Highlights
- Baldur's Gate 3 pays homage to beloved fantasy franchises like Avatar: The Last Airbender, including a hidden Easter egg referencing the show.
- Interacting with NPCs in the game can uncover fun Easter eggs, making the world of Baldur's Gate 3 feel more lively and immersive.
- With thousands of hours of content, Baldur's Gate 3 offers many secrets and references for players to discover, adding to the game's depth and replayability.
Baldur's Gate 3 has taken the gaming world by storm. While developer Larian Studios was already well known and beloved for its excellent Divinity: Original Sin 2, Baldur's Gate's tie to the Dungeons and Dragons franchise brought its newest game to a much wider audience, and its genre-upending size and depth has made it one of this year's stand-out titles. Baldur's Gate 3 is massive and its world is jam-packed with references to Larian's previous titles, Undertale, Blizzard games, and more. Among these many references is a hidden Easter egg referencing the beloved Nickelodeon cartoon Avatar: The Last Airbender.
Baldur's Gate3 is a worthy successor because it was a labor of love for its developers and was made with the concerns of both new and die-hard fans alike. The original Baldur's Gate games, developed by BioWare, are still among the most revered CRPG titles of all time, and their influence is still felt over 20 years later. Avatar: The Last Airbender has received similar reverence in its medium and is just as fun to watch today as it was when it came out. The franchise is getting a live-action adaptation on Netflix and has remained relevant despite ending over a decade ago. It makes sense then that Baldur's Gate 3 would pay homage to one of the most popular fantasy franchises released since its last entry.
Avatar: The Last Airbender's Running Cabbage Gag
In Avatar: The Last Airbender, there is a running gag about a traveling cabbage seller. He is first encountered by Aang and his friends in "The King of Omashu", the series' fifth episode. Outside the gates of the city, the group witnesses as the guards accuse the traveling merchant of bringing in rotten cabbages before launching the produce and cart into the valley below. He screams, "No! My cabbages!" Over the course of the series, the cabbage merchant repeatedly has his cart and the produce it contains destroyed, oftentimes during crucial story events and sometimes by Aang himself. While the merchant is never named, he has become beloved by series fans and is referenced in the sequel series, The Legend of Korra.
In Baldur's Gate 3, players may cross paths with a man known as Geezer Loryss. Geezer Loryss is seen standing next to a tipped-over cart with a box smashed next to it. Inside the box are cabbages. Loryss is complaining about the thieves who are presumably responsible for the cart's destruction. While talking to him normally is uneventful, if the player's class is monk, he'll remark that monks have done enough damage and will tell you to get away from his cabbages. Unfortunately, it does not seem like this encounter is a repeated one like in the show, though Baldur's Gate 3 DLC could amend this.
References in Baldur's Gate 3 Bring Its World To Life
While the cart of cabbages might have been enough to raise the alarms for some fans of Avatar: The Last Airbender, Geezer Loryss' comments about monks all but confirm that the destroyed cabbages are a deliberate reference to the show. References like this one have helped to make the world of Baldur's Gate 3 feel more lively. Interacting with seemingly inessential NPCs will sometimes uncover fun Easter eggs, and this reference's exclusivity to the monk class makes it a particularly deep cut. Geezer Loryss embodies the game's approach to Easter eggs. They are presented in a fun but unobtrusive and lore-friendly manner; fans of Avatar get a little chuckle, and those unfamiliar would give it no second thought.
Baldur's Gate3 does references right, and its Avatar: The Last Airbender Easter egg is one of the game's most fun ones. The size of the game means that many players will never stumble upon it, but for those that do, Geezer Loryss is a fun nod to another beloved fantasy franchise. Unavoidable, however, is Baldur's Gate 3's main menu Easter egg, which pays homage to Larian's own Swen Vincke. With thousands of hours of content for players to experience, Geezer Loryss is far from Baldur's Gate 3's only secret, and there are likely many left that players have to uncover.
Baldur's Gate 3 is out now on PC and is set to release on September 6, 2023, for PlayStation 5.
