, Minsc, and Jaheira, and of course Viconia, the original BioWare bad girl with a deeply-buried heart of gold—all of them and others shared the road with me in Baldur's Gate 2.

And yes, I did put the smooth moves on Viconia. Of course I did! Videogame romances can be trite and formulaic these days, but 25 years ago that kind of NPC relationship was new, unexpected, and real in a way that gave it a sense of significance beyond the mechanical necessity of cranking out loyalty missions.

Best of all, amidst that bantering, bickering crew was me, ostensibly the leader of the pack but also just one among many: Grown from a young half-elf caught up in events beyond my understanding to a seasoned adventurer, but with still so much to discover and learn. I called the shots but my companions had their own ideas, and I ignored them at my peril.

That's what really sealed the Baldur's Gate 2 deal for me: I wasn't an unseen hand controlling an anonymous party of min-maxxed randos, I was that guy on the screen right there, and yes I was the boss but I was also getting yelled at by Jaheira on a regular basis and spending more time than I probably should wondering why I'm still putting up with Anomen's bullshit. Sort out your daddy issues on someone else's time, bud.

Baldur's Gate 2 did so many great things: The art, the audio, and the huge, packed game world remain among the best of the RPG genre. But it was the decision to focus on the characters, and to make me one of their number, that elevated it from a great RPG to one of the most important and unforgettable videogames of all time.

It gave the game a feeling of tabletop authenticity I'd never previously experienced, and for someone who spent his youth on the outside looking in, suddenly having a seat at that table was nothing short of magical. That's the real legacy of Baldur's Gate 2 for me: Imoen, Jahiera, Minsc, Mazzy, and Viconia: Literally, and without a shred of irony, the friends I made along the way.

God help us, it has been 25 years since Baldur's Gate 2 released, and even though a third game under the same name has since come out and got everyone very excited with its sexy-haughty vampire boys and whatnot, we're still talking about it.

Why?

Well, that's easy. Baldur's Gate 2 is a good game. It's a very good game, actually: a plane-hopping, swashbuckling, high-fantasy adventure filled with great performances and memorable characters.

But that's not quite enough explanation, is it? There have been a lot of very good games in the past few decades, and not all of them get anniversary write-ups. Heck, personally I'm more of a Baldur's Gate 1 guy, and yet I don't think I said a thing when that game's 25-year anniversary hit two years ago.

It's because Baldur's Gate 2 is a lot more than just Baldur's Gate 2. It represents BioWare hitting on an approach to design that would define it—and consequently, so much other RPG development—for over a decade afterwards. BioWare never stopped making Baldur's Gate 2 once it made it the first time. Dig in almost any RPG, especially one that has you roll deep with a party of whining misfits, and you can find a trace of it.

Party mode

The obvious question is, 'Why attribute all this influence specifically to BG2, and not the first game in the series?' Great question. Thanks for asking. BG1, for as much as I love it, came into the world still coated in a thin layer of early-'90s RPG stuff—friction-generating busywork and a combat-first philosophy.

Travelling between its hubs meant crossing multiple long maps of little but bare nature: wide stretches of grassland and trees. In fairness, BioWare took all the opportunities it could to speckle those maps with amusing little encounters, but it was tedious and old-fashioned. BG2 ditched that stuff. From now on there would only be hubs, stuffed with quests and things to do. When you fly between planets in Mass Effect or cities in Dragon Age, you can thank BG2 for cutting out the cruft.

But that's minor. What really set BG2 apart from all that came before it was its party. BG1's helpers were a collection of cliches and barks—meatshields you shouldn't feel bad about discarding if they happened to get gibbed by an unlucky crit. BG2's cast of freaks were people, man.

Your half-sister who struggled with her divine heritage, the smooth-talking rogue with a guilty conscience, the woman dealing with the grief of her husband's death as she (maybe) falls in love all over again. Also Anomen. Anomen sucks.

Do these remind you of anything? Of course they do. They're BioWare NPCs—characters you could slap a Star Wars name and put in KOTOR, or turn into Turians and Salarians and slot them in Mass Effect, or change literally nothing and put them in Dragon Age. BG2 was when BioWare truly tried its hand at making you fall in love with your companions and absolutely nailed it, and then it never stopped trying to do that in any major release after 2000. Except Anthem, and look how that turned out.

