In the fight against Grym, you can use all the help you can get. One fan took it to the extreme, kidnapping dozens of NPCs and bringing the entire game to its knees with the fight.
Baldur’s Gate 3 allows for quite a few unusual strategies. Wielding a gnome as an improvised weapon? Ending a boss fight by pushing the villain into an abyss in the middle of a conversation? All standard.
Now, one fan has discovered a truly unusual method of mastering the infamous boss fight in the Adamant Forge: He kidnapped 70 NPCs from Act 1 and threw them into the arena. Not only does this lead to glorious chaos, it also pushes the game to its limits.
Like an MMO raid
You can find the complete story, in the form of a battle diary, here on Reddit. We’ll summarize the most exciting findings and explain how to do it.
Got myself a 70 man raid team to fight Grym in honor mode
by
u/xehparr in
BaldursGate3
User xehparr explains the idea: Why should only four players face the powerful (optional) boss from Act 1? It would be much better if a horde of NPCs took the damage. Of course, they don’t come to fight voluntarily, but first have to be laboriously dragged into battle.
This requires a lot of effort and a lot of time – according to xehparr, it took him six hours to gather his horde. This tutorial, which also inspired xehparr, explains how to drag NPCs around using a strength potion and the “improvised weapon” function:
Even in the planned battles, a round can take an uncomfortably long time if the enemy AI takes its time. With over 70 characters involved, you can imagine how much patience you need as a player before you get to click again. Or, as Reddit user thatonemoze puts it in the thread:
Bro, you could cook a full three-course meal before it’s your characters’ turn.
xehparr then complains in the comments that he can’t stand the wait any longer. And, of course, the game itself quickly started to falter – it’s impressive that it didn’t crash immediately. Instead, Halsin’s AI shut down, in true bear fashion. He just forgot how to think for a moment. After restarting the game, however, the battle actually continued.
In the end, only the three characters of xehparr himself were left standing. Grym and the NPCs, on the other hand… rested on the ground for a while. The whole battle lasted an hour and a half and in the end, the main outcome was a good story. However, xehparr gained disappointingly few experience points, as most of the NPCs fell victim to the lava and therefore did not yield any XP. The studio has long been aware that Larian fans like to turn role-playing games completely upside down – and they support this with full intent. Divinity: Original Sin 1 and 2 already allowed for a multitude of exploits. Baldur’s Gate 3 has taken this to the next level. This fits in perfectly with the D&D template, where the only limit is the goodwill of the game master.
