I didn’t particularly want a Bard in my 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Baldur’s Gate 3 party. I have two Bards in my current Dungeons & Dragons party (it’s a big one), and neither of them really do anything. Oꦿo🌜h Bardic Inspiration, yay. Are you going to do it again next turn?
This thought was compounded by a few things in Baldur’s Gate 3. Firstly, I still can’t work out exactly who I want in my party with their current setups, let alone find room for a Bard I don’t really want. Additionally, my colleague James Troughton felt utterly useless i🐼n theꦍir playthrough as a Bard, so why would I respec my companions, who are currently incredi﷽bly useful, into a class that’s not only boring, but also unhelpful?
There’s only one reason to do that: to see how much care and attention 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Larian Studios has put into this game. I heard 🌠rumours online about Bardified companions and had to see something for myself.
If you respec any charac𒐪ter as a Bard, they gain access to Vicious Mockery. This cantrip does a little bit of damage to opponents 𝕴and gives them Disadvantage if they fail a save, but that’s not the real reason to use it. The real reason to use it is to hurl a load of profanities at whatever beast you’re facing.
Different types of Dungeons & Dragons players will tackle this differently. Some (and if I picked a Bard, this would be my choice) would just hurl a c-bomb or bunch of other appropriate swear words at their foe.✅ Some will go the complete opposite and just say, “I cast Vicious Mockery,” with no flavour or roleplaying. Finally, there are the really creative types who will come up with a hyper-specific insult that is somehow not profane in the slightest, but the most cutting and incisive thing you’ve ever heard, and you almost take second-hand psychic damage in embarrassment.
It seems that Larian’s writers sit firmly in that third group. Vicious Mockery comes with a long list of insults that fee♕l incredibly personal to the character casting the spell. These lines are not used for anything else in the game, they’re not recycled, they’re specifically written in case you respec any character as a Bard. Astarion has my favourite lines (“Is that your face? My word…”), and works thematically as a Bard, b๊ut you’ll have to respec all the characters to check them out for yourselves.
Of course, there are a couple of other ways to access Vicious Mockery. For instance, you can gain iꦍt if you take the Magic Initiate feat, but it’s a spell that is iconic to the Bard 🅘class. Most of us don’t want a Bard in our party, so you can always access these lines this way, but it feels like a waste of a useful level-up slot. I just embraced save-scumming to try it out.
However, Larian doesn’t stop there. Respecing Gale as a Rogue causes him to worry about the legality of his thievery, and Karlach similarly bemoans bei♔ng too tall for all this sneaking. Larian has thought of every possibility, every decision you might possibly make in your playthrough, and has had the forethought to design things for it. There’s a Yak that tells 💛you it has seen the entirety of history if you cast Talk To Animals on it. Larian thought of every eventuality, and the world of Baldur’s Gate 3 feels handcrafted because of it.
So much of this comes down to design decisions and a meticulo🌱us attention to detail, but it’s brought to lifeꦉ by the voice actors, who are excellent throughout. You can’t help but think that they had so much fun recording these fish-out-of-water lines, as well as indulging their profane creativity when dealing out some Vicious Mockery in the recording booth. Respecing your characters shows exactly how much thought Larian put into this game, and it’s exactly what makes it an anomaly of modern gaming.