Larian recently revealed some more of the stats it’s been sneakily gathering while we’re playing Baldur’s Gate 3. Among them, the revelation that 33% of Halsin romancers requested he boink them in bear form. Honestly, you people.
Just as shocking in its own way is finding out that 464 parties have earned themselves a golden D20 by making it to the end of Baldur’s Gate 3’s permadeath Honor Mode. This is the recently added difficulty option above Tactical that doesn’t allow reloading, and also beefs up boss fights by giving enemies that are already powerful extras like legendary actions they can use when it’s not even their turn. The remixed difficulty includes plenty of surprises, like the owlbear mother you face in act one being joined by an owlbear father to provide double the parental pummelling.
While some of those 464 parties no doubt took advantage of the kind of glitches and exploits speedrunners have been using to race through Baldur’s Gate 3 at top speed, you’d have to be a real cynic to believe all of them have. Especially when more legit ways of achieving ultimate power, like playing a monk with the Tavern Brawler feat, are right there on the table.
The 34,000 player-characters Larian says have fallen short and carked it in Honour Mode so far have my sympathy. Fortunately, there’s a forgiving fallback that lets you keep your progress if you fail at Honour Mode, and you can keep playing from your last save after swapping over to a non-Honour Mode difficulty. Still, it’s not something I’d recommend for your first playthrough. Heck, I’m not trying it on my second—a Dark Urge run on Tactician difficulty is hard enough for me.
Another interesting stat from Larian’s round-up is that Gale is still the most popular choice among those who play as one of the Origin characters rather than rolling their own PC. If you play as Gale you can get his flying cat Tara to hang out in your camp, which has certainly bumped him way up the list of characters I’d like to try in a future run. Though maybe a fragile wizard wouldn’t be a good choice for Honour Mode, when I could play it safe as a tanky barbarian. We’ll see.
