So, we were playing Baldurs Gate 3 recently and came to a point where our Warlock PC could use his Speak with Animals ability to talk to a giant spider <shudder>. My long-honed bloggers instincts told me to take a screenshot, but that also meant looking at the screen, which my husband had already warned against “Errr, don’t watch this dialogue!”. Conversations are multi-player in that the non-active players can choose to “listen in”, and such evesdropping can occur at some distance so I wasn’t near and hadn’t seen the spiders properly up until this close up moment. I like this style of interaction, not quite as good as SWTOR’s multi-player interactive dialogues, but it’s good to have the option to listen in – well except when the conversation partner has that many eyes and legs…
I’ll drop a trigger warning in here: if you are arachnophobic I will be including photos later, so do not scroll further!
I have mentioned my dislike of spiders enough times on this blog, but one post I remembered writing was the most memorable reference (which has no pictures, FYI). Shockingly that post was from 2011, the blog’s first year!
I wrote in that post about the Everquest 2 New Halas tunnel spiders. Low-and-behold I encountered that very moment of shock again only last week. I have started playing in Norrath again – just short sessions after I finish evening studies. As I must have done dozens if not hundreds of times I got distracted by looking at the Wiki to find the next destination for a quest timeline (a.k.a quest chain) and dropped to the floor in the New Halas tunnel leading down to the dock.
Not the worst depiction of an arachnid I’ve seen, they’re almost fluffy looking. Certainly nothing like the monsters in Dungeons & Dragons Online (still my assertion in the linked post above holds, they’re the scariest spiders I’ve seen in a MMO). It is possible to have a much more “in your face” angle at random than the one shown, the number of times I’ve stopped here cannot be underestimated. It’s the route I always use to travel from my character’s home to the nearest Globe of Swift Travel, and I sometimes would follow it multiple times in a longer session. I could fly this route likely blindfolded it’s so ingrained in muscle-memory, that’s why the spiders sometimes still catch me unawares – I’m often only half paying attention to the screen as I fly/glide this route. As a lifelong arachnophobe the silhouette of a spider is enough to cause that jump-scare reaction.
Back to Baldurs Gate 3, and slight spoilers – we are in the Goblin Camp area at the moment. Deeper into the area, the goblins have a spider pit that they reference a few times. Indeed, the goblins threaten people with being dropped in there. One of us spotted the giant spiders within the lowest central area pretty quickly, if you angle the screen just right from a higher platform you can see them below (angling the camera in BG3 can be problematic, the game could learn a thing or two from classic MMO approaches to camera controls).
This being a game well known for problems having more than one solution, and with us being a puzzle-loving trio of players, clearly just barging into the spider pit and killing the spiders ourselves wasn’t going to be our approach. While observing from above we noticed the levers that probably controlled the gate that kept the spiders penned in. So, our Warlock spoke to the spiders to make sure they didn’t know anything useful. Then my Rogue used an item to conjure a Mage Hand down in the pit. With us all at a safe distance from the steps leading down into the pit I opened the gate. The spiders dutifully charged out and attacked the nearby goblins. We ran / sneaked past into the pit to explore and loot. In the end when we reemerged the spiders were dead and the goblins remarkably unscathed – I guess the spiders weren’t that well matched to the goblins on guard there. A bit of a disappointment given how fierce the spiders looked! A friend expressed feeling guilty that we used the spiders in this way, frankly I have no problem with not having to fight them up-close…
GamingSF 