Now You Can Make Baldur’s Gate 3 More Challenging (Or Easier)

Every player’s Baldur’s Gate 3 experience is different and with the new Patch 5 update, players can customize their experience even more. This update is a big one including new scenes, responses, effects, quality of life changes, new dialogues, fixes for issues raised by the community, and much more.

Source: Larian Studios

But the aspect that most players are excited about is that now they can make Baldur’s Gate 3 more hardcore or much easier, as per your preference. That’s because of the two new game modes that have been added – called Honour Mode and Custom Mode Difficulty.

Source: Larian Studios

Honour Mode

Honour Mode makes BG3 more difficult than the previous Tactician mode – bosses are harder and other smaller boss fights will also be tougher. Since save scumming is something most players do, you won’t be able to do it in Honour mode because it will be disabled. With the safety net of Save Scumming lost, you must take every decision wisely. And if you die, you will be shown the stats of your journey of survival till then. If you do complete the whole game with Honor Mode enabled without dying, you will receive the Golden D20.

Here’s what the devs say:

[bs-quote quote=”Honour Mode ups the intensity of what was previously our most challenging mode – Tactician – and not only makes the game more difficult in and out of combat, but also introduces over 30 new tweaks to all of Baldur’s Gate 3’s boss-fights, with a new Legendary Action system designed to catch players off-guard and increase the challenge. Now, bosses can perform new actions, adding twists and turns to all major fights throughout the game.” style=”default” align=”center” color=”” author_name=”” author_job=”” author_avatar=”” author_link=””][/bs-quote]

Custom Mode

If you want to customize your BG3 experience and make it more like a tabletop game, you can go for the new Custom Mode. It gives you various options related to enemy aggression, character power, enemy loadouts, combat mechanics, proficiency bonus, camp cost multiplier, short rest full heal, and much more. Some of these options have tiers of Explorer, Balanced and Tactician.

Source: Larian Studios

For example, if you choose Tactician for enemy loadouts, enemies will employ advanced spells and items in combat. But if you choose Explorer, then enemies will only have access to basic spells and items.

Here’s the dev comment:

[bs-quote quote=”With many options to pick from, a few favorites include the option to hide the required roll to succeed dice checks, which gives a more realistic D&D experience, as well as the ability to hide enemy HP in battle, again more closely simulating the tabletop style.

Other options in Custom Mode include Short Rests fully healing the party, as well as disabling Death Saving Throws, or even the ability to hide failed Perception Checks, which means you’ll never know there was even a roll to begin with!” style=”default” align=”center” color=”” author_name=”” author_job=”” author_avatar=”” author_link=””][/bs-quote]

You can go through the patch notes in their entirety here.