Baldur's Gate 3 limits the number of corpses you can speak to by, um, decapitating them

eurogamer.net:

Have you ever wondered why, when you're having a lovely stroll around the world of Baldur's Gate 3, there are so many bodies without heads lying around? No it's not because the inhabitants of the world have faulty necks — it's because developer Larian is doing something sneaky.

You see, offering people the ability to speak with any corpse via the spell Speak with Dead created a lot of work. It meant writers not only had to write lines for all the living people, but for the dead ones too. And okay, there's a limiting factor in how Speak with Dead only allows you to ask five questions, but that's still an array of questions to write answers for. And in a war-torn world filled with dead people… That's a lot of answers to write.

What to do? Simple, albeit gruesome: cut their heads off. «The trick that we use is [you can speak to] 'any dead that still has their head',» Vincke told Wizards of the Coast interviewer Todd Kenreck, in a really lovely interview actually. «So you will see a lot of decapitated people in the game — that's literally how we solved that.»

Theirs is a wide-ranging conversation that touches on a number of topics, mostly relating to Dungeons & Dragons. They talked about why there's no Dispel Magic in the game, for example — in short: it was just too complicated.

But arguably the most ear-catching moment came when Vincke referred to what he and Larian were making next — their next game. Well, I say «talking about» but it was more what he didn't say which intrigued me.

Kenreck was asking Vincke about being inspired by Dungeons & Dragons-adjacent fantasy fiction series Dragonlance when growing up, and then what fiction he finds inspiring today. To which Vincke laughed and said, «You're asking me my next game —