Tag: Baldur’s Gate

[anyclip-media thumbnail=”undefined” playlistId=”undefined” content=”PHNjcmlwdCBzcmM9Imh0dHBzOi8vcGxheWVyLnBvcHRvay5jb20vYW55Y2xpcC13aWRnZXQvbHJlLXdpZGdldC9wcm9kL3YxL3NyYy9scmUuanMiIGRhdGEtYXI9IjE2OjkiIHB1Ym5hbWU9IjE5OTgiIHdpZGdldG5hbWU9IjAwMTZNMDAwMDJVMEIxa1FBRl9NODMzNSI+Cjwvc2NyaXB0Pg==”][/anyclip-media]

Baldur’s Gate 3 Patch 5 is live now, and it gives fans something they’ve wanted for months now – Bing Bong as a canon part of the BG3 universe. Those words might mean absolutely nothing to you depending on how closely you follow the game’s voice actors, but for a large group of fans and Larian itself, Bing Bong became part of the family shortly after launch.

Bing Bong’s birth came about during a D&D game that members of BG3’s cast played on the High Rollers D&D channel, including Lae’zel’s voice actor Devora Wilde and Shadowheart’s actor Jennifer English. Both were playing as their BG3 companion characters for this game.

Lae’zel and Shadowheart stopped off at an adventurer’s mini-mart with a young imp at the door. In the absence of a bell, he said “bing bong” to announce their arrival, Shadowheart fell in love, and she decided to adopt him.

Lae’zel wasn’t having it and killed the imp, and then narrator Amelia Tyler swiftly announced a sad, ignoble end for Lae’zel.

Fans and actors alike jokingly called for justice for Bing Bong and asked Larian to consider including him in the game somehow – and they did. In one of Shadowheart’s new epilogue lines, she met a stray imp called Bing Bong on her travels and took him under her wing, so to speak, which is incredibly adorable and set the fandom on fire.

“THIS is how developers show they care and are engaged with their community and taking in feedback,” one Reddit user said. “Not telling us ‘You think you want that but you don’t’ or telling us to ‘get better computers.’ Larian is in the trenches giving us FREE updates to an already amazing game and adding in stuff we asked for. From major Act III fixes to minor things like #JusticeForBingBong.”

Baldur’s Gate 3 Patch 5 is live now on PC and PS5, and whenever BG3 on Xbox launches, it’ll include that patch and all the other updates Larian has published since August 2023.

Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF

[anyclip-media thumbnail=”undefined” playlistId=”undefined” content=”PHNjcmlwdCBzcmM9Imh0dHBzOi8vcGxheWVyLnBvcHRvay5jb20vYW55Y2xpcC13aWRnZXQvbHJlLXdpZGdldC9wcm9kL3YxL3NyYy9scmUuanMiIGRhdGEtYXI9IjE2OjkiIHB1Ym5hbWU9IjE5OTgiIHdpZGdldG5hbWU9IjAwMTZNMDAwMDJVMEIxa1FBRl9NODMzNSI+Cjwvc2NyaXB0Pg==”][/anyclip-media]

Baldur’s Gate 3 Patch 5 is here, bringing 30 GB of updates, including an expansive new epilogue, two new modes, and a whole lot more. The epilogue, which Larian teased as Withers’ afterparty, sounds like it fulfills the studio’s original, promised vision for the game, while Honour Mode puts your skills to the test, and Custom Mode gives you more control over how the game unfolds.

The new epilogue takes place six months after the game ends, as Withers brings your companions – or what’s left of them – back together for a final reflection on everything that happened. The event plays out differently depending on the choices you make during the game, and Larian promised “a giant tree” of permutations and over 3,500 new lines of dialogue. That sounds a lot like the thousands of endings the studio teased before the game launched with rather less than that.

“Your epilogue is defined by you,” Larian said in the patch notes. “This is the culmination of every choice and consequence that you’ve made since the very start of your adventure, a gigantic tree of permutations that leads to an opportunity to reflect on that journey before you say goodbye. For the writers of Larian, this ‘final goodbye’ has resulted in some of the most complex writing in the game thus far, as it takes advantage of Baldur’s Gate 3’s reactivity across the entire adventure.”

BG3 Patch 5 adds Honour Mode, the harder difficulty option that GOG leaked with a new achievement, and Custom Mode, which lets you tinker with a range of settings to tailor the experience. Custom Mode lets you hide active rolls so you won’t know if you miss a perception or survival check, for example, or you can remove the skill check requirements for every roll and make it more like a regular D&D game.

Honour Mode gives you just one save file and won’t let you save-scum. Battles are tougher and bosses are smarter in Honour Mode. Your adventure ends if your party dies, though you can choose to continue on Tactician or another difficulty instead if you don’t want to start over completely.

