I played the first act of Baldur’s Gate 3 a few times in early access, which is why I’m always slightly surprised on subsequent playthroughs that there aren’t a bunch of mind-controlled anglers protecting the dying mind flayer you encounter near the start of the game. They were cut in the final release, along with a bunch of dialogue and scenes, much of which has now been restored by modder HyperspaceTowel.

“This mod brings over 100 conversations and more than 1000 lines of voiced dialogue back from the dead”, says the description of Early Access Scenes Restored. It restores a lot of companion reactivity in particular, enabling extra responses to, er, what you see behind the barn door. It’s mostly dialogue for Astarion, Shadowheart, Gale, and Lae’zel, since Karlach and Wyll had different voice actors in early access, though a smaller amount of their dialogue has been restored by splicing existing lines of audio.

HyperspaceTowel plans to continue work on this mod, restoring more scenes including the one with the thralls on the nautiloid from the tutorial—another thing I always forget was removed until I start a new game. I can see why you’d want the prologue to be shorter, given how much people complain about tutorials, but I do miss hearing the poor brainwashed suckers ramble about rats in the flour and bulls on the loose while dragons and imps battle around them.

Apparently one issue with this mod is that it can interfere with how Gale’s beard looks, though that’s fixed with a mod you should already have: Gale’s beard fix, which prevents his chin from clipping right through his flavor-saver.

You can get Early Access Scenes Restored from Nexus Mods. It’s recommended you install it before starting a new playthrough, since a lot of what it restores is right at the start of the game, and then don’t uninstall it mid-playthrough since the new characters and camp events it adds will need to hang around.