BG2 marked the studio realising its superpower wasn't encounter design, or combat, or worldbuilding (which is not to say it was bad at those things) it was that it could drive players absolutely nuts with passion for these tiny paper-cut avatars; that people were ravenous to build relationships, theories, headcanons on the basis of the personalities the studio's writers imbued their party-members with. They might even choose to set out with a statistically nonoptimal party because they like the people in it—unthinkable!

And having discovered this dark alchemy, BioWare never stopped using it. Every big RPG it made thereafter was defined just as much—if not more—by its party than by its narrative. The pattern of BG2 now defined BioWare as a whole.

The studio knew it, too. Mass Effect 2 and ME3's Citadel DLC are perhaps the peak of the whole style: ME2's main plot was almost an afterthought compared to its lineup of party loyalty missions—an anthology of vignettes each centering around an individual companion (BG2's party members had these, too).

Citadel, meanwhile, almost had the feeling of a mea culpa—BioWare knew you were upset about how ME3 had wrapped up so it let you throw a big party with your pals to make up for it. You could just as easily have made the same DLC for Dragon Age, or KOTOR, or BG2.

BG2 wasn't the first RPG to give a damn about its characters, but it was certainly the most impactful. It defined BioWare, sure, but it helped define Obsidian, Troika, Owlcat, Larian, even CD Projekt Red, a studio which doesn't even deal in party-based RPGs.

It fired the starting pistol on a philosophy of RPG design that continues to echo today. When The Outer Worlds 2 put out a companions trailer last month, giving you a quick overview of the game's party and wearily letting you know in advance that no, you can't sleep with them, it was echoing a lineage that traces its Big Bang back to the year 2000. When you celebrate BG2, you celebrate 25 years of RPGs, and that's why its anniversary really matters.

Vicious Mockery is one of the most iconic D&D 5e spells—in case you're completely unfamiliar with the system, or just haven't played a bard yet, it's a cantrip that deals 1d4 psychic damage (scaling a bit with your level) and gives enemies disadvantage on their next attack roll. It also lets you insult someone so hard that they just die, which is also the case in Baldur's Gate 3.

Larian went real overboard on the depth and breadth of insults with this singular cantrip—even giving one NPC bespoke, trauma-invoking dunks just to twist the knife even more. But there was a time when these insults were just plain dookie. No, literally.

As spotted by our friends over at GamesRadar+, a recent stream with junior writer Martin Docherty revealed that poor beleaguered studio head Swen Vincke had to tell the BG3 team to tone it down with the scat-based dunking.

He recounts a time when he'd collected a bunch of Vicious Mockery insults into a big sheet: "Swen had a look at them, and he was like: 'Ah. Hm. Why are so many of them about poo?'" That's one hell of a note to receive. Which, to Docherty and his fellow writers' credit, they took on the chin: "Interesting. That's an interesting point. We've all gone very scatological."

The chaser to Vincke's shot, however, comes in the note Docherty shares afterwards: "Less poo, more Shakespeare." I've never been given such devastatingly constructive critique by my editors here at PC Gamer, but I'm not entirely sure I'd recover if I did.

I decided to refresh my memory to see how many kaka croons made it into the full game (thank you, BG3 wiki), and it turns out? Quite a few:

• "Tape your bottom-mouth shut."
• "Thou goblin-goo-gobbler!" This one's debatable, based on what we think goblin goo is.
• "Thou latrine-loving leper!"
• "You gorbellied, purulent horse-ass!"
• "You're dung-pretty and scented to wit!"
• "Back to the anus that spat you out."
• "Hark! A dung golem!"
• "Clag-bottomed coward!"
• "Majesty of manure, sovereign of shit!"
• "Mouthier than an arse, twice as full o' shite."
• "Regard this spontaneous flatulater!"
• "There - a miserable pile of secretion."
• "Shall I compare thee to a sow's fart?"
• "Gnoll eat your face and shit it out?"
• "Feculent beast!" Feculent means to contain dirt or waste matter, so I think this one counts.
• "Fudge-fondling fustilarian!"
• "Thou bandy-legged brindle-hole!"

