One baffling result of Baldur's Gate 3's latest patch—which arrived with plenty of bugs and subsequently a bunch of hotfixes—is, well, Astarion turning into the Grinch. It's only happening under certain mysterious circumstances, but it is certainly happening. Act 3 and Astarion spoilers to follow.
This whole debacle kicked off after footage of Astarion's new Act 3 epilogue scene (shared by skarsghardy on Twitter) caused a swathe of memes to surface about Larian's new 'Astarion Jumpscare', wherein everyone's favourite vampire watches you while you sleep, looking as if he's been devising devious plans to steal Christmas.
NEW POST PARTY EPILOGUE SCENE ???? pic.twitter.com/xsDArwy1EUFebruary 16, 2024
Now, listen. There's nothing wrong with a person just looking like that—it's even sort of cute, but considering Astarion is typically a full-lipped princeling that looks like he belongs on the front of a smutty romance book (shirt optional), it is suspiciously glitchy. I've been trying to smile while folding my upper lip into my lower one for about five minutes, and I can't get it to feel natural.
Enter one of my favourite mods so far for Baldur's Gate 3: Astarion's de-grinchifier by magnetuning on Nexus Mods. To prove that Astarion superfans aren't just losing their gourds, magnetuning made a comparison video and—fair enough, in his latest scenes? Astarion's looking a little greener and meaner.
Observing that Astarion didn't make this face on lower graphics settings, magnetuning initially believed the problem was due to "missing LODs"—referring to the real-time simplification of polygons—when compared to other companion characters in the game.
In a pinned comment, they explain that "even though adding the missing LODs does make a difference as well (and deleting them does add back some of the grinchiness). I'm not entirely sure what's going on". According to magnetuning, running Astarion's pretty face through Blender may also be hampering his expressiveness like digital botox, which would naturally lower the rate of Grinch occurrences.
"Also honestly he just kinda looks like that tbh! Sometimes you just have to love your hag the way he is. While… also making sure his model is functioning properly."
They seem to really mean this with their whole heart, because there's also an optional mod that lets you re-grinchify Astarion if you're using a custom head. "For those who love his grinch face, and have been disappointed by the fact their custom heads de-grinchified him without knowing why, this is for you."
