The number of potential player actions that Baldur’s Gate 3 accounts for is one part of what makes it such a special RPG, but players have finally found something that it looks like Larian didn’t expect them to do: use Gale’s corpse as a remote explosive.
This article contains mild spoilers for Baldur’s Gate 3.
As any player prepared to play fast and loose with the Wizard of Waterdeep’s health pool will know, upon death a hologrammatic form of Gale will appear and beg to be resurrected. That’s because Gale’s heart acts as something of a time bomb that can only be suppressed through magical energy – hence why he’s constantly trying to eat all your magic items. If Gale’s unable to absorb that energy for too long – because, say, he’s dead – he’ll explode, levelling everything around him in a massive radius.
Later in the game, you can choose to detonate Gale at will – leading to one of Baldur’s Gate 3’s weirder speedrunning records if you’re quick enough about it. That should mean that you could choose to safely detonate the Wizard at a safe distance from the Sword Coast – in another plane of existence, for instance.
Sadly, that’s not the case. As noted on Reddit (via PCGamer), one player sacrificed Gale during Act 1. Having not yet triggered the cutscene arrival of Raphael during their playthrough, they then found the devilish figure in their camp, whereupon they opted to reverse-pickpocket their former party member’s corpse into Raphael’s inventory. Clearly, the intention was that with Raphael ducking back to the House of Hope – firmly nestled in Avernus, essentially a different dimension from the one in which most of the game takes place – Gale would safely detonate in a place where the collateral damage would be limited to the devilish and demonic.
After their next long rest, the unfortunate player was met with a form of game over. Rather than an official cutscene, a lengthy black screen appeared, suggesting that the detonation of the bomb in Gale’s chest had prevented the game from continuing. A similar fate had already befallen another player, who says they sent Gale to Chult via the Djinn in the Act 3’s Rivington circus. Chult is a remote jungle region, populated in the game entirely by dinosaurs, and situated hundreds of miles from the Sword Coast where Baldur’s Gate 3 takes place. They chose to explode Gale there, but says that they were still met with a game over.
This might be a slightly disappointing way for a playthrough to ‘end’, but it’s testament to Larian that this is even notable – for this particular to work, a player has to have killed Gale, chosen not to resurrect him, manipulated Raphael’s spawn to get him to appear in camp, and then slipped a corpse into the devil’s pocket. It’s the kind of thing a first-time playthrough would pretty much never yield, and the fact that we’re only hearing about this months after release suggests it’s very much an extreme edge-case scenario. It’s also something that seems very difficult to adapt around – Chult is pretty expendable, but Raphael is very important, and Larian’s gone to reasonable efforts to ensure that the player can’t get rid of him before his time – I’d argue that Raphael is a point around which much of the game’s story eventually hinges, and while Baldur’s Gate 3 is very good at providing extra NPCs in the event that important faces are killed off before their time, some might just be too important to die off-screen. Given that this is one of very few, if any, examples of the game not accounting for specific player choices that I’ve seen since launch, I’m prepared to turn a blind eye on this one.
Meet Howard, the most extraordinarily ordinary hero Baldur’s Gate 3 fans didn’t know they needed.
Source: gamesradar.com
