Baldur’s Gate 3 balances Speak with Dead in a hilariously gruesome way

In an interview, Baldur’s Gate 3 director Swen Vincke revealed a game design reason for all those decapitated bodies, and it relates to one of the game’s most useful spells.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is set in a dark world where danger lurks around every corner.

Within that, players will often come across dead bodies, many of which can be spoken to so long as you have a party member with access to the spell “Speak with Dead.” While some won’t have much to say – especially if you’re responsible for their demise – others can reveal helpful information.

Now, Larian Studios CEO and Baldur’s Gate 3 director Swen Vincke has revealed a surprising and gruesome way his team chose to balance out that spell – and it helps explain all those headless corpses players have noticed across the Sword Coast.

Baldur’s Gate 3 lets players speak to any body – so long as they still have a mouth

In an interview with Wizards of the Coast’s Todd Kenreck, Vincke explained the simple way Larian balanced Speak with Dead. In addition to players getting a maximum of five questions, the developers included another little trick to make it so not every body needed to have something to say.

“The trick we used is any dead that still has their head,” he told Kenreck, who called it Larian’s “cheat.”

Given how many bodies can be found in Baldur’s Gate 3, it makes perfect sense that Larian would need a “cheat” like this. There’s already so much dialogue in the game that having to add even more for the many, many bodies found throughout the world would have been unrealistic.

This also explains why so many bodies in the game are missing their heads. Sure, it’s not a surprise that in a brutal wartorn world there’d be some decapitations, but the game definitely has more headless corpses than you’d expect.

The rest of the interview is also worthwhile for Baldur’s Gate fans, as Vincke shares plenty of great insights, such as the reason why all your companions have been so thirsty and his thoughts on raising the game’s current level cap in the future.

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