Summary
- Baldur’s Gate 3‘s latest patch adds Honour Mode, a punishing difficulty level with permadeath and limited save files.
- Honour Mode enhances the social experience of the game, adding stakes and intensity, especially when streaming or playing with a multiplayer party.
- Despite the frustration of losing in Honour Mode, the humorous and unexpected ways in which failures can occur make it an entertaining and addictive challenge.
Baldur’s Gate 3‘s most recent patch introduced a number of features and fixes that make for smoother sailing, but it also included a more devious addition than ever before. Developer Larian Studios has taken post-launch updates as an opportunity to add some features from the studio’s Divinity: Original Sin games that didn’t make it into Baldur’s Gate 3 at launch, like the ability to customize characters after starting the game through the use of the Magic Mirror. The most recent Divinity import is the addition of Honour Mode, although it’s likely to cause a lot more pain than the Magic Mirror.
At launch, Baldur’s Gate 3 had three different difficulty modes – Explorer, Balanced, and Tactician – with each catering to a different level of expertise with roleplaying games and turn-based combat. Tactician is certainly challenging, even with some experience, but it isn’t necessarily punishing, as mistakes can always be repaired by reloading a save file. Honour Mode steps in to satisfy anyone looking for that unforgiving experience, rendering party wipes as complete game overs and limiting the entire run to a single save file, autosaving whenever the game is closed.
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Honour Mode Takes No Prisoners In Baldur’s Gate 3
Honour Mode might sound like an intimidating way to play the game, but many players have ultimately found it hard to deny the allure of the ultimate Baldur’s Gate 3 run. Several months after its release, a large chunk of the community has finished one or more campaigns, and going back in with Honour Mode is an exciting way to see things from a new angle. Niche strategies suddenly become necessary, and every fight can be a breathless experience with the intensity of life or death consequences.
The fundamental changes to save files and Game Overs aren’t the only things that make Honour Mode hard in Baldur’s Gate 3. Bosses get a big Honour Mode boost in general, with better gear, more health, and Legendary Actions that let them take more frequent actions in combat. Regular enemies are tougher as well, with a general +2 to every roll they make. The difficulty increase isn’t restricted to combat, with higher difficulty checks and more expensive goods serving to introduce more problems to general existence in the world of Faerûn.
There’s one big exit hatch in the Baldur’s Gate 3 implementation of Honour Mode, as dying offers an option to continue a campaign on custom difficulty while giving up Honour Mode rather than booting the player entirely. This makes it easier to start up an Honour Mode campaign without the fear of completely losing hours and hours of progress, even if taking this route would still lose out on the coveted status of a successful run. Hardened Divinity: Original Sin veterans might look down on the option, but it’s a smart way to maintain the integrity of an Honour Mode run while making defeat less exhaustively crushing.
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BG3 Honour Mode Is A Great Social Experience
One reason that players keep coming back to Honour Mode in Baldur’s Gate 3 is how much it adds to the game as a social experience, even when taking on a single-player run. Streaming an Honour Mode campaign adds a level of consistent stakes that can’t be found in most games, from combat encounters to basic skill checks in dialogue. Any hour of gameplay in Honour Mode is likely to contain a whole slew of moments that could mean the end, and the prospect of losing 50 or 100 hours of progress is far more intense than getting eliminated in a battle royale or failing to take a control point in an FPS.
Building an actual multiplayer party in Honour Mode might be the closest Baldur’s Gate 3 can come to an actual Dungeons & Dragons experience, mimicking the stakes of a total party kill at the game table. For the right group of experienced players, this can be incredibly fun as well, although anyone who makes a crucial mistake might never hear the end of it. Like Mario Party, multiplayer Honour Mode could be a friendship ruiner under the wrong circumstances, so it’s not an affair to embark upon lightly.
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Losing Honour Mode In Baldur’s Gate 3 Is Half The Fun
An Honour Mode campaign coming to an inglorious end can definitely cause some serious rage, but that frustration often comes with awareness of how humorous the situation can be. In a complex world where just about everything is deadly, the odds of accidentally ruining a playthrough in a silly way are extraordinarily high. A Reddit post from PoliticalBudgie provides a good example of this phenomenon, mentioning an incident where Scratch attempted to fetch a runepowder vial while an arrow was on its way to ignite it. Scratch’s commitment to fetching was an improvement made in Baldur’s Gate 3 Patch 4, but this Game Over shows how seriously it can backfire.
In traditional DnD fashion, Baldur’s Gate 3 failure is often funny in general. Although the game doesn’t specifically flavor Critical Failures in the way that many Dungeon Masters do, talking back to a powerful NPC or failing an important skill check can easily invoke over-the-top punishment. Attaching permadeath to the game makes every impudent remark and impetuous choice a death-defying act, and there’s an appreciable poetic justice seeing karma swing back to smack a character in the face in a way that can’t be ignored.
Maintaining a steady supply of Inspiration can be critical in Honour Mode, so equipping party members for situations where they’re likely to get Inspiration and being careful not to waste earned points are both important strategies to keep in mind.
There’s no getting around the fact that Honour Mode is brutally difficult, and it’s absolutely not the first way that a newcomer should try to take on the game. As a boost to replayabililty and a method of truly testing a party’s mettle, however, the adrenaline rush of scraping by through an encounter where failure is genuinely catastrophic can quickly become addicting. Taking on the trial of Honour Mode and enjoying it may require a certain degree of masochism, but the Baldur’s Gate 3 community has quickly proven that it’s not going to back away from challenge.
Source: PoliticalBudgie/Reddit