We've got at least 17 rump-oriented heckles that made the cut—that last one might be an edge-case, but "brindle" means a brown the colour of animal fur, and I think we can reliably say what a brown-covered hairy hole might be. Just not on this website.

"I’m honestly heartbroken right now." Reddit user Naoness shared those words alongside a video of their badly damaged limited edition Baldur's Gate 3 vinyl earlier this month. It was accidentally left out in direct sunlight hot enough it melted the record (sparking plenty of memes about Astarion's "full concentrated power of the sun" quote).

Naoness shared the post as a warning to other BG3 fans, but the damage was done. The record was a limited edition and a gift from Naoness's wife, meaning it was nearly irreplaceable—nearly.

This week, Naoness posted again on the BG3 subreddit with a surprising update: Larian sent a free replacement for the melted record and even a few pins to go with it. Apparently, someone on the Larian team saw Naoness's original post and reached out to help, proving once again that the BG3 dev team really does care about its fans.

Naoness was understandably ecstatic about the replacement, saying, "I honestly can’t thank Larian enough. You’ve already given us one of the best games ever made, and now this kindness on top of it. It really means a lot!" As for the ill-fated original record, Naoness is holding onto it to display with Astarion's "power of the sun" quote, commenting that they also hope to get it signed by Neil Newborn.

Larian replaced my melted Baldur’s Gate 3 vinyl <3 mi from r/BaldursGate3

The vinyl saga comes just a few weeks after Larian expanded the BG3 mod toolkit "to give you even more freedom," another community-friendly move. It's especially noteworthy since Larian confirmed earlier this year that they're not planning to make a Baldur's Gate 4, but good support for mods and community-created content lets players keep enjoying BG3 long after finishing the main campaign.

In a similar incident back in April, Larian even voiced support for a mod for an entirely different game, the "Baldur's Village" mod for Stardew Valley. It was briefly taken down by Wizards of the Coast until Larian CEO Swen Vincke came to the mod's defense. Larian seems to still be standing by Vincke's motto from an interview about Baldur's Village: "Happy player, happy business."

The actor behind Astarion, Neil Newbon, has gone on record as being keen to play Astarion again. Everyone's favourite spawn from Baldur's Gate 3 has stolen hearts (including mine), and you'd be forgiven for thinking Newbon would jump at the chance to play something similar—not so.

In an interview with challenge runner Luality (who has personally impressed Swen Vincke), Newbon explained that while he'll always come back to a role, he doesn't want to get typecast as a flamboyant vampire forevermore.

"I like to stretch myself, I like to play, I like to do different roles all the time. For instance, I'd love to play Astarion again, but I wouldn't necessarily enjoy playing an Astarion-like character."

Not that it hasn't been on the table, as Newbon explains: "I have people approach me saying, 'Oh this character's just like Astarion, would you like to play them?' And I'm like, 'Not really, no'."

This leads to an anecdote about a sapient drier, where Newbon is keen to emphasise that a household appliance with pecs is very different from a vampire spawn in the Forgotten Realms. We all get those mixed up.

In seriousness, though, listening to Date Everything's Drysdale, I can see the similarities. He's even got a frilly shirt. However, Newbon looked to British comedy staple Blackadder for inspiration:

"We wanted to make sure that he wasn't going to fall into the Astarion trope too much. So I based him on an actor called Rik Mayall who does this wonderful character called Lord Flashheart in Blackadder … It was enough of a jump away from Astarion that it was very cool to play, it was really fun."

As to why Newbon wants to keep switching it up, he explains that "especially in film and TV—the danger is that people end up playing the same role, because people like playing that role. Whereas I think for game actors … we get to take our faces off, which means we get to be more of a character, we get to play the characters we'd probably never get given in live action. So for me that's amazing."

Newbon's definitely kept that up since, playing a fish named Fibonacci in Warframe and, most recently, struggling actor Chase Lowry in the horror game Dead Take. And an anthropomorphised drier you can kiss, let's not forget that.

I think we can officially call the mod support provided for Baldur's Gate 3 a success. Not just because they're really dang convenient, but because, per a recent blog post, over 265 million downloads have occurred via Larian's mod.io page.

"Since the introduction of mod support in September 2024, you’ve uploaded over 8,500 mods to mod.io and hit 265 MILLION mod downloads!" the announcement cheers, before immediately crushing me with the burden of eldritch knowledge.

