Baldur’s Gate 3 Mod Removes Astarion’s “Grinch Face”
As I’m sure you’ve noticed by now, Astarion is a pretty popular character among the Baldur’s Gate 3 playerbase. However, as Astarion romancers know all too well, there is one downside to securing the best ending for the beloved vampire – his smile gets all weird. For some reason, when Astaron beams at the player at the end of the game, he pulls what fans have taken to calling his “Grinch face”, and it’s a little unsettling. So, one player has decided to do something about it.
Astarion’s De-Grinchifier on Nexus Mods does exactly what the name suggests, changing Astarion’s smiling animation to make it less… Grinchy. Better yet, in creating this mod, Nexus user Magnetuning may have discovered that Grinchstarion is actually a bug, opening up the possibility of a fix being rolled out by Larian.
Without getting too technical, Magnetuning says that Astarion’s Grinch face doesn’t appear if you have graphical settings to medium, just high. With this in mind, the mod works by using the medium settings animations on a higher graphical setting, which seems to suggest that the whole thing was a bug in the first place. Of course, this hasn’t been confirmed, but it would make sense, as he doesn’t usually smile like this.
Of course, maybe we’re all just a bunch of meanies, and this is just what Astarion smiling looks like. After all, you won’t get him pulling this face if you let him go through with the ascension, as his smiles take a much more sinister turn. Poor guy is just genuinely loved up when he’s Grinching out.
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This potential bug was spotted by many when the sixth patch dropped, since this extended the final romance scenes with every character, right before the epilogue party. Here, if Astarion isn’t ascended, he’ll smile warmly at the player as they wake up after the final boss. Alas, it was a bit of a jump scare for unsuspecting players, who had that face taking up their screen.
Still, even if it is a bug, there are other things that fans will want Larian to focus on first. For starters, many are pretty unhappy with a change made to the Minthara romance in the latest hotfix, as she now seems to break up with The Dark Urge if they opt for the redemption path. It’s not clear if this was intended to be included in the update, since it wasn’t mentioned in the notes, but in any case, it seems like most fans want this removed.