Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Restartitis and Length of Acts question

So, since I’ve been playing the game for the last several months, I’ve had a SEVERE case of restartitis. Basically, whenever I get to Act 3, I restart the game. Now I do this (as perhaps others do?) because I feel like the game is drawing to a close, and I don’t want the game to end. Because I love it so much and I love how I’ve developed my characters up to that point. (I had the same issue with DOS2...)

So, to my question. How close IS the beginning of Act 3 to the end? This may be an old tired question, as I’ve seen it asked before on other forums, but I’m interested in people’s personal experiences on this forum.

How long did Act 1 take you to finish? Act 2? And if you have finished the game, how long was Act 3, or if you haven’t, how long have you spent in Act 3 so far? Looking to reassure myself that just because it’s the last act, the adventure isn’t going to end right away, and I don’t need to restart yet again.

For me, it took about 68 hours to get through Acts 1 and 2, exploring everything as thoroughly as I could. I looked back at my saves, and Act 1 took about 39 hours, and Act 2 took 29 hours. I did enough content to get to level 7.5 by the end of Act 1, and level 10 by the end of Act 2.

Especially if anybody has had a similar playstyle as me, how long has Act 3 been for you?

I didn' time the acts. I have 2 PT's now. One ranger and one bard/warlock(durge). The first did almost all side quests, for about 155 hrs, the second was a durge run, and skipped a lot of of the quests from act 3 and came to about half that time. (I play on balanced mode, but have switched to explorer on the heaviest fights, and have avoided quite a few fights with RP options in the 2nd PT)
The first run obviously had more restarts in it, so that biases the numbers.
How close act 3 is to the end also depends on what companions you gathered. You would surely want to do their personal quests, but other side quests can be completely omitted, although some of them are fun, while others are less so. So for the first PT, I would try to do as many as possible, and then for the next run you can be more selective.

How long did Act 1 take me on my first playthrough? Or how long does Act 1 take now? Since that's some difference...

Honestly, I haven't really got times for completing things. I haven't paid that much attention. I think my saves are around 24-26 hours to make it to Act 3 (Doing every side quest, killing every enemy etc). But a lot of that is my optimizing runs as I repeatedly played those acts while trying out different builds. Seeing what works, what items are useful and what are bait...

I haven't done much in Act 3... Since when I was getting ready for it Patch 4 came out and broke it... By the time Patch 5 came around to fix it I'd kind of lost my will to play it and instead have been more into the games I was playing while Act 3 was broken...

But yeah, I get how you feel. I technically never finished DOS2, as I got most of the way through the last area, was max level with every item for my builds and so it's hard to simply go through the motions of the last few fights just for the game to end...

I haven't finished a single playthrough yet for several reasons, some of them technical e.g. a patch killed all my saves, or abyssmal performance in act 3. With patch 5 everything runs good enough that I might actually finish the game. Yet I struggle, part of it is the length of act 3, which might be good news for you. I need around 45h for act 1 and act 2, because I'm a completionist. When I arrive in act 3, I'm already exhausted and from the way the quests start coming in, I assume, act 3 will be another 45h. Currently I'm sitting at around 60h and have only done sorcerous sundries, Shadowhearts quest, some exploration, digging a bit into Laezels quest.

I couldn’t put a number on it, but I feel I spent the most time in Act 3 in my ~85 hour playthrough of the game.

Granted, I mostly just slaughtered my way through the forge, the Cresh, and most of Act 2, so I certainly missed a fair bit of story content.

Act 3 is pretty packed with content, but at a certain point I became very comfortable with the idea of just not doing everything and enjoyed ending the game much more for it.

I don’t understand you completionists. The way y’all play games sounds inevitably exhausting to me. XD

I completed three playthroughs.
1 on Balanced Mode as Tav
1 on Balanced Mode as Durge
1 on Tactician Mode as Origin Astarion
I did not change the difficulty at any time, and have completed the vast majority of every battle I could find.

Act 2 is the shortest, and Act 1 and Act 3 were pretty equivalent. Percentage of time I spent per Act:
Act 1: 35-40%
Act 2: 20-25%
Act 3: 35-40%

If I were to guess how long it would take you in terms of hours, probably the higher end of this range:
Act 1: 30-40 hours
Act 2: 20-30 hours
Act 3: 30-40 hours

I felt Act 3's main map was more dense than the maps in Act 1. There was more to do, per square foot traveled.
Act 2 can be long or short, depending on if the person chooses to talk their way out of battle or do the battles
Act 3 can also be longer or shorter, depending on how many companion side quests you're doing. There were many more optional battles, however you had to do combat for most of them

Same as Lilith for me. I love doing some quests in act 3, but some I dread. I'm not a fan of the final quests, for reasons, I have posted in the main story quest thread.
You should do act 3, it has a lot of companion quest solutions, you have a few fun heists, you can pull of and BG is pretty.

Thanks for your input everybody! See, I had already played through act 1 about eight times by the time I got to this playthrough, so I was pretty efficient. I’m kind of clueless in Baldur’s Gate. So it’s good to know that Act 3 will be as long (or probably longer) than act 1, because I don’t have that same efficiency. Thanks!