Over 250,000 of that number have exclusively been the Withers Big Naturals. At the time of writing, the exact number is actually 256,690, with just over 1,000 players slapping humungous tatas on a mummy today alone. That's just shy of 0.1% (0.094339622%) of all downloads being necrotic milkers.

The mod (which gives Withers titted boobs, huge ones) is a riff on the Gandalf Big Naturals meme, a gag that originated from Tumblr wherein user gay-pippin' was asked to "Post gandalf big naturals". Replying with a trio of breasted Wizards, gay-pippin responded: "what else do you command of me" I can only imagine with the air of a very, very tired genie.

The original image is credited to Becca Teeth, who forged Gandalf Big Naturals after recovering from top surgery. In an interview with autostraddle, they said: "It’s always satisfying to make a thing and see people connect with it, even when it’s an image of Gandalf with a huge rack."

And thus, the legacy lives on in Withers. There's an added layer of hilarity to this whole situation, given Withers is (spoilers incoming, avert thine gaze) Jergal, the former god of death, a fact he's keen to remind you of if you ruin your party. Should all psychopomps come armed with a pair of honkers? Philosophers have been debating this question for centuries.

As my fellow writer Andrea Shearon noted earlier this week, this success has given Larian cause to upgrade its modding tools, "expanding the official toolkit to give you even more freedom". Soon, you will have new and powerful ways to equip Withers—and any character—with twin spheres of annihilation. But beware, many-a-wizard hath pondered their orbs overlong. Happened to my buddy Gale once.

Larian's released a whole treasure trove of fun stats for Baldur's Gate 3, and I encourage you to peek the full list yourself—however, one particular statistic leapt out at me and immediately activated the prehistoric lizard part of my brain that's obsessed with min-maxing in RPGs, because I'm almost certain I know exactly why it happened.

Shadowheart, god's favourite princess and the Forgotten Realm's smarmiest cleric, has been respecced 4,890,005 times, per the graphic below. It specifies "by number of campaigns", which if my rusty statistics knowledge is to be trusted (it isn't) means they divided the amount of times she was respecced by the actual campaigns she was in, in an effort to help curb both the buildcrafters and the indecisive from mucking up of the numbers.

Kind friends, companions, adventurers all—I know exactly why Shadowheart has been respecced near five million times. Or, well, I know two reasons why. Vanilla Shadowheart just, er, kinda sucks. I'm sorry.

Reason number one is her stat line. In the base game, Shadowheart comes with an utterly baffling array. Most of it's fine—a 17 in Wisdom as a Cleric is good, and a healthy 14 in Constitution means she won't fold in combat. But for some Shar-baffling reason, she comes with 13 Strength and 13 Dexterity.

I cannot properly convey how useless of a stat spread this is. In Baldur's Gate 3, your modifiers go up by +1 for every two points in a score you have. Having 14 Strength and 12 Dexterity would be fine, giving her a +2 to whack with her mace and a little bit of AC in Medium Armour. But 13 in both? Why?

This gets even worse when you get to level 4, and you'll need to pick two ability scores to bump up by one. With a properly built array, you could start Shadowheart with a solid 14 strength, a 15 in Con, and a 17 in Wis, knocking both up to 16 and 18 when she turns level 4. With the one the game gives you, you're basically obliged to waste this first stat-bump on correcting one of her terrible 13s. The munchkin in me recoils and hisses.

The second reason as to why she's the most-respecced is, in my opinion, the fact that the Trickery Domain cleric is terrible. Advantage on stealth checks is nice, but Invoke Duplicity is perhaps one of the worst Channel Divinity options, whether you're playing D&D's 5th Edition or Larian's all-timer RPG.

That's because it takes concentration, and Clerics have so many good concentration spell options—Spirit Guardians, Bless, Shield of Faith, Hold Person, the list goes on and on—making Invoke Duplicity basically useless right out the gate.

As for what players replaced it with, Larian says it's clean down the middle between Life and Death cleric, which, as the blog post outlines, absolutely tracks. At least these stats are a little more explainable than the 33% of people who got all-natural with Halsin back in 2023.

