Baldur’s Gate 3 is no doubt a massive game with sprawling storylines, side quests, and secret encounters that only a small percentage of players are likely to stumble upon, but one player has discovered an interaction with Karlach that sees your Tiefling companion seemingly break the fourth wall and speak directly to you, the player.
Baldur’s Gate 3 content creator Chubblot shared a video of the uncommon encounter with the cheery barbarian to YouTube. During the interaction, Karlach asks to try a technique she learned from one of Zariel’s clerics while in Avernus – a painless method of telling truth from lie. If you agree to letting her practice on you, she asks to stare into your eyes while she questions you – but in a jarring twist, the camera angle shifts and Karlach is no longer staring at your Tav, but instead through the screen at the player.
The questions are relatively innocuous to start with, asking for your name (although she gets a weird feeling when you provide your character name), but quite quickly take a turn into the fourth wall-breaking. She explains that she can see the “grand design,” controlled by a “hand that decides,” before asking if you know “how this all ends” and if you’ve done this before. In what might be a cheeky nod to the previous Baldur’s Gate games, you can respond that you’ve journeyed to Baldur’s gate “once or twice.”
While this on its own might seem like a character just having an existential crisis (relatable), Karlach goes on to express her jealousy, given she is stuck “forever here…in these hundred hours, or less, or more,” clearly a direct reference to the overall runtime of the game – definitely more if you’re busy getting sidetracked by every single thing you see, like many of us.
The intense interaction begins to even out as she says there’s just one thing she must know – “you’re having fun, aren’t you?” – and if you respond that you are, which you obviously should so you don’t break her Infernal Engine heart, she replies, “we did it! We’ve done it, everyone!” This feels almost like the Larian devs themselves asking you, the player, if you’re enjoying Baldur’s Gate 3, which based on the continued hype almost two months post-release, it’s safe to say a fair amount of players are. After this, Karlach seems to snap out of her creepy trance and return to her usual self – which is equally intense, but in a much more joyful and wholesome way. The camera angle also immediately flips back to the usual interaction angle, ending the encounter (and intense eye contact).
It seems so far, no player has yet triggered the conversation organically – Chubblot themselves used a back-end trick to trigger it, so there’s no clear way to access this interaction with the happy-go-lucky tiefling as of yet. The voice actor for Karlach, Samantha Béart, took to Twitter to repost the video and said she would talk about it more once players did find it the good old-fashioned way, rather than “yanking the file and getting confused about context.”
It looks like based on Béart’s tweet, Baldur’s Gate 3 players may yet find this conversation – although how long it’ll take given fans continue to find new side missions, characters, and Easter eggs nearly two months on is up in the air.
In the meantime, Baldur’s Gate 3 is set to receive a third major patch this weekend (Larian’s calling it a “big one”), and the voice cast is also gearing up for the release of a pre-recorded Dungeons & Dragons live-play one shot with the High Rollers team. The hype for this RPG continues to build, and as more players continue to uncover secret conversations, small references, and new facets of the title, we’ll likely see that hype sustain for some time to come.
Lead Image Credit: Larian Studios
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