Several late-game scenes that were previously bugged and didn’t play in most circumstances are fixed, and Larian even added Orin’s red outfit as a drop item that anyone can wear. BG3 Patch 5 streamlines inventory management as well, so you can handle everyone’s items from one screen, instead of having an individual interface for each party member.

There’s the usual, sweeping range of changes and fixes in Patch 5 as well, including more interactions for Jaheira, a better ending for Mol, and further fixes to bugs that cut out character dialogue and reactions.

You can check out the full notes on Larian’s website. The studio promised further fixes for BG3 romance scenes in future updates, though didn’t give specifics.

Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF

[anyclip-media thumbnail=”undefined” playlistId=”undefined” content=”PHNjcmlwdCBzcmM9Imh0dHBzOi8vcGxheWVyLnBvcHRvay5jb20vYW55Y2xpcC13aWRnZXQvbHJlLXdpZGdldC9wcm9kL3YxL3NyYy9scmUuanMiIGRhdGEtYXI9IjE2OjkiIHB1Ym5hbWU9IjE5OTgiIHdpZGdldG5hbWU9IjAwMTZNMDAwMDJVMEIxa1FBRl9NODMzNSI+Cjwvc2NyaXB0Pg==”][/anyclip-media]

The best Baldur’s Gate 3 quests take you off the beaten path and into some of the RPG’s deeper and darker stories. One puts you in touch with a vengeful and unhinged man out for justice. Some have you systematically dismantling a villain’s family. There’s one with a pretty good weapon at the end, a murder mystery, and one that just lets you blow lots of stuff up, which is always fun.

We focused on side quests only, instead of companion stories and main quests, and we avoided big spoilers wherever possible.

[anyclip-media thumbnail=”undefined” playlistId=”undefined” content=”PHNjcmlwdCBzcmM9Imh0dHBzOi8vcGxheWVyLnBvcHRvay5jb20vYW55Y2xpcC13aWRnZXQvbHJlLXdpZGdldC9wcm9kL3YxL3NyYy9scmUuanMiIGRhdGEtYXI9IjE2OjkiIHB1Ym5hbWU9IjE5OTgiIHdpZGdldG5hbWU9IjAwMTZNMDAwMDJVMEIxa1FBRl9NODMzNSI+Cjwvc2NyaXB0Pg==”][/anyclip-media]

Baldur’s Gate 3 speedruns chart to see who can have sex the fastest because of course they do, but a beary interesting new run breaks the mold. As you can probably guess from that atrocious pun, it’s a Halsin speedrun, or Bear%, as the record-setting weedmoder calls it.

Bear%’s goal is seeing how quickly you can get to the Baldur’s Gate 3 romance scene with Halsin, which is a pretty impressive goal to begin with. You can grow closer with every other romanceable companion during Acts 1 and 2, maybe less quickly now than at launch, since Larian patched out some of their, er, eagerness. But you have more free time and opportunities to work on the relationship.

Not so with Halsin. You have to rescue him in Act 1, go through mandatory scenes with the happy refugees, save the Shadow-Cursed Lands in Act 2, complete a difficult battle and a boss fight, and then deal with yet another challenging battle at the start of Act 3.

Weedmoder managed to do all this in just under one hour, and they posted a condensed version of the run and a full breakdown explaining how they managed to pull it off. It involves a combination of glitches and smart planning, including the Shadowboxing method, enhanced leaps, feather fall, and some well-timed assassinations. Poor Minthara. She never saw it coming.

It’s yet another impressive feat from the BG3 community, especially Weedmoder’s method of dealing with the Ketheric battle in Act 2 – they jump while invisible and trick the game into considering it impact damage on Ketheric – and the Astral Plane, where they use a “kidnap” glitch to pick up Gith foes and drop them into the abyss.

Weedmoder admits there’s still room for improvement, and they even encountered some unexpected glitches near the end of the run. Expect Bear% runs to start clocking in even faster as more players figure out its intricacies.

Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF

[anyclip-media thumbnail=”undefined” playlistId=”undefined” content=”PHNjcmlwdCBzcmM9Imh0dHBzOi8vcGxheWVyLnBvcHRvay5jb20vYW55Y2xpcC13aWRnZXQvbHJlLXdpZGdldC9wcm9kL3YxL3NyYy9scmUuanMiIGRhdGEtYXI9IjE2OjkiIHB1Ym5hbWU9IjE5OTgiIHdpZGdldG5hbWU9IjAwMTZNMDAwMDJVMEIxa1FBRl9NODMzNSI+Cjwvc2NyaXB0Pg==”][/anyclip-media]

Baldur’s Gate 3 narrator Amelia Tyler found inspiration in unlikely places for some of BG3’s best moments, including her own background in animal psychology. Tyler explained her approach to the hundreds of narrator lines and over a dozen speaking styles she adopted for the game in a recent set of interviews with PC Gamer, where she explained how the process evolved from early access’ more judgmental tone to what we hear in the game now.