Baldur's Gate 3 Patch 8 marked the last of Larian's major updates, but that doesn't mean we can't get a hotfix or modding surprise as a treat. As part of the RPG's second anniversary community update, the studio shared a few bite-sized fixes and a quick breakdown of more BG3 player stats. But most notably, the developer revealed that it isn't done working on the official modding toolkit.

Specifically, Larian says it's "working on expanding the official toolkit to give you even more freedom," with more details on what that entails coming soon.

The community update notes its extra effort is inspired by the RPG's relentlessly creative modding scene that "raised the bar with every mod," so shout out to all of those ridiculously detailed custom hairstyles, the millions of costume recolors in my mod folder, and, uh, Withers' big naturals.

There's also a scene for modding the mod tools. It only took two days after the official kit debuted for someone to unlock its developer mode and reveal a hidden level editor. We've seen extra additions from Larian since then, but nothing quite as robust as what some third-party tweaks accomplished.

BG3's Patch 8 update added partial level editing, so you can drop in DIY NPCs and objects to the world, but it's got limitations. The unlocked toolkit isn't something you'll find help with through Larian's official channels either, but we've seen some wild creations borne from community projects as modders set their sights on custom campaigns and restoring cut content.

As one of the self-proclaimed modding sickos, my brain immediately conjures up a million what-if scenarios for what expanding those tools could mean. I understand there are limitations to keep folks from going too wild within the official hub and risking game instability, plus Larian's FAQ explains licensing and console guidelines, but I've already been tempted by the forbidden level editor fruit.

I mean, I can't mod anything beyond changing a color or texture, but just imagine the custom Karlach date destinations all you talented modding types could make.

First reported by GamesRadar, one of Baldur's Gate 3's most persistent bugs has once again resisted Larian's attempts to squash it, with players on the BG3 subreddit sharing screens of their companions staring flatly into the camera in their portraits.

I don't know if it was around in early access, but I've seen screenshots of the blank-faced stare bug out in the wild since Baldur's Gate 3 released. Rather than flattering, heroic poses and angles, their icons show them dully regarding the camera like they're taking a driver's license photo.

You can’t be serious… from r/BG3

Some companions, like Lae'zel and Shadowheart, will be slightly off to the side or bottom of the frame, like a little kid or someone's grandparent trying to make a facetime call. I actually only started seeing the bug in my own game after BG3's monster eighth patch.

But it all came to an end on July 31, or so we thought. Larian deployed a "room temperature hotfix" to fix some lingering glitches, the portrait bug among them. Even at the time, though, the wording of the hotfix implied this unkillable thing might come back to haunt us yet again: "Fixed, probably this time really maybe, the weird character portraits."

And wouldn't you know it, we've got at least two posts on the Baldur's Gate 3 subreddit sharing screenshots of the glitch still occurring after the hotfix, from users Equivalent_Lab_2510 and Independent_Lock_864. What is dead may never die.

But maybe I've been using the wrong ham-fisted movie metaphor to think about this. Everybody loves the portrait bug. What if it's less the monster coming back, and more the hero beating all the odds? I make eye contact with the portrait glitch in a Florentine cafe. I smile at it, nod, and it nods in return, a moment of respect and camaraderie that needs no words.

The time of Baldur's Gate 3 patches is ended; now is the time of Baldur's Gate 3 hotfixes. God bless 'em, I don't think Larian will ever manage to stop tinkering with its masterpiece—today it returned to Faerûn with BG3's hotfix 33, bringing a smattering of fixes for bugs as diverse as crashes, broken game invites, the Dark Urge accidentally spoiling their whole deal, and weird character portraits. Maybe. That last one is a solid maybe.

Most of the fixes are, well, pretty workmanlike. Useful but uninspiring stuff, which is probably why Larian is cheekily calling this hotfix a "room temperature fix," but there are some juicy morsels in there.

My favourite has to be the one that finally nixes the Dark Urge—notionally an amnesiac—referencing things they absolutely should not know yet in overhead dialogue.

"Told the Dark Urge, everyone's favourite amnesiac, to stop talking about people 'back home' (you don't know where that is yet, bestie) and spoiling the game by mentioning their 'father', among other silly notions, in their overhead dialogues," writes Larian.

More good news: the game's party members should no longer look like your granddad trying to use Zoom. Hopefully.

