This literally face-melting Baldur's Gate 3 glitch is so horrifying that it puts even Orin the Red to shame

Baldur's Gate 3
(Image credit: Larian Studios)

Last week, Baldur's Gate 3 patch 4 dropped, bringing more than 1,000 fixes to Larian's CPRG. As with any patch that large, however, there's a pretty good chance it'll mess with your mods, which is exactly the fate that befell one player - with horrifying results.

Taking to the game's subreddit in the wake of patch 4, KingFreakKelo shows off an unfortunate interaction between some part of the update and one of their mods. The video starts off pretty bad, but I've seen the whole 'missing face' glitch before - it might look a bit gross, but if you were around for Assassin's Creed Unity, you'll know that eyes and mouths stick around, as they're animated differently to face-flesh.

Oh golly a new patch! I hope my mods didn't break anyth--- from r/BaldursGate3

Unfortunately, as the video progresses, it becomes clear that the issue isn't that the face is missing, it's that it's in the process of actively falling off. As the user flicks through the character creation screen options, each face and neck literally sloughs clear of the skull in a horribly liquid mass of cheek and forehead skin. To make matters worse, the de-skulled flesh bag that was once a face just kind of hangs around at torso level, complete with some truly dreadful physics that means that it wobbles back and forth as the character gets moved around.

It's a graphical glitch so disturbing that I immediately thought of Baldur's Gate 3 serial killer Orin the Red, who carves her way mercilessly through the game's third act, and also plays with some slightly-less-literal face-changing magic. On reflection, however, I realized that Orin tends to opt more for dismembering than face-removal, and while that's bad news for certain circus entertainers, it means that she hardly holds a candle to just how grim this glitch is.

Baldur's Gate 3 players are sharing the game's rarest and best-hidden magical items

Ali Jones
News Editor

I'm GamesRadar's news editor, working with the team to deliver breaking news from across the industry. I started my journalistic career while getting my degree in English Literature at the University of Warwick, where I also worked as Games Editor on the student newspaper, The Boar. Since then, I've run the news sections at PCGamesN and Kotaku UK, and also regularly contributed to PC Gamer. As you might be able to tell, PC is my platform of choice, so you can regularly find me playing League of Legends or Steam's latest indie hit.