Baldur's Gate 3 limits the number of corpses you can speak to by, um, decapitating them
Plus a cryptic clue about what Larian is making next.
Have you ever wondered why, when you're having a lovely stroll around the world of Baldur's Gate 3, there are so many bodies without heads lying around? No it's not because the inhabitants of the world have faulty necks - it's because developer Larian is doing something sneaky.
You see, offering people the ability to speak with any corpse via the spell Speak with Dead created a lot of work. It meant writers not only had to write lines for all the living people, but for the dead ones too. And okay, there's a limiting factor in how Speak with Dead only allows you to ask five questions, but that's still an array of questions to write answers for. And in a war-torn world filled with dead people... That's a lot of answers to write.
What to do? Simple, albeit gruesome: cut their heads off. "The trick that we use is [you can speak to] 'any dead that still has their head'," Vincke told Wizards of the Coast interviewer Todd Kenreck, in a really lovely interview actually. "So you will see a lot of decapitated people in the game - that's literally how we solved that."
Theirs is a wide-ranging conversation that touches on a number of topics, mostly relating to Dungeons & Dragons. They talked about why there's no Dispel Magic in the game, for example - in short: it was just too complicated.
But arguably the most ear-catching moment came when Vincke referred to what he and Larian were making next - their next game. Well, I say "talking about" but it was more what he didn't say which intrigued me.
Kenreck was asking Vincke about being inspired by Dungeons & Dragons-adjacent fantasy fiction series Dragonlance when growing up, and then what fiction he finds inspiring today. To which Vincke laughed and said, "You're asking me my next game - so I'm not going to answer that."
The suggestion, then, is that Vincke's next game at Larian is based on an existing fictional property of some kind, but which one?
We might find a clue in what he says next. "I've always had an interest in both sci-fi and fantasy, and then there's a bunch of other things, but when it comes to entertainment, those were always my two go-to things."
Apparently, he read voraciously when he was younger. "I just kept on reading and reading and reading - I over-read on fantasy." And he said this led to him being really picky about what fantasy he reads today. "I'm like, 'Ah no, I've seen that before,'" he said. "That's the problem with saturation of something that you love.
"But," he then added, "there's a couple of really good things out there. So, uh, yeah..." he trailed off with a coy smile, clearly not wanting to say any more. So what could Vincke be referring to?
Presumably whatever it is has to be big and exciting enough to base a game on. And also, would it really make sense for Larian to do another fantasy game after both the Divinity: Original Sin series and Baldur's Gate 3? I don't think so. And when you couple that thought with Vincke's apparent love of sci-fi, there's an obvious suggestion staring us in the face.
If it is a sci-fi fiction he's referring to, then, which sci-fi fiction could it be? Your guess is as good - and probably better - than mine.
Remember, we don't know anything about what Larian plans to make next, only that it is already at work on something. We also know that Vincke will move entirely onto that project now and leave Baldur's Gate 3 to other people on the team. After a short break, that is.
Baldur's Gate 3 arrives on PlayStation 5 tomorrow, 6th September, and I've been having a really good time with it. It's also coming to Xbox this year, although there's no more specific date.