Baldur’s Gate 3’s latest hotfix quietly removes artifacts of a cut storyline never meant to be heard

Baldur’s Gate 3’s Patch 8 was stuffed full of wonderful things, like 12 new subclasses and a photo mode, but once it was out some players stumbled into new dialogue they had never heard before. A chat with a certain corpse revealed a snippet of a storyline that didn’t actually exist anywhere else in the game. After some speculation over the last few weeks, Larian dropped a hotfix today that solves the mystery for good.

Tucked away in the patch notes for hotfix 31 is a fix that removes “some defunct dialogue that mistakenly made it into Minthara’s Speak with Dead dialogue in Patch 8.” Clips of the scene before it was removed have a lifeless Minthara revealing that she was going to be a mother—a story beat that apparently was never supposed to make it into the final game.

Many people suspected this was the case after a bunch of cut dialogue from other characters who mention Minthara’s baby was found in 2023. “Minthara with child,” Shadowheart says in the datamined dialogue, “Somehow I can’t picture her sitting around the campfire knitting baby booties.”

Nobody is quite sure how this would’ve come up. It’s possible your Tav would’ve been involved or that Larian wrote a whole Minthara arc we’ll never get to see. With its removal today, it’s pretty clear it snuck into Patch 8 on accident.

When Larian announced it would expand the endings in 2023, it said the team was “pretty strict” on what kind of things fit into the game. “If it isn’t good—if it isn’t fun to play—it doesn’t make it into the game,” it wrote.

Unused dialogue like Minthara’s can be fun to speculate about, but it doesn’t always mean something good was taken away. If Larian thought it wasn’t interesting, it probably wasn’t interesting. That said, I’d love to see the developers sit down and talk about all the stuff like this that made it far enough to be fully voice acted; if only to know why they didn’t think it worked for the story they wanted to tell.