Apathy is the greatest evil here
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Baldur’s Gate 3’s seventh major updateis here - bringing with it a monstrous 18,000 words worth of patch notes - and one player has just discovered a new fiendish ending that proves the age-old adage about apathy being one of the truest forms of evil.
I always love when an RPG lets players loose to be a little more than mischievous, andBaldur’s Gate 3was happy to oblige throughout its mammoth campaign. Developer Larian Studios has now given evil-doers some new finales to wrap up their hours spent being mean and nasty.
One of the scrapped endings that came with the seventh patch has actually been fully animated and left hidden in the game’s files, unreachable in normal runs due to the recurring “impossible” tag blocking it off. It isn’t so plainly evil, though - your character simply decides that they kind of can’t be bothered to finish the fight, right before they’re about to subjugate innocents to the Absolute’s power. YouTuber SlimX discovered the “impossible” ending, and you can see it down below. “Your character has had enough of all this tadpole business and peaces out, with or without your companions,” as SlimX puts it.
Before truly succumbing to the dark side, your character can instead have the most jarring change of heart I’ve seen in years: yanking the tadpole from their brain and wordlessly strolling out of frame as if someone’s just uttered their sleeper agent activation phrase - all while the surrounding NPCs give them a dumbfounded stare.
The left-turn ending doesn’t actually make much sense, no matter how you think about, and simply saying ‘peace out’ after adopting the seat of power you’ve been trying to overthrow the entire time isn’t very emotionally satisfying either - so I don’t blame Larian developers for locking this away under the “impossible” banner. I guess there’s something to be said for being so evil you can’t even be bothered being evil anymore.
SlimX had previously discovered all sorts of secrets tucked away in the game’s code, and even hacked their way intoBaldur’s Gate 3’s rarest ending to find an alternative that is impossible to normally achieve. Other cutscenes, likethe fourth-wall breaking Karlach nightmare, have also only been triggered by loopholes, so there might still be plenty of secrets left in the year-old RPG.
After Baldur’s Gate 3, Larian says “the quality bar was set high” - now the studio’s figuring out “how to raise it even higher” with its next RPG.
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Kaan freelances for various websites including Rock Paper Shotgun, Eurogamer, and this one, Gamesradar. He particularly enjoys writing about spooky indies, throwback RPGs, and anything that’s vaguely silly. Also has an English Literature and Film Studies degree that he’ll soon forget.
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