“I don’t think it was a conscious decision at the beginning, to give it those different voices,” Tyler said. “It just sort of evolved naturally. We’d get to a more Dark Urgey line or a Shadowheart line or an Astarion line or a Wyll line, and [I’d say] them in a way that allowed me to convey emotion. You never wanna tell a player how to feel, but I can echo the emotion of a moment.”

Tyler said she and Larian envisioned her role as someone just over your shoulder, whispering in your ear and guiding you along. The Dark Urge presented a particular challenge for Tyler. For other Origin companion characters, Tyler said she used their speaking style as a guide – opting for a more boisterous tone with Karlach, for example. The Dark Urge rarely speaks, though, so Tyler got even more creative than usual.

“I did a lot of animal psychology study – behavior in the wild versus behavior in captivity,” Tyler said. “There was a lot of that which got mimicked in Dark Urge. That kind of caged animal, pacing, needing to be free, needing to kill and not even really knowing why. It’s just: that’s how you’re wired … It’s tapping into something more primal in that character, it’s not necessarily someone else’s voice. It’s the part of you you might not like.”

On the less murder-y side, Tyler told PC Gamer she thoroughly enjoyed the quirkier lines, the snarky epitaphs in graveyards and others that let her draw on her love of one of her favorite authors.

“I particularly enjoyed the [lines] where it goes full-on Terry Pratchett. Like: ‘Tongs! A wide variety of tongs’ [or] ‘The sheep stares at you with unsettling malice’ … I love those little twinges of comedy, ’cause I grew up on Terry Pratchett.”

Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF

[anyclip-media thumbnail=”undefined” playlistId=”undefined” content=”PHNjcmlwdCBzcmM9Imh0dHBzOi8vcGxheWVyLnBvcHRvay5jb20vYW55Y2xpcC13aWRnZXQvbHJlLXdpZGdldC9wcm9kL3YxL3NyYy9scmUuanMiIGRhdGEtYXI9IjE2OjkiIHB1Ym5hbWU9IjE5OTgiIHdpZGdldG5hbWU9IjAwMTZNMDAwMDJVMEIxa1FBRl9NODMzNSI+Cjwvc2NyaXB0Pg==”][/anyclip-media]

Your Baldur’s Gate 3 weapons ranked list probably looks a bit different than mine, since the best BG3 weapons do more than just smack a goblin real hard. They augment your character builds, make new attack options possible, and even debuff enemies or blast them into the abyss. It’s pretty much a given that any legendary weapon is worth your time, so we only included our favorites. A handful of other very rare or even just rare weapons made the cut as well, though, thanks to their unique modifiers and additional actions.

[anyclip-media thumbnail=”undefined” playlistId=”undefined” content=”PHNjcmlwdCBzcmM9Imh0dHBzOi8vcGxheWVyLnBvcHRvay5jb20vYW55Y2xpcC13aWRnZXQvbHJlLXdpZGdldC9wcm9kL3YxL3NyYy9scmUuanMiIGRhdGEtYXI9IjE2OjkiIHB1Ym5hbWU9IjE5OTgiIHdpZGdldG5hbWU9IjAwMTZNMDAwMDJVMEIxa1FBRl9NODMzNSI+Cjwvc2NyaXB0Pg==”][/anyclip-media]

It looks like Larian has a future Baldur’s Gate 3 update planned that includes at least one fresh addition: the hardest challenge from Original Sin 2. A few savvy Redditers found a new, unused achievement in files on BG3’s GOG version called Foehammer that appeared after BG3 Patch 4 went live, and the Foehammer achievement only unlocks when you “complete the game in Honor mode.” 

Honor mode doesn’t yet in Baldur’s Gate 3, but it is what Larian called the biggest challenge in Divinity Original Sin 2, the difficulty setting that’s harder than Tactician. In Honor mode, Larian gives you just one save file for manual saves, auto saves, and quicksaves. That’s challenging enough for those of us who like to keep several avenues open in case a decision goes terribly wrong, but it’s not Honor mode’s biggest hurdle.

New GOG achievement, hinting the Honour Mode?
byu/Scornz inBaldursGate3

If your party dies, that’s it. The game wipes your save file, and you have to start over. Baldur’s Gate 3 features an awful lot of ways to die, including self-inflicted lightning bolts, surprise mummy gangs in a sewer, and sassing an angry genie, who may send you to a realm of dinosaurs or turn you into cheese depending on how serious the sass was. On the bright side, actual death takes a fair bit of messing up to achieve. Your party of four has to drop to zero HP and either fail death-saving throws or get attacked while in a downed state.

Still, Tactician mode is no joke. You’ll probably want to clear it at least once and have a strong grasp of how alchemy works before even trying Honor mode and maybe even throw in some Baldur’s Gate 3 mods like 5e spells to give yourself an extra advantage.

Larian hasn’t commented on the achievement or the possibility of Honor mode appearing in Baldur’s Gate 3.

Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF