Baldur's Gate 3 Devs Went to War Over a Celestial Elephant Detective — All So She Could Sip a Glass of Wine

File this under: things I did not expect to type today. Baldur's Gate 3 has a celestial elephant detective named Valeria who swans around in a jaunty cap and casually sips wine like that is the most normal thing an elephant could do. And yes, she is exactly as delightfully ridiculous as that sounds — which also meant she was a nightmare to pull off behind the scenes.

Meet Valeria: drunk Columbo, but with wings

Valeria is a Hollyphant — in D&D terms, that means a small, golden, winged celestial elephant. Larian made her a pompous, tipsy sleuth who thinks she is the coolest creature in the room, and honestly, she kind of pulls it off. The cap helps. Of course there is a detective cap.

Larian junior writer Martin Docherty broke down how this fever dream made it into the game on a new episode of the studio's Show and Yell stream, chatting with Larian senior communications developer Aoife Wilson. The character pitch was wonderfully unhinged from the start:

'What if this, like, celestial elephant detective was like Columbo but bad at his job, right?'

From there, it got very 'inside baseball' very fast. Internally, they argued about everything from tone to accessories, with someone loudly defending the most crucial creative choice: the hat. According to Docherty, there was a full-on champion for 'No, no we do need to give them the hat. The hat is very important.' Reader, they won. And they were right.

The wine problem (aka: please let the elephant drink)

The writing team decided that after Valeria wraps a case, she likes to wander off for a drink. Great character beat. Minor animation apocalypse. The cinematic artists were all-in on the gag but also horrified by the logistics: how do you convincingly show a tiny winged elephant drinking wine without it looking cursed? As Docherty put it, the artists basically said they desperately wanted to make the shot work, but it was a dreadful ask — which, fair enough.

• Who: Valeria, a golden, winged Hollyphant in BG3, dreamed up as a pompous, tipsy detective
• Where we heard it: Larian's Show and Yell stream, with writer Martin Docherty and host Aoife Wilson
• The pitch: 'Columbo, but bad at his job' — and absolutely must wear a detective hat
• The headache: animating a celestial elephant drinking a glass of wine without breaking reality
• The outcome: they wrestled it into shape; the hat stays on, the wine gets sipped

In the end, they figured it out. Valeria gets her post-case vino and the scene plays — which is the funniest possible outcome given how absurdly specific the problem was. A celestial elephant detective demanding her hat and her wine? That is cinema.