Content warning: Partial nudity.
This is a follow-up to my write-up of my playthrough 22 of Baldur’s Gate 3. To spare you from having to click on the link, the purpose of that playthrough was to:
- Set up some photography for my eventual playthrough 15 fanfic. This required the use of the Wings Unlocked mod.
- Use all the Evolved companion series of mods available on a console.
- See how the game handled a full Dark Urge character in a relationship with an Ascended Dark Astarion.
The result:
- Success. I have at least one game save to use as a “photography stage.”
- Mostly succeeded. Something went wrong (I’m not sure what) and I did not fulfill the requirements for the Evolved Sazza mod.
- Failure. The game crashed near the end.
The reason for the post you’re reading? I figured out a way to turn result 3 from “failure” to “mostly successful.”
I had a thought. I knew the reason for the crash was one of the mods I was using or, perhaps, the interaction of two or more of the mods. Turning off a mod mid-playthrough is problematic. A mod makes changes to the game’s save file. Remove the mod, and the program may not be able to interpret the contents of the save file correctly.
What if the problem were the display of graphics elements from a mod? The game was crashing in the middle of a cutscene. The mods I’d never used in a previous playthrough, and had graphics visible in a cutscene, were Wings Evolved and Dark Urge – Slayer Equipments and Spells. I couldn’t turn the mods off without risking a crash, but what about removing the gear that generated the custom graphics?
The Slayer Equipment mod included custom underwear. So:
Result: I got to the end of playthrough 22.
To make it clear, the characters did not fight the final battle in the nude. After the characters got out of the water, I put their gear back on.
I reached the end of the story. I saw what happens when the Darknesses of the Urge and Astarion unite.
No, I’m not going to spoil it for you. Everyone likes a surprise.
Notes
I have some more observations about playthrough 22, just from getting through to the end.
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As I’ve gone through my playthrough 21 (still in progress), I saw that I’d only used a small part of what the Evolved companions could do. The final combat in this playthrough confirmed that. Just one of these Evolved companions has a lot of interesting abilities.
Just one example: Here we see Evolved Bernard cast a Globe of Invulnerability to protect the party. (Notice how Mizora, to the right, cowers in the Globe.) Assuming that I find that the Evolved mods don’t crash playthrough 21, I may explore just having one of these mods active in future playthroughs. When you have too many of them, none of them get a chance to shine.
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A specific observation: At the final battle, using Evolved Shovel‘s shape-shifting ability caused the game to crash. I dealt with it simply, by not changing her shape.
I know from playthrough 21 that a shape-changing Shovel doesn’t generally crash. This is probably just another mod conflict in playthrough 22.
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Another bug: For some reason, in any of the repeats I did, Tusk stayed behind and refused to join us in the final battle.
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At the approach to the final battle, you face a bunch of enemies. If you go straight ahead, you have to fight all of them.
After a few playthroughs, I learned of a different approach, which I’ll simply say is “to the right.” You still have to fight, but this bypasses about half the enemies along the “straight ahead” path.
More recently, I heard of a path “on the left.” I never used it before. This time I gave it a try. It’s much easier than the “straight” or “right” paths.
If you take the path to the left, you get to meet Tilly and Robyn. They seem surprised that you’re not going to kill them.
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You take the straight path, the path to the right, or the path to the left. I always thought that if you leave any enemies behind in any of those paths, they just stayed there.
This time, I learned that they don’t stay there. If you split the party and have someone race ahead, the ones left behind can see the destruction of the remaining enemies along those paths.
A shame. I was hoping to get an optometrist recommendation from this fellow, but now they’re just a flaming pile of goo, along with their friends. I assume this isn’t news for a large fraction of BG3 players, but this is the first time I’ve seen it.
The Partial Failure
Why did I say that ultimately my playthrough 22 was “mostly successful”?
As I said, I saw the culmination of the Dark Urge story.
I had a subsidiary goal: To restore the game from a save, and have Helia choose to reject the Dark Urge. The purpose of doing this was to see the Evolved creatures walking around the camp during the last scene of the game, the way they do in camp during the main game.
That failed.
If you choose to romance Dark Astarion, there’s a sequence in which you and he discuss future plans.
Then you head to the final sequence.
And then:
I repeated this on the PS5 and the Mac. I tried turning off the problematic mods (which I can do on the Mac, but not the PS5). The result was always a game crash.
Hopefully I’ll get to see the Evolved creatures cavort at the end of my playthrough 21.
