Baldur’s Gate 3 is a bottomless pit. A mod for the 2023 Game of the Year RPG brings back several NPCs and more than 1,000 lines of dialogue that Larian Studios never used. While Larian looks toward the next Divinity, the modding community keeps digging up new secrets hidden in the game’s files.

Just when you think every possible angle about Baldur’s Gate 3 has already been covered, reality hits you all over again. And it is not only because the game has effectively become Larian Studios’ most recognizable and painstakingly crafted project. We all know its development cycle was long and demanding, and that when the first full version finally launched in August 2023 after Early Access, a substantial amount of content had to be cut.

Some of that material slowly made its way back through updates and patches released for the 2023 GOTY winner. But if datamining and mod-based restoration can be seen as a form of video game archaeology, then one user has now unveiled the biggest “find” in this field so far: a mod that restores scenes, NPCs, and more than 100 conversations that had never been seen before.

A Mod That Feels Like a Baldur’s Gate 3 “Director’s Cut”

The “archaeologist” behind this discovery is the modder known as ‘HyperspaceTowel’. Under the title Early Access Scenes Restored on Nexusmods, this fan has invested a great deal of time in salvaging and reintroducing a significant portion of content that Larian had to discard before launch, and which was later not selected for official inclusion, unlike certain features such as recruiting Minthara without mods.

The file uploaded to the well-known site represents months of work examining the game’s data, recovering dialogue lines and NPCs that had been “detached” from the scripts, and reinserting them for players to experience. Among these restored elements is material that makes the mod resemble a kind of “director’s cut”: new camp conversation scenes, non-playable characters that were present in some Early Access builds but ultimately removed, such as Lotan, the tiefling child encountered in Act One. There are even additional romance possibilities between companions, including one that never made it into the final game between Karlach and Gale.

Even More Content Still Lies Hidden in Baldur’s Gate 3

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of these additions is that a large amount of content removed by Larian Studios from Baldur’s Gate 3 still remains buried in the code, including smaller quests. These have not yet been restored because the goal is to avoid disrupting the game’s organic progression structure. Even so, it is remarkable that two and a half years after release, fragments of unseen material are still present. It should also be noted that much of the content in this mod features less refined visual and audio quality compared to the final game, although HyperspaceTowel’s work is fully compatible with other mods that include fixes.

This also helps explain why Baldur’s Gate 3 takes up such an enormous amount of disk space, nearly 150 GB compared to other RPGs, and not only because of its technical polish or environments that can be explored from a classic top-down view or near third-person perspective. We must also factor in the 170,000 lines of spoken dialogue, along with an unknown number of additional lines still hidden, more than a thousand of which are included in this mod. The best part is that you do not need any extra libraries to install and use it, although starting a new game is recommended to see everything and to prevent issues with an existing playthrough.

Source: 3djuegos