“I had the severed head of Karlach, and I saw Scratch in the corner of the screen, and I wondered if he would play fetch,” Lua ‘Luality’ tells me in the middle of London, Ontario’s glamorous Hilton. We’re having a follow up conversation about Baldur’s Gate 3, the game that propelled the Brazilian streamer to Twitch stardom. Clocking in at just “four bunnies tall,” I didn’t take her for a vaguely murderous Tiefling slayer, but it turns out that Lua is, indeed, the reason that you can now play fetch with Scratch using Karlach’s head. And she’s not sorry, not at all – in fact, she’d happily behead more Baldur’s Gate 3 characters if given the chance.
“I threw the head over and he just sat there!” she tells me emphatically. “In that moment I finally understood how my parents felt all of their lives – I was like, this can’t be! I’m so disappointed, Scratch should be playing Fetch!” In her jovial frustration, she then penned a playful social media post to Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian, expressing that, while the DnD-themed RPG is easily one of the best PC games ever made, the lack of Karlach head-fetching was greatly distressing to her.
“It was absurd that in a game with so many options that Scratch wouldn’t play fetch with a severed head. So I showed the tweet as a joke to one of the developers I met when I went to Larian’s studio in Quebec, and they were like ‘huh, I know the developer that worked on Scratch’s fetching mechanics, maybe we can make something work.’ Then, from Patch 5, Scratch started playing fetch with severed heads and limbs, and lots of other objects.”
I don’t understand why Scratch plays fetch with the ball but refuses to fetch Karlach’s head?? @larianstudios please fix! pic.twitter.com/4nbJm7ZraZ
— Luality (@luality) August 31, 2023
Lua, however, hasn’t stopped there. When she’s not beating Elden Ring bosses on a dance mat or a drawing pad (yes, that’s her), she’s doing myriad Baldur’s Gate 3 challenge runs. Aside from her Dark Urge playthrough, she created MiniThara (a Deep Gnome inspired by the game’s infamous Drow companion) that continually stabbed a corpse in her camp and filled it with blood. Then, she defeated vampire lord Cazador by, erm, throwing rats at him. Just your average Friday night in Baldur’s Gate, I guess.
The latter was fixed in a later patch, but Lua notes that she “actually avoids exploits and things like this in Baldur’s Gate runs because [she] doesn’t want them to get fixed. If people have fun doing whatever they do, I don’t want to shine a light on it on a livestream in case it’s taken away.”
She recalls that “when they released the Honor Mode patch, one of the Larian developers reached out and said that the patch had a lot of ‘Lua fixes.’ I still don’t have a clear response on what that meant, but some of the Honor Mode boss skills sometimes felt like they were a direct counter to some of the challenge runs [I had done]. I don’t have confirmation, but I thought it was very suspicious…”
The real question is, however, does Lua feel any regret? She did, after all, behead a fan favorite character and throw her head for a dog to catch. “Well, I’m very happy that I can proudly say that my contribution to Baldur’s Gate 3 is getting Scratch to fetch severed limbs,” she smiles. “But at the same time I don’t like when people think I don’t like Karlach – it’s nothing personal. I personally think Larian doesn’t like Karlach because she’s the only companion you can decapitate.
“I just want to make it clear that, if I could cut all of the heads off of all the other companions, I would do that, and I would play fetch with Scratch using their heads as well.” At this point in the conversation, this writer started to back off very, very slowly, but to her knowledge, she still has her head. Crisis averted, sigh of relief.
If you’re looking for some Lua-style inspiration, we have a list of all the best Baldur’s Gate 3 mods to inject a little chaos into your next run. Alternatively, if you’re all about that min-maxing, here’s our guide to the best Baldur’s Gate 3 classes.
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