There are a lot of easter eggs and oddities in Baldur’s Gate 3 and it seems like there’s plenty left to uncover yet. For instance, one dataminer has just managed to trigger a dialogue scene in which bestest barbarian Karlach becomes aware she’s a character in a game and looks right through the screen into your soul.
It begins with Karlach suggesting she try something she learned from a cleric of Zariel, a technique for looking into someone’s eyes and determining whether they’re telling the truth or not. Things go awry almost immediately when she stops looking at the character, and instead stares at the player.
If you play along with her questions, Karlach gets more than she bargained for, and has a glimpse of reality. “I see… a great web,” she says. “Intersecting lines—permutations—and behind them, chaos. And then the hand that decides: yes, no. But it barely knows itself.” What’s more, she sees her own place in that web. “I’m stuck here, forever. In these tangled lines, in these hundred hours, or less, or more…”
More than a hundred hours for those of us on our second playthroughs, that’s for sure. Karlach finishes by seeming to embody the developers for a second. “You’re having fun, aren’t you?” she asks the player directly. You’re free to answer in several different ways, but if you care enough to make it to this point I can only assume you’re having plenty of fun. I know I am.
It feels fitting for a scene like this to happen in a Baldur’s Gate game. After all, Baldur’s Gate 2 had a party of adventurers who had been turned to stone you could rescue and give a quest to who would then try to double-cross you, fail, and reload their save. Not to mention poke lines like Xzar’s “Stop touching me!” and Jaheira’s “Yes, oh omnipresent authority figure?” (Karlach has one in Baldur’s Gate 3 when you on her, sometimes saying, “Don’t. Poke. The Karlach.”)
This Baldur’s Gate 3 easter egg scene was uncovered and posted to YouTube by Chubblot, who also posted a fuller version of the scene showing the outcome of every dialogue option. Interestingly, when they first posted it to Twitter, assuming it was cut content, Karlach’s voice actor Samantha Béart responded to explain that it’s still in the game. “Congrats on finding this,” she wrote, “perhaps I’ll talk about it when someone triggers this organically (rather than yanking the file and then getting confused about context)”.
Guess we’ll just have to bring Karlach along in every playthrough until we find out how to trigger this dialogue then. That won’t really be a problem, she came in top of our ranking of Baldur’s Gate 3 party members after all.