Highlights
- A glitch in Baldur's Gate 3 allows players to turn a mid-game boss, Balthazar, into a sheep, making the battle easier and more amusing.
- The glitch can be triggered by casting Polymorph on Balthazar in the first chamber of the Gauntlet of Shar, and the sheep form persists throughout the game's remaining cutscenes.
- The glitch can be exploited to defeat Balthazar early on, avoiding a more challenging fight later in the game.
One Baldur's Gate 3 player has recently stumbled upon an unusual glitch that makes one of the RPG's most threatening mid-game bosses significantly less menacing. And though their discovery technically adds to the list of known Baldur's Gate 3 bugs, the glitch itself is not so much harmful as hilarious.
Warning! Act 2 spoilers for Baldur's Gate 3 ahead.About halfway through the second act of Baldur's Gate 3, the adventuring party will meet a creepy character called Balthazar. The game presents players with multiple opportunities to take on this boss across a variety of locations, but all of them lead to fairly difficult battles. In fact, as a level 8 Necromancer constantly surrounded by a battalion of undead monstrosities, many will find Balthazar to be the biggest challenge that they have encountered at this point of the game's campaign.
Nevertheless, Reddit user mist1e recently discovered a way to make Balthazar much less threatening, both in terms of combat and overall presentation. They did so by casting Polymorph on the Necromancer in the very first chamber of Baldur's Gate 3's Gauntlet of Shar where he can be encountered. "I thought this might be a clever way to start the fight," the player explained. But much to their surprise, none of the surrounding NPCs appeared to be bothered by Balthazar turning into a sheep. What's more, the necromancer retained his wooly form that normally expires after four turns even after the player cleared the room.
Intrigued by this peculiar turn of events, the fan decided to make a save and see how the quest plays out if they continue playing along with Balthazar's plot after massacring his minions. This led them to discover that the glitch persisted throughout the Gauntlet of Shar with some rather hilarious results, showing an ominous sheep continuing its conspiracy to kidnap Nightsong across the remaining cutscenes taking place in this location.
The boss finally regained his form at the end of this section of the quest, prompting the player to reload their earlier save and defeat the unsuspecting sheep in its starting location. Doing so is far easier than having to kill Balthazar later on during the second act of Baldur's Gate 3 because the fight with him gets more challenging the longer players postpone it.
As for the reason behind this glitch, it would appear that only the final Balthazar cutscene in the Gauntlet of Shar clears his Transmutation status effects, which should normally happen at the start of every dialogue. Even if Larian addresses this bug in a future update, Polymorph should still be a smart way to initiate this Baldur's Gate 3 boss fight. Namely, the encounter normally starts with Balthazar casting Haste on himself and dishing out some severe punishment before the player gets to react, which is something that he cannot do as a sheep.
Baldur's Gate 3 is out now for PC with a PS5 version coming September 6 and an Xbox version also in development.
