Last week, Larian Studios celebrated the anniversary of Baldur’s Gate 3’s 2023 launch by revealing some stats and telemetry they’ve gathered of the past year, including the most- and least-chosen outcomes among the role-playing game’s vast player base. But there is one ending that no one has seen yet, and that’s because the choices leading to it are so contradictory it won’t trigger.
YouTuber SlimX discovered this strange ending by rooting through the game files. First, here’s what they found, with a warning that there are spoilers from here on for the conclusion of Baldur’s Gate 3. We’ve timestamped it to the reveal of the secret and unattainable ending.
So this needs a bit of explanation. The normal ending is already exceedingly rare, as only 34 people, playing as Lae’zel, chose to kill themselves after Vlaakith — the Lich queen of the githyanki (Lae’zel’s race) — rejected their plea for ascension after killing Orpheus as a Mind Flayer. The rejection has its canonical reasons that are quite specific; basically Vlaakith has no use an illithid (the Mind Flayers) as they have no soul to consume.
In the unattainable ending, Lae’zel becomes a Mind Flayer and Vlaakith grants ascension anyway, despite Lae’zel’s form.
So why did Larian ditch this ending?
As fans have pointed out, this ending was likely scrubbed because its canonically contradictory. Even though the accessible ending (again, seen only by 34) suggests, in the epilogue with Withers, that Lae’zel retained some form of a soul after turning into a Mind Flayer, it’s simply not established that Vlaakith would or could know that, which is probably why this scene was rendered inaccessible should the player make that transformation.
So it sounds like Larian was covering all their bases on all possible outcomes until a continuity editor took a look and realized they’d have a big contradiction if Lae’zel ascended as a Mind Flayer (on the back of a dragon, no less). As it is, she can only ascend if she stays in her Githyanki form and follows all of Vlaakith’s commands to a T.
Bottom line: An ultra-rare Baldur’s Gate 3 scene was datamined out of the game files, enjoy. You stand a better chance of completing the game on Honour Mode (just 12% out of more than a million attempts) than seeing this in normal play.
Featured image via Larian Studios
