Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Honor Mode Changes can't be accessed in an active playthrough. This needs to change.

Larian, in an attempt to not irritate people that were using exploits that are now fixed in Honour mode, forgot that there are currently people with an active playthrough, all the way into act 2 and act 3, who would have liked to see these changes apply to their save file.

I intentionally didn't continue my act 3 playthrough because I was waiting for a balance pass. And when I saw the patch in which they advertised a new legendary action system for bosses and the removal of certain exploits I was excited to test them out immediately. But I can't. Because they're honour mode exclusive. And there is no way to just convert an old save file to the honour mode ruleset. If you go into the difficulty selection you can't convert your difficulty to it since this is a decision the player can only make when they start a new game. This feels like a huge oversight.

If Larian decides that, for whatever reason, fixes to exploits should be locked behind a difficulty selection, they should have at least given people with older save files the ability to convert their save file to that higher difficulty. Or have a toggle somewhere in the options menu for those tighter restrictions on the ruleset. My motivation to continue playing that save file dropped substantially because of this.

Well i yeah.
What is bothering me that custom difficulty don't have the Honor difficulty slider.
So I could not create my own horror difficulty.

Also yesterday I started honor run and I kind a instantly run into a bug. Around the gate I got the cutsceen with Shazza. So I canceled it. But when I came to the actual sceen she was already dead. And I could not load back.

So my original feedback about Honor mode is still relevant.
This type of difficulty is only working in a 100% bugfree game.
I cannot imagine how mad someone can be after 80 hours playing in Honor mode. And falling down into a glitch or something.

I mean, yeah?

Of course you can't convert your save file where you could have save scummed, TPK'd multiple times and cheesed through bosses into a difficulty setting that specifically locks you into no loading saves to ensure you don't save scum your way through the mode.

At best, I could see them putting in the additional boss power into the Custom Mode options (As that's the only thing missing from Custom Mode, which would allow you to simply recreate Honour Mode without the reward from completing a playthrough on Honour Mode. You could even make a harder version of Honour Mode with the additonal settings that hide features of the game)

+1 to this, I'm confused if it's supposed to be a challenge run why people would assume the wouldn't have to restart on a different playthrough?

Would be cool to see legendary actions added to Custom mode but other than that, I can't honestly say that the concerns here were entirely realistic...

Did you read my post? I specifically referred to the Honour mode changes. The ruleset. I don't care about converting the save file to honour mode for the sake of cheesing the difficulty for some achievement.

As it is implemented right now I cannot recreate honor mode during an active playthrough because that option isn't available. Even if they added it to the custom difficulty setting page I couldn't access that option because the custom difficulty can't be selected on an already existing Tactician run. You only get to pick between Explorer, Balanced and Tactician if you want to change your difficulty. Honour mode wasn't available when these old save files were made and there are parts of honour mode which are essentially bug fixes, like the exploits they've removed. I shouldn't be forced to start a new playthrough just to get those fixes applied to a save file that was made before I even had any inkling whatsoever that Honour mode would ever be implemented into the game. Again, if Larian decides that they want to give people the option to avoid having fixes applied to their save file, they should have done it through an opt-in toggle. Not lock those fixes behind an entirely new difficulty which forces players to start a new playthrough if they want to have them. I've never seen a game have bug fixes be part of the difficulty selection process.


Because people that were complaining about the lack of difficulty have been waiting for a balance pass to this game for a while and just stopped playing the game with a save file ready at the beginning of act 3 so they could play around with it in a late-game environment, which is exactly where the difficulty of the game falls apart completely. I am one of those people and I'm not interested in starting the entire game over just to see whether the legendary action system they implemented, which should have been in the game on release because that's how 5e bosses don't get left behind in terms of their action economy, is worth its salt. If this was just a perma-death mode, and the rest of the changes could be accessed at any time by just ticking a box in the menu, I would have much less to complain about here. Or you know, what they should have done which is to just patch out these exploits across the board. They literally only made the decision to leave those in to not piss off people that were taking advantage of these exploits but that decision comes at the cost of anyone who actually wants to see these changes manifest in their active playthrough they started before patch 5.

There are not.

Honour Mode simply adds the Legendary Powers to bosses.

All the exploit fixes from the patch were added to the base game (Aside from save scumming which is addressed as part of Honour Mode and is an option for Custom Mode via the One Save File aspect)

Which as I mentioned, I could see them adding as an option to the Custom Mode.

You are just wrong. Some exploit fixes are honour mode exclusive.

Here is a list from the community wiki:
Undocumented Patch 5 updates

The community update #25 also explicitly says so:


Right there. "Some of the more powerful 'unintended exploits' have been removed for players who embark on an Honour Mode adventure."

The first link I posted from the community wiki lists those changes.

For example:

So if you want Pact of the Blade fixed you have to play honour mode. If Larian considers that an exploit they shouldn't lock it behind a difficulty that people couldn't have selected before Patch 5. That's a half-measure.

You should not be able to convert a previous-to-Patch 5 campaign to Honour mode - I can only imagine the coding difficulties that would have entailed - but Honour mode can also be made to make the game easier. Likewise, they should get rid of being able to move between game modes in any one campaign altogether as it's complete cheeze.

May have to man up and start a new campaign.

Honour mode changes need to be accessible in custom mode.

Apparently zero coding difficulties because there is already a mod on the nexus that was released one day after the patch that does exactly that.
https://www.nexusmods.com/baldursgate3/mods/4743

It's bad design to make fixes to exploits exclusive to a specific difficulty that people in an active playthrough can't apply to their save file if there is no technical reason for that restriction. A new playthrough to access bug fixes and legendary actions is a complete waste of time if I'm already sitting in act 3. I'm just not going to play the game until they decide to do the sensible thing which is to implement a toggle for the honour mode ruleset. If they don't, then my playthrough stops here.

Technically it simply applies honour features to the game, doesn't exactly change a game to honour mode.

I explicitly stated in my original post that what I am interested in is the honour mode ruleset.