The 'Zoom Call' bug is back. from r/BaldursGate3

For a long time now, the game's portraits have been blighted by a weird issue that would misalign party members with the frame of their portraits, making them look absolutely absurd. Larian's tried to fix it before, but hotfix 33 should be (should be) the end of it. "Fixed, probably this time really maybe, the weird character portraits," says Larian. Well, I'm convinced.

The rest of the fixes are equally—if not more—important, but not quite as funny. We're talking a bunch of repaired crashes and softlocks and an updated EULA that "now offers a much clearer overview of how you can share fan content!" I'll list it in full right below:

Baldur's Gate 3 Hotfix #33

EULA

• Updated a link in the EULA to navigate to our new fan content policy which now offers a much clearer overview of how you can share fan content!
  • Larian Fan Content Policy
  • Baldur’s Gate 3 Fan Content Terms

Modding

• Increased the timeout when trying to publish large mods to help prevent the 'A task was cancelled.' error.

Crashes and Performance

• Fixed a potential crash when using the Set Slot option in the radial menu.
• Fixed a potential crash related to combat.
• Fixed a crash that could occur after failing a particular Arcana check in Moonrise Towers.
• Fixed a bug causing the game to freeze when hovering over skills on the Action Radial Menu.
• Improved some UI jitteriness on controller when dropping below 75 FPS.
• Fixed a long freeze that could occur on Xbox when levelling up.
• Fixed a potential crash related to the Trade UI.
• Fixed a potential crash on Xbox when resuming the game after suspending it.
• Fixed a potential crash on the 'Press A to continue' screen on Xbox.
• Fixed a bug preventing you from loading savegames due to corrupted data.

Gameplay

• Fixed a softlock on split screen where if Player 2 disconnects while Player 1 is in an active dice roll during a dialogue, Player 1 would get stuck in the dialogue.
• Fixed a bug causing the Lunar Vitality condition to get repeatedly and rapidly added and removed from characters in Starry Form.
• Fixed a bug causing the Shadow Curse condition to be repeatedly applied and removed when a druid uses their Starry Form as their only light source.
• Fixed the Private Dialogue on/off toggle during dialogues, which wasn't working on multiplayer games using the controller UI.
• Told the Dark Urge, everyone's favourite amnesiac, to stop talking about people 'back home' (you don't know where that is yet, bestie) and spoiling the game by mentioning their 'father', among other silly notions, in their overhead dialogues.
• Fixed a bug causing effects triggered by Rage: Wild Magic to remove themselves after Level 9.
• Fixed a bug preventing Hexblade warlocks from using the Accursed Spectre and Armour of Hexes reactions after removing a Polymorphed condition.
• Crawling Claws' Necrotic Claws now only does additional damage on hit and not on miss.
• Fixed a rare bug that would block mouse input after a dialogue.
• Fixed an issue preventing you from sending game invites or joining a cross-play lobby via the Xbox Guide.
• Fixed a bug preventing you from joining a platform lobby via an invite on your platform after playing a cross-play game.

Photo Mode

• Fixed the Highlights setting not working on controller.

UI and Tooltips

• Fixed, probably this time really maybe, the weird character portraits.
• Fixed a typo in the Giant's Rage condition tooltip that indicated the wrong damage bonus.
• The scrollbar on the Mod Details page of the Mod Browser no longer moves at a snail's pace when you're using a controller.
• Fixed some missing icons for certain Bardic Inspiration passives.
• Fixed the Donate UI ('Consumable Items') not letting you donate stacked items.

Art and Animation

• The Gloves of Power no longer get all stretchy-looking when worn by male dwarves who have the Chain Shirt +1 equipped.
• Recovered the Help animation for Ranger's Companions.

Baldur's Gate 3 was one of the best RPGs of the decade, and it's not getting a sequel—at least, not one made by Larian, anyway. That's simply because the developer's heart wasn't in it, or the prospect of making DLC, either. I can't quite blame them. If I spent close to 10 years doing anything, I'd want a breather, too.

At the time, I thought that was exactly right that the studio stepped away—Larian doesn't need D&D to make the next great RPG. Echoing that feeling is Astarion's voice actor, Neil Newbon, who shared similar thoughts in a conversation with Radio Times Gaming's "Arcade Hang" (thanks, GamesRadar+).

