Baldur’s Gate 3 Has So Many Headless Bodies To Stop You From Talking To Them

Larian Studios CEO and the creative director of Baldur’s Gate 3, Swen Vincke, confirmed in a recent interview with Wizard of the Coast’s Todd Kenreck that they added so many headless bodies in-game to ensure players couldn’t converse with them (timestamp: 19:30). This creative decision was made to tackle an issue Vincke saw in Larian’s previous titles that “didn’t really fully support the features.”

For starters, this may sound weird since this is basically the developers limiting players’ options. However, implementing a feature like that in a game with so many characters and dead bodies is nigh impossible. The “Speak with Dead” spell has been an enemy of dungeon masters for a long time as it allows the user to talk with the dead.

In the case of a real-life DnD campaign, the dungeon master can make something on the whim, but it is still a difficult task to ensure that it doesn’t take away the essence of world-building. Doing that in a game would be unimaginably difficult as developers would need to add dialogues, secrets, and lore behind every lifeless cranium. But since the spell exists, Vincke wanted the game to fully support every feature it had.

I learned a long time ago that our first games were very ambitious but we didn’t really manage to fulfill the ambitions within the game, because we didn’t really fully support the features,” says Swen Vincke.

If the game has a feature, players should be able to use it to its full extent. So, if you have the Speak with Dead spell, then there should be no reason why you can’t talk to every single dead body, provided that it has a head to speak with. That was the solution Larian Studios came up with, and in this way, the developers have made players feel as if they can do everything possible by limiting their options.

From the criticisms on those games, I learned that it’s really important that if you put a feature in there, you have to go full monty, which means you can speak with animals; you can speak with every animal. You can speak with dead, you can speak with, well, the trick that we use is any dead that still has their head. You will see a lot of decapitated people in the game, but that’s literally how we solved that,” says Swen Vincke

So the next time you see a decapitated body, it’s not because the game doesn’t want you to uncover some dark hidden secrets, but more because it just doesn’t want you to converse with it. Nevertheless, there should be more than enough bodies with a head to keep you entertained when you need someone to talk to. 

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Baldur’s Gate 3 was released on PC on August 3, 2023, with the PlayStation 5 release on September 6, 2023. The game has since seen incredible reviews and has encapsulated hundreds of thousands of fans across platforms. It has also been confirmed to arrive on Xbox this year, with the Mac release coming later this month.