Baldur’s Gate 3 gets a surprise official cartoon to celebrate the PlayStation 5 release

Mashed — an animation channel on YouTube known for producing video game parodies — have released a new Baldur’s Gate 3 short in collaboration with Larian Studios, to jointly celebrate the game leaving early access on PC and launching on PS5.

This follows on from a previous BG3 cartoon collaboration between Mashed, Larian Studios, and PC Gamer back in June, which was shown as part of this summer’s PC Gaming Show at Not-E3.

This time around Wyll and Lae’zel have left the party — I’m guessing perhaps their voice actors had other commitments, since these cartoons feature the work of the official game VAs throughout, performing original dialogue written for the skits.

On the plus side, we’ve gained the company of lovely Karlach, who joins Astarion, Gale, and Shadowheart as they encounter a glowing portal that they speculate might lead to some sort of zeitgeisty multiverse crossover crisis setting. Or might just be the path out of early access. Or both. Who knows! You’ll have to watch the short and find out:

Judging by the comments on the video, I’m not the only Baldur’s Gate 3 fan who’d happily watch a whole series of non-canon comedy shenanigans like this starring everyone’s favourite band of plucky tadpole infectees. It’s like a Saturday morning cartoon for adults, with gags about Astarion gleefully murdering people and Karlach showing off her hot bod.

The voice actors are clearly having a ton of fun taking their characters even less seriously than usual, and we’re surely long overdue a new Dungeons & Dragons cartoon series, aren’t we? Damn, I’ve talked myself into it and now I want it so badly.

Baldur’s Gate 3 left early access on Steam on August 3rd, and was released on PlayStation 5 on September 6th. An Xbox Series X/S port is anticipated by the end of November.