Newbon got into it while talking about the prospect of playing Astarion again: "I really hope that I get to reprise Astarion in some form or another again, whether it's BG4 or what-have-you—I'd love to play him live-action, that'd be amazing, that'd be awesome to do that."

However, he added: "[But] I don't get a call on any of that stuff, so I don't know if that's going to be possible or not."

While it's surprising to hear Newbon's not been contacted to reprise his role at all (okay, not too surprising)—or that he's simply being professional and not breaking NDAs he may or may not have signed—he's keen to clarify that he's not upset at Larian for the dearth of opportunities to hop back into his favourite vampire spawn.

"I really love the fact that Larian, when they knew their heart wasn't in doing another game, or even DLC for that matter—that this was the experience, it'd taken them eight years, they were exhausted, they were tired, they were happy, and all the rest of it—but it was like 'that's done now'.

"I like the fact they stuck to their convictions, and they knew in their heart it wouldn't be as good as the endeavour they'd just done, because their hearts weren't fully in it, and they wanted to do other things. I think it was absolutely the right call."

Hear hear. Larian's at its best when it's excited about whatever it's making—if Swen Vincke & Co. aren't elbow-deep in enthusiasm, then neither am I. Newbon adds, however, that he's "really grateful to've been part of this in the first place—grateful to Swen, grateful to all the devs, grateful to all the directors and cast."

As for the future of the series? Newbon's open to the possibility that someone could match Larian's pedigree, but concedes that it shouldn't just be a copy-paste job. "I don't know who could do it. I'm very curious as to who could do a fourth one … and to see what they will do with it, because you don't want a carbon cutout of [BG3]."

He hopes, however, that "they get the writers back, that'd be a good move."

AI! It's the new big thing. It's the foundation of the 21st-century digital economy. It's going to feed the hungry and clothe the naked. It will punish the wicked and reward the righteous. It'll bring about the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. And you're going to lose your job if you don't learn how to use it.

That's what I hear from people whose multi-trillion dollar market caps ride on AI continuing to be the next big thing, anyway, but down here in the muck? Opinions vary. Take Neil Newbon, who you almost certainly know as the actor for Astarion in Baldur's Gate 3, for instance. In a recent chat with Radio Times Gaming, Newbon spoke some hot truth about just how useful AI could be for actors like him: "It's shit."

"You know, I spoke to a lot of devs, I know a lot of devs, and they don't want to use AI because it's shit," says Newbon. "It doesn't work very well. It takes a lot of effort to get something that's half decent."

He's not wrong. Videogame experiments with voice acting have been many and iffy. The stilted delivery of The Finals' commentators? The "rancid" AI-powered Aloy that wasn't meant for public consumption? Modders replacing the time-honoured tradition of the amateur enthusiast speaking into a crappy headset mic with artificial voices? All these crimes and more can be laid at the feet of AI.

"Even with the modern things that I've seen recently, it's like, 'Yeah, okay, great. You can make AI, and what?' Where's the joy in it? … You can always tell that something's slightly off. It's not right," says Newbon.

Which is correct, so far as I'm concerned, but the obvious rejoinder is, 'Well, it won't always be slightly off.' AI acting will, I suspect, someday improve to the point where you can't tell the difference between it and a real actor. But Newbon, being a rather clever sort with a lot of experience in his field, has a great rebuttal to that: "It's synthetic, it's not real. It doesn't have the happy accident possibility and capability that are those great moments in film, TV, theatre, games, where nobody can predict [it]—it just happened. It was magical."

By way of example, Newbon points to Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy. "You know, Dustin Hoffman banging the car—'I'm walking here!'—because he almost got run over but stayed in character, is iconic. And it was a complete accident. Most of the most famous things in film and TV you can quote are those happy accidents. So yeah, AI sucks."

Were I to guess, I'd say the position of most beloved Baldur's Gate 3 party member is probably a hard tie between Astarion and Karlach. Which is wrong, because it should actually be Lae'zel, but never mind; people love the hoity-toity vampire boy and the large, red, armed puppy-dog, and I'd never take that away from them.

