Larian Studios used a cruel trick to prevent an issue in Baldur’s Gate 3 that would affect one of the most useful spells in the game.
What’s the problem? There are some powerful spells in Baldur’s Gate 3 (BG3). A particularly useful one is Talk with Dead, which allows you to have short conversations with a deceased. This way you can get interesting information from an NPC who is already looking at the lilies from below.
But “Speak with Dead” presented BG3 developer Larian Studios with a problem, because if you could really talk to every dead NPC and get important information, the spell would simply be too strong – and you would also need more lines of dialogue than Baldur’s Gate 3 already offers.
As Larian Studios CEO Swen Vincke recently revealed in an interview with Wizards of the Coast’s Todd Kenreck, the developers are using a small but brutal trick to balance the spell.
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One cannot speak without a head
What is this trick? According to Vincke, Larian followed the simple principle: “You can talk to any dead person who still has their head” and elaborated: “So if you see a lot of decapitated people in the game, then we literally did it like that. This is our cheat (via YouTube).”
Deceased NPCs, with whom you should not speak, died too brutally to provide you with information. They are out of their minds and can no longer answer you.
To further balance the “speak with dead” you can ask a maximum of 5 questions to a corpse. In addition, a dead person may not want to speak to you if you are their killer.
Who can use the spell? Speak With Dead is a level 3 spell that can be learned by bards, warlocks, and clerics like Shadowheart.
In addition, the Amulet of Lost Voices gives you the ability to talk to a corpse once per day. You can already find the piece of jewelry in act 1 in the decay tomb.
In the interview with Todd Kenreck, Swen Vincke also spoke about a spell that didn’t make it into the RPG and explained why the team decided against it:
A single spell would have made Baldur’s Gate 3 almost double in size