Down amidst the floating rocks and dark swirling clouds of the Shadowfell realm, a battle is raging. With the mysterious force (who is actually a person, it turns out) known as theNightsongat its centre, trapped and tormented in a magical cage for gods-know-how-long, I’m doing battle with the necromancer Balthazar, high-ranking minion of Ketheric Thorm’s.
The battle starts off disastrously, and I put my real-life relationship with my partner on the line when I persuade her not to quickload after her main character, Sparrow, gets thrown into a chasm and killed before we even have our first move (thereby establishing a new rule between us that if someone dies on their first turn, they can push through a quickload—no questions asked). It doesn’t help matters when Gale ends up face-down on the ground in a puddle of his own blood, his valiant attempts to cling to life quashed by Balthazar’s devastating Cloudkill, which enshrouds a big chunk of the arena with a high-damage poison cloud.
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Battle In The Depths
But somehow, we struggle on. The knockback on my Drow Warlock’s Eldritch Blast (which for my money is the best combat ability in the game) is sending Balthazar’s undead minions into Shar’s swirling abyss in droves, while Shadowheart valiantly runs into enemies with Spirit Guardiansswirling around her, instantly damaging any enemies in her radius with Radiant Damage.
We manage to revive Sparrow, my partner’s Archer, who leaps up to the high ground and is finally able to start doing her sniping thing, though alas poor Gale literally disappears into a puddle of blood, without so much as an orb with which to revive him. Rather poetically, it’s Sparrow who deals the killing blow to Balthazar, which somewhat eases the tensions that can sometimes spill over from game to reality in intense scenarios like these.
The battle is over, and we come to the critical point, where shitreallyhits the fan.
Vaelyan, my Warlock, is a sexy smooth-talker, able to effortlessly flow between Persuasion and Intimidation to get the best outcomes in dialogue. Sparrow, meanwhile, is a beautiful archeress, but… how to put this nicely… struggles with the verbals. She’ll disarm traps and unlock locks, but with her minimal Charisma, her tongue gets tied when trying to do anything conversational—from bedding a companion, to getting good prices with a merchant.
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Knowing full well that Shadowheart was on the verge of making a big decision about the Nightsong that would drastically alter the story going forward, Ispecificallygot Vaelyan to speak to the Nightsong, as he’d have the best chance of getting a positive dialogue outcome.
We were at an impasse, unable to execute our preferred course of action due to a game-changing bug. In a weird twist though, this lead our D&D brains to kick into gear once more.
But even though it’s me, as Vaelyan, who clicks to enter the conversation, who actually is leading the chat when the cutscene rolls around?Sparrow! It’s not the first time this weird switcheroo bug has happened, having previously occurred when Vaelyan for some reason spoke to Astarion at a key relationship-building moment (even though Astarion was attached to Sparrow at the time, and in all other circumstances, you’re able to’t speak with the companions your partner’s controlling). Things go terribly wrong, Shadowheart goes full Shar Zealot and, well, a lot of people end up dying soon thereafter (and that’s to say nothing of the inevitable ramifications later in the game).
It was a maddening moment, a bug at a critical time that directly undermined a specific plan and altered the story. Worse still, the game didn’t autosave immediately after this significant battle (why not, I ask!), so I had to load back to a point in the battle where I’d saved.
So we go through the rigmarole again. In fairness, even though repeating a battle in these circumstances was tedious, we managed to dispose of Balthazar much sooner this time, when he positioned himself near a ledge and Sparrow used a thunder arrow to knock him into the abyss. For all our frustrations, we couldn’t help but exclaim squeals of delight at resolving the battle so stylishly.
I can’t stay mad at you forever, Baldur’s Gate 3…
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But then,it happened again! This time we manually saved after the battle, and even though we clearly sent our smooth-talker Vaelyan to deal with the crucial Shadowheart-Nightsong situation, Sparrow kept taking over.
We were at an impasse, unable to execute our preferred course of action due to a game-changing bug. In a weird twist though, this lead our D&D brains to kick into gear once more. Accepting that this situation wasn’t going to be solved with the magic of quickloads, no matter how many times we reload, we came to the conclusion that there’s only one thing to be done here: Sparrow had to die.
So, like a proud sea captain walking the plank after her vessel’s been taken over by pirates, Sparrow solemnly marched up to the very edge from which Balthazar fell, looked over into the chasm below, then got pushed by Shadowheart into it. With Sparrow dead (and Gale too), there was literally no one left to inexplicably butt into the highly sensitive Shadowheart-Nightsong dialogue, and Vaelyan was finally able to work his charms and pursue the right outcome.
Now don’t get me wrong. Rolling with the dice rolls is a big part of the fun inBaldur’s Gate 3, and even in this critical situation IthinkI’d have had the discipline to stick with the outcome had I failed those Persuasion checks, but to be tripped up by bugs like this one I’ve encountered (more than once) can really take you out of the experience. Even this many months on from release, Baldur’s Gate 3 still has plenty of issues,especially on Xboxandin the area of split-screen, but I think it’s reached a status where the game is otherwise so good that it’s become a bit taboo to highlight its shortcomings.
In fairness, the experience redeemed itself by still letting me play within the beautifully open rules of the game to remedy the disaster scenario (by killing my fellow player), and in that sense it’s testament to the remarkable versatility of the Baldur’s Gate 3 that we’ve come to love.
But there’s only so many critical scenarios in which the game can bug out before it’s worth questioning its overall quality (the sheer number of bugs alone makes me respectfully disagree with ourJack’s 10/10 verdict in his review), and I really hope I don’t experience many more as I approach the final chapter of the game.
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