Baldur’s Gate 3 is known for its countless possibilities and freedoms, but less for its exorbitant difficulty. Especially veterans enjoy making the game even harder with mods. A player demonstrates that newcomers should not underestimate the challenge, as he almost ruined his first playthrough.
What kind of mode is this?
- The “Honour Mode” is a special challenge with its own set of rules. It is essentially an “Ironman” mode with only one save, no ability to load saves, and with permadeath. If the party is dead, the game ends.
- The difficulty is set to “Tactician”, which is the highest possible difficulty that already makes enemies stronger. Additionally, bosses gain new “legendary” abilities.
- Those who complete the Honour Mode can boast an achievement and a set of golden dice.
This is how the player ruined the game for himself: On Reddit, a user explains that he is playing Baldur’s Gate 3 for the first time and directly selected the Honour Mode. However, now he has a problem: almost his entire party is dead and he cannot revive them.
In his screenshot, he is seen standing in the Chapel Ruins, one of the first dungeons in the game. Only his Tav (meaning his own character) is alive, Astarion, Shadowheart, and Wyll are dead. He cannot swap or revive them:
I misjudged the difficulty of the game and started directly with the Honour Mode […] As you can see, I have three dead in my team, fortunately, I survived. I cannot take down a group of enemies solo. I cannot swap out a dead character in my team. Although I still have two living members in camp, they say the group is full… yes, full of dead ones.
He apparently has no more scrolls of resurrection or cannot reach the corpses. At this point in the dungeon, Lazarus, or in English: Withers, is also not yet in camp. But the community knows how to help.
“Withers should appear in your camp after a few Long Rests”
In the comments, a user gives the helpful tip that Withers should appear in camp after a few Long Rests, which new players often delay out of fear of missing the story.
He can then ask the skeleton to resurrect his friends and simply steal the money back from him – a trick that many Honour Mode players apply, even if it is morally questionable.
Even some more experienced players did not know this. However, there is often advice for the creator to just start over. That is smarter for the beginning.
Because the Honour Mode is more manageable when you already know the story and know what to expect. The creator explains that he chose the mode because he does not trust himself to not reload saves, the popular and often used “Save Scumming.”
However, he can also simply create a custom difficulty with only one save, but without the challenges of the Honour Mode. This way, the newcomer can enjoy the game without the “danger” of reloading and without ruining a save right away.
Baldur’s Gate 3 can quickly present new players with challenges not only because of its difficulty but precisely because of the scope that is otherwise often praised. Newcomers who do not stick around quickly lose track: A player fails even after 1,200 hours in Baldur’s Gate 3 at a simple task, making it even harder for themselves
