Baldur’s Gate 3 Patch 5 is live now, and it gives fans something they’ve wanted for months now – Bing Bong as a canon part of the BG3 universe. Those words might mean absolutely nothing to you depending on how closely you follow the game’s voice actors, but for a large group of fans and Larian itself, Bing Bong became part of the family shortly after launch.
Bing Bong’s birth came about during a D&D game that members of BG3’s cast played on the High Rollers D&D channel, including Lae’zel’s voice actor Devora Wilde and Shadowheart’s actor Jennifer English. Both were playing as their BG3 companion characters for this game.
Lae’zel and Shadowheart stopped off at an adventurer’s mini-mart with a young imp at the door. In the absence of a bell, he said “bing bong” to announce their arrival, Shadowheart fell in love, and she decided to adopt him.
Lae’zel wasn’t having it and killed the imp, and then narrator Amelia Tyler swiftly announced a sad, ignoble end for Lae’zel.
Fans and actors alike jokingly called for justice for Bing Bong and asked Larian to consider including him in the game somehow – and they did. In one of Shadowheart’s new epilogue lines, she met a stray imp called Bing Bong on her travels and took him under her wing, so to speak, which is incredibly adorable and set the fandom on fire.
“THIS is how developers show they care and are engaged with their community and taking in feedback,” one Reddit user said. “Not telling us ‘You think you want that but you don’t’ or telling us to ‘get better computers.’ Larian is in the trenches giving us FREE updates to an already amazing game and adding in stuff we asked for. From major Act III fixes to minor things like #JusticeForBingBong.”
Baldur’s Gate 3 Patch 5 is live now on PC and PS5, and whenever BG3 on Xbox launches, it’ll include that patch and all the other updates Larian has published since August 2023.
Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF
