Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Silence Spell Having no Effect

I cast silence around the area of the cracked wall in the goblin fort before I hit it with a melee weapon, but the goblins nearby still woke up and complained about the noise. I also used silence on the area of the dwarf who was chilling outside the paladins/fiends in the tollhouse before trying to stealth kill him, but the people inside the building, when the door was closed and silence was cast, still heard the combat and joined the fight.

The silence spell should have an affect on these situations, as it blocks out all noise in the radius.

I notice that as well and was wondering what is going on. this bug as well as others will hopefully be fixed with the next update

Bug?

More like: Nobody thought of this before at Larian?
Dude~s what a brilliant way to use this spell. Never thought about it.

Haha I guess I'm just looking at it with more of a TTRPG approach and just trying random stuff.

The silence spell does have a lot more repercussions I hope they explore, like how as of right now you can still talk to your companions when you're inside the radius when there should be no sound.

Right now it doesn't even seem to render enemies unable to cast verbal spells while in the radius of the silence spell, so ... o_o

It totally should have an effect. Well ... it should block the noise. That's what it says. That's what it's supposed to do. I don't think that's how it was coded.


More like : the way Larian had coded this spell is horrible (for now).

A bug is when a piece of code is written, meant to do a certain thing, but the code doesn't work as intended. For Silence, I suspect that the spell's code doesn't truly care about sound to begin with. In fact, I don't know the extent to which the game engine really handles sounds (in the passage under the Druid Grove, coming from the cliff, you can Eldrich Blast the guardian statue and have the head roll down the path, you can be sure that the goblins won't hear any of the massive echo that this would produce in the cave).

My suspicion is that the current code for Silence does something like "in the Silence area, spells cannot be cast", full stop. No reference to sound. Also, I think the game doesn't distinguish spells requiring vocalisation or not (haven't checked this, just writing from the top of my mind). So it probably prevents all spell casting.

My personal list of examples of Silence brilliantly not handling sound :
- Cast Silence on a Harpy that has previously cast Luring Song. The Harpy stays in the Silence area during her turn. Luring Song is not interrupted. On this one, I suspect the real problem is that Luring Song isn't an ability that requires continuous singing, it is coded as a concentration spell. If cast before the Silence zone, it sees no problem. Which is problematic.
- You can play goblin war drum in a Silence area.
- Your cat familiar can mew in a Silence area.

I'm happy/sad to add the "breaking wall in goblin camp" to the list. Also, I'm sad I didn't think of this during my playthrough, it's such an obviously good idea. (Also, I'm happy I read about it. Totally going to use that during my real playthrough at full release.)


Well ... technically speaking, I hope they don't explore, brainstorm, come up with a list of possible uses for the spell, and code them. Instead, I hope they program it to work systemically, by blocking sound. This way, everyone, developers and players, can come up with imaginative ways to use the spells. If they only program a list, given the much larger number of players, there will very likely be people thinking of good uses of the spell which won't work because they weren't specifically coded to work.