Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Delete early access file or update?

So, I have BG3 early access game on my Steam Deck. I know saves don’t carry over but should I totally delete everything now and just redownload everything Thursday, or just keep it and download an update. How is Larian handling this?

Personally I am going to wait for some more official details. Swen is awesome but he doesn't exactly know technically how these things work.

I believe Larian said the early access files will not make the game download smaller because the final game is too different so you'll have to download everything anyway when the full game launches.

I will be uninstalling the EA game just before download of the full release. I don't know if it makes a difference, but I want a fresh install rather than an update just in case.

I'm not touching anything, they will probably just clear the EA content and start downloading the real thing anyway. I'm going to try to actually finish the EA at least once before thursday.

I will probably delete the files before. Deleting files costs time and if I do that together with the download, that will just be wasted time.
Also, I still hope they will block the EA download 1-2 days before release and allow pre-downloading the game. Probably won't happen, though..

I won't delete anything beforehand, this way the download starts automatically as if it was just an update
Also, Steam should be able to delete any unneeded files while downloading the new ones.

I WILL delete the files before downloading the final game.

Both because Swen Vincke openly advised to do so (since apparently very little of the EA build is being reused) AND because even before release, with the previous patches, it was way faster to just redowload everything that going through the slow file processing after the patch was downloaded.

Any recent official word from Larian in what we should do? Delete or wait for the update? You know….like the game comes out in 3 days…..

Yeah, they said it over a week ago already. Delete. Delete your saves, too.

Well, they said we could, that the new files wouldn't be similar enough to the old ones or something. I recall that.

I think the issue is that some of us really don't know what we're doing. For instance, I have no idea if Steam will automatically start the update for me or the new install for me or whatever. If it won't, do I need to be hovering by my computer at the appointed time? If it does, do I have to open Steam or is Steam always running in the background?

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I'm not expecting answers to those questions. I'm sure I'll figure everything out as time moves forward. I just wanted to mention it to show that some of us are a bit uncertain about how to proceed. Getting a community update is always nice and helpful for dummies like me.

I'm fortunate enough to work from home, so Wednesday night I'm deleting everything, then hovering over Steam to download it fresh once it goes live... which can't come come soon enough.

%LOCALAPPDATA% \Larian Studios\Baldur's Gate 3 should be the location of your save files and mod files if you're looking to delete those. I personally deleted everything, too many weird issues can occur with left over files as I learned from Fallout and Skyrim modding.

eah, look, they've accounted for that. I'm pretty sure taht if you do not install, you can just update. But on their end, they set the app container to include everything, so everything just get overwritten.

Either I'll let the data stay and "update" or wait until the download starts, then delete everything and download, so I'll know it 100% dropped.

I don't bet on 5pm Ghent time getting hit perfectly and it would be just my luck to delete the files early, then download at 5pm only to get for conflicts (update drops after download starts) or just full on download early access again xD

I deleted everythig, I want a clean install of full release.

Delete it. File overwrite is a perfect way to corrupt all your games files. I seen it happen a LOT of times

I'm not going to delete it. I'll be at work when the game is released. I have my steam deck set to automatically update games. So leaving my deck running should start it downloading while I'm at work. If I delete the EA game, then I'd have to trigger the download manually and I can't do that from work.

That's the reason why I already deleted mine. But I will be available to download files at the release.

Note this is not a dig a Swen. He called this out himself in interviews that he doesn't know for sure how this works with Steam and others. For me i will archive and delete the EA saves and will keep the EA binaries in place unless we get official word via a community update i will do an in place upgrade.