Get ready for another multi-part Baldur’s Gate 3 saga, on my 12th playthrough of the game.
Once again, I saw scenes and places I’d not seen before.
Near the end of my write-up of my 11th playthrough of Baldur’s Gate 3, I set my goals for playthrough 12:
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Use the Adjustable Party Limit mod to include every character with a speaking role in the adventuring party. The idea was to listen to as much of the inter-character banter as I could.
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Romance Shadowheart, in order to experience her kissing sequences.
It turns out that I exceeded my expectations on both counts!
Let’s start with the banter.
In BG3, you form a group of characters who adventure with you. In games of this sort, it’s common for the other characters to exchange banter with each other.
Here’s an example of an exchange between Karlach and Lae’zel. I’ve included captions because I’m not sure of the visibility of the text above the characters’ heads for people reading this post on their cell phone:
The banter can be serious, playful, or offer some exposition of the game’s story:
Since a given banter exchange usually only occurs once in the game, I can’t include any of the audio. By the time a given bit of banter occurs, it’s too late for me to start audio/video capture. I can only share screenshots of the characters speaking.
That’s a shame. What you can’t tell from just the text is how smooth these spoken exchanges are. I know that, in reality, the actors recorded their lines separately. Yet you can’t tell. I attribute this to the skill of the actors, the directors, and the audio engineers.
Consider the above exchanges, between Karlach and Lae’zel, and later between Minsc and Astarion. They can only occur between those characters if they’re both in the party.
- Since Karlach and Lae’zel are typically melee fighters, you might not be inclined to include them both in a four-character party as they’d fulfill the same role.
- You can only have Minsc in your party if you make the series of game decisions that leads to Minsc becoming one of the playable characters.
That was my motivation to make playthrough 12 a “banter run.” With all eleven playable characters in the party, I’d have the greatest chance of hearing the available inter-character lines. This exchange, for example, serves as a reminder that, in the early part of the game, Lae’zel and Shadowheart dislike each other.
All of the above exchanges are between two characters. I was surprised to see that there were some exchanges that occurred between three characters. Here’s an exchange that includes Shadowheart, Lae’zel, and Gale:
These “3-ways” seem to be structured so that the last remark, from that third character, could be omitted if they were not in the party:
When it comes to plot exposition, the following exchange caused my jaw to drop. If you’ve played the game before, it may surprise you too. Bear in mind that this exchange is only visible if Wyll, Lae’zel, and Gale are all in your party. Since both Wyll and Gale are spellcasters, this is not likely if a party consists of only four characters.
Most exchanges consist of three or four lines, but some have only two:
Less frequently, the exchange might have five lines:
There are also exchanges that depend on game events. I was surprised to discover that the banter acknowledged that Amaranth and Lae’zel were dating. (I’ll discuss the story of Amaranth’s relationships in my next BG3 post.)
After Amaranth and Shadowheart later confirmed that they were in a stable relationship, we see Halsin trying to share his way into it. It’s not entirely out of place, for reasons I’ll get into in my next post.
Simple teasing, I suppose. The problem with that particular exchange was that, at least in my playthrough, when the game ran out of phrases for the characters to say, it repeated that above exchange over and over again. It became annoying after a while.
Some locations have their own exchanges. Here’s one that only occurs if the characters are standing just outside the residence of a skilled necromancer.
With all these screen captures, you may get the idea that I captured every exchange in a screenshot. That’s not the case. Often I’d hear a character speak, and I wouldn’t be able to move the camera in time to see the phrase over their head. Here’s an example of an exchange in which I missed the first phrase.
About 3/4ths of the way through the playthrough, I discovered that the banter was being stored in the combat log. When you read this, bear in mind that everything is being displayed with the most recent at the top; you’ll have to read the exchange from the bottom up.
Here you see four sets of lines, each spoken a few minutes apart:
- The bottom-most one is the frequently-repeated Halsin-Shadowheart exchange that I mentioned before.
- The next is a comment by “The Emperor” (whoever they are!) that leads to a side quest.
- The one after that is an isolated remark from Karlach, suggesting that we meet an old friend, Dammon.
- Finally, at the top, there’s a banter exchange between Shadowheart and Wyll.
Combat logs are not a great way to preserve banter conversations. Aside from getting used to reading each sentence in reverse order, the logs are not preserved if you leave the playthrough (e.g., to turn off the PS5). Also, I had no way to “copy-and-paste” on a console, so the only way to preserve the logs was through screen capture.
With all that said, the combat logs let me see the text of a conversation when I wasn’t quick enough to get a screenshot of a phrase.
Wow! All these screenshots! Does this mean I experienced every banter exchange possible in the game?
For one thing, some conversations were cut short. For story reasons, Shadowheart sometimes experiences a stabbing pain in her hand. When this happens, the banter ends, whether or not she was a part of it. Here’s an example of a dialog that I’d would have liked to have heard:
Another limit is that, as we’ve seen above, some conversations only occur in response to certain game events. For example, there are exchanges for each of the potential romances in BG3. I couldn’t experience the banter for (e.g.) a relationship with Karlach.
I’m not likely to try to repeat this effort.
For one thing, it’s nothing compared to what other players have done. They’ve gone into the audio files of the game and listened to every one of the thousands of lines of dialog. You can read the results of their efforts on the BG3 wiki. A quick glance tells me there are many exchanges I did not hear.
In fact, they’ve heard lines that weren’t in the released game. After Larian prepared all the audio files, changes were still being made in the game. Whole plotlines were removed; for example, Minthara’s pregnancy.
Also, as I’ll discuss in a later blog post, the “Adjust Party Limit” mod has some pitfalls of its own. I’d rather not juggle 11-14 characters again.
In my next BG3 blog post: Hugs, kisses, sex, and a five-way.