GamesRPGBaldur’s Gate 3Larian finally throws its hands up as one 1,400-hour Baldur’s Gate 3 player beats every backup possible, including a magic fish, to doom the world and find new contentWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
GamesRPGBaldur’s Gate 3Larian finally throws its hands up as one 1,400-hour Baldur’s Gate 3 player beats every backup possible, including a magic fish, to doom the world and find new contentWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Larian Studios)
Nearly a year afterBaldur’s Gate 3’s full release, dedicated players are still unearthing rare interactions tied to fail-safes and backup fail-safes designed to prevent us from unwittingly breaking the game. The latest find comes from 1,400-hour sleuthProxy Gate Tactician, who found a lucky merchant, magic fish, spontaneous kobolds, and a true soft lock tied to some of the most important items in the whole RPG: the Netherstones.
The Netherstones are, uh,borrowedfrom the RPG’s three main villains and used in the fight against the big bad Netherbrain, so they’re pretty important - and since they’re late-game items, you should take the rest of this breakdown with a big ol’spoiler warning. Proxy Gate, who you may know for putting outa $500 bounty for an extremely rare Karlach cutscene, wanted to see what happens if you lose these items in frankly unthinkable ways, like chucking them into the sea or a soon-to-explode factory.
“I can only think of it being an Easter egg for someone intentionally trying to lose the game,” the investigator tells GamesRadar+. “It’s tough to find anything new in the game still, but backup NPCs are likely the most unexplored. There are several more backup NPCs I’ve found that aren’t well known about, and only appear in your game if the player killed specific NPCs.Some are backups of backups even.”
Losing the Netherstones under ordinary circumstances – well, ordinary compared to what we’re about to talk about, but still pretty unlikely – will usually prompt the Emperor himself to either remind you of the stones or transport them directly to your camp. That, or you’ll instantly get a game over if the stones are outright unrecoverable. But what if you were to, say, drop the stones in the undersea Iron Throne and then blow it up, making the area off-limits?
Unlocking The Secret Netherstone Fail-Safes in Baldur’s Gate 3 - YouTubeWatch On
Unlocking The Secret Netherstone Fail-Safes in Baldur’s Gate 3 - YouTube
Unlocking The Secret Netherstone Fail-Safes in Baldur’s Gate 3 - YouTube
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The Steel Watch Foundry, which also gets blown up later in the Act, has a similar solution to lost Netherstones, as Proxy Gate noted and as Larian gameplay scripter Mihail Kostov discussed in a recentdeep dive. Larian calls these progress-correcting mini-quests “boosters,” and one Steel Watch booster summons a squad of harmless Kobolds who’ve scavenged the Netherstones from the factory wreckage. Kill them and you’ll get the stones back – or you can let them escape and face a rare game over.
(Image credit: Larian)
Okay, smarty-pants. What if we just chuck the Netherstones into a different one-time area, like the Chult jungle tied to the Baldur’s Gate carnival genie’s lottery wheel, and then seal the path back?
It’s a fascinating example of the lengths Larian had to go to in order to support this degree of player freedom. Here’s another of my favorites:the worst hero in Baldur’s Gate 3 gets an apocalyptically bad secret endingafter breaking every failsafe in the RPG.
“I realized very quickly this was D&D”: Astarion actor Neil Newbon sniffed out Baldur’s Gate 3, or maybe Icewind Dale 3, and put in for 10 of the RPG’s 12 races mid-Final Fantasy 16.
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Cobra Kai season 6, part 2 review: “Returns to the sort of hard-hitting form that made it such a fan favorite in the first place”