But according to Karlach's voice actor, Samantha Béart, your favourite Tiefling might not always have been quite so nice. In an interview with TheGamer, Béart was asked what the biggest misconception about Karlach was. Their answer? "That she is a really sweet, nice, happy-go-lucky person.

"I think she was a very different person in hell," says Béart. Sure, Karlach might be strawberry-sweet up in the Prime Material plane, but survival in hell requires a different vibe entirely. Béart says they got into the role of Karlach by imagining "being locked in a supermax prison, with no hope of getting out and doing all sorts of horrible gang stuff to survive."

Béart doesn't go into just what nastiness they think Karlach got up to, but your imagination can probably fill in the gaps there. Suffice it to say, Béart reckons Karlach "was a piece of work in hell" if only out of necessity. "You just think about how people behave in those very small communities. Essentially, I think you can completely change to survive."

Which I like a whole bunch as a take on the character. Anyone who's played BG3 (which I think is everyone who doesn't belong to an uncontacted people at this point) will know that 'really not wanting to go back to hell' is a big part of Karlach's whole deal.

Sure, part of that is probably because hell just kind of sucks as a place to be and you have to endure no end of painful personal torments, but it fits Karlach to a tee to have her main reason being that she doesn't want to return to being the cruel, violent person that hell demands she be.

"For me, it's a redemption arc," says Béart. "Finally actually getting out and going. ‘Do you know what? I get to decide who I am now. And I'm not going to be that person anymore.'" It's a layer to the character I quite like, and makes me feel all the worse for accidentally totally obliterating her in my own ending to the game. Sorry, Karlach. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

You know, I was pretty happy with the ending I got in Baldur's Gate 3 in my (so far) only playthrough. Everything seemed to work out pretty well for everyone. But, and spoilers ahead folks, I guess I was wrong.

The end I went with saw exiled Gith prince Orpheus freed from his dimensional time-prison, The Emperor roundly rebuffed, my character living happily ever after with Shadowheart, and all the rest of my companions generally pretty happy with themselves and the world. Except, well, except Karlach. I turned Karlach into a Mind Flayer.

Look, she offered, okay? And I would have done it myself, but it seemed like quite a mean thing to do to Shadowheart after I kind of sort of talked her into euthanising her parents. And hey, Karlach was on a ticking clock anyway, right? Her heart was going to give out and she preferred death to returning to Avernus. Mind-Flayerising her seemed like a great third way: she gets to live without having to return to hell. She's also an octopus. That's an issue, sure.

But she seemed pretty content, and I figured it was the best option for her. Apparently not, though, because in a chat with PCG's Ted Litchfield, Karlach's actor Samantha Béart talked about how they worked with BG3's movement director to imbue the shuffles, shimmies, and covert fist-pumps of everyone's favourite Tiefling with character. One of the things they went over in detail? Mind Flayer Karlach.

"If you choose to go down the Mind Flayer Karlach [route], we talked a lot about what that meant and how much Karlach is left." The answer? "Not very much. This is now an impersonator playing Karlach," a fact that Béart incorporated into their performance. And which I didn't pick up on.

So, uh, sorry Karlach. Or sorry to the Mind-Flayer-shaped entity that previously housed Karlach's soul, which I guess has now been shattered like bone china. To D&D heads, this might not be all that surprising—that the process of ceremorphosis pretty much obliterates all trace of the mind and soul of the host is an established bit of lore. But Mind Flayer Karlach did such a good job convincing me she A) was still Karlach, and B) was pretty content in her cephalopod form, that I honestly just kind of bought it. Whoops. Pobody's nerfect.

Béart didn't just discuss the precise ways in which I screwed up in their chat with PCG. The actor says that—the game dev pipeline being what it is—there wasn't huge room to improvise, but they still slipped in a few excellent performance quirks. "When Karlach says 'I love you too,' I said it 'ILOVEYOUTOO'—that was me. I said 'I'm gonna do it as one word. It's one word! It's one word!'"

The same goes for the scene where Karlach, convinced she's not long for this Earth, encourages the player to pursue other characters. "I very much did that 'You have your fun,' through gritted teeth," says Béart. So if you felt guilty about it, blame them.

Given that these are defining Karlach moments for a lot of fans—around half a million views on this single YouTube clip of the 'I love you too' scene—I'd say Béart's contributions were appreciated. Also, look, I'm sorry.