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Baldur's Gate 3 has an ending so rare that only a few dozen players have discovered it, and I'm struggling to find even the most cursory evidence that it even exists.
This article contains spoilers for Baldur's Gate 3's endings.
In a new set of infographics celebrating the RPG's first anniversary, Baldur's Gate 3 developer Larian revealed some of the game's most popular endings. 3.3 million players, for instance, took down the Netherbrain, while a further 1.8 million betrayed the Emperor and took the brain's power for themselves. Somehow, nearly 330,000 players convinced Orpheus to continue his existence as a mind flayer, but it's the fourth ending that Larian chose to highlight that's really thrown me.
Larian says that a measly 34 players "chose to kill themselves at the end of the game." That's because, while playing as Avatar Lae'zel - the version of the Gith Warrior that's cast as the main player character - Githyanki god-queen Vlaakith rejected Lae'zel's bid to Ascend. Ascension is a fancy word for getting chewed up and spat out by Vlaakith, who's also a Lich, but it's something that many Githyanki strive to achieve anyway. After getting as far as the Lich Queen's throne only to be turned away, it's not too unlikely to assume that Lae'zel would feel unable to go on. "You read that right," Larian insists.
Still, that reality appears to be unlikely enough that, of the millions of playthroughs of Baldur's Gate 3 over the past 12 months, only a few dozen of them ended here. There are a handful of reasons that might contribute to that – Larian's stats also reveal that only 7% of players went with Avatar playthroughs, and Astarion, Gale, and Shadowheart dominate as Origin characters. By contrast, according to the only stats we have on the full cast makeup, Lae'zel is so unpopular that former Baldur's Gate developers have stepped in to speak up for her.
Then there's the narrative aspect. Triggering the Ascension ending requires players to go along with Vlaakith's plan and kill Orpheus at the end of the game. Presumably, to get Vlaakith to reject Lae'zel's Ascension, you'd have to go along with that plan for hours, and then decide to spare Orpheus at the last moment. After that, you'd have to reach Vlaakith's chamber - in an ending that appears to have only been added in January - get rejected, and then decide to cap off a campaign that likely lasted 100 hours or more by quietly killing your main character. It's an unlikely series of twists and turns that would easily whittle down the numbers.
Sadly, I can't even be entirely sure that this is actually how all of this works, because this ending appears to be so rare that I can't find anything but the most cursory mention of it online. The only reference I can spot is a single line mined for the Baldur's Gate 3 wiki, which reads: "We defeated the Netherbrain - but Vlaakith rejected Lae'zel's bid for ascension, as she hadn't killed Orpheus."
Even that, however, doesn't necessarily guarantee this ending, as it still depends on you playing as Avatar Lae'zel and deciding to kill yourself. For now, I guess I'll just have to take Larian's word for it, but I'd be interested in actually seeing the ending play out - though I'm not offering the kind of bounty that some Baldur's Gate 3 investigators are handing out for certain scenes.
I guess when you've got 17,000 endings, some of them are going to be pretty well-hidden.
