Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Technical & Gameplay Problems Characters stopped leveling up / XP Bars Broken

All my characters have no XP bar for at least a month or so, and their experience isn't accruing. None of my characters have leveled up for like a month.

When I hover over them, it says, "Current experience: 9142" (or whatever the # is for each character), and "Remaining experience needed to gain a level: 0." It has had that "0" for over a month.

I miss being able to level up, where you choose new spells, get new abilities, more HP, etc., and hope this can be resolved soon.

And when it is hopefully fixed, I hope the game has been internally keeping track of my experience so my characters get appropriately caught up. Otherwise, should I stop playing the game, for fear I will get too far and not have enough HP and spells to defeat enemies?

Possibly silly question, but what level are you currently? The maximum level is 12 and after that what you're seeing would be expected, though the current experience would be in the region of 97K rather than 9K.

There's enough exp in Act 3 alone to go from level 1 to max! Someone did a challenge on YouTube with just one character. If you do it in the right order, the game is still beatable even if you don't get caught up on exp

Maybe redundant, but do you have mods that expand the level cap or add dummy levels to multi classing? If not installed properly, it can also result in this issue. Thanks.

Thanks for the replies! Good questions/observations. I will check later today, but I'm pretty sure I'm at level 8 or 9 with my characters. Don't quote me, as maybe (slight chance) I am 12? I know my spells for Shadowheart and Gayle are still at VI. I don't know if they ever go higher than that?

I definitely haven't installed any mods, or added any dummy levels, or anything like that. Just the plain, basic, vanilla (albeit awesome) game, and I let Steam install it however it installs it.

A month ago when I emailed Larian about it, I took screenshots. My XPs at that time were at about 8600 for two in my party and about 9150 for the other two. I will see what it says now, later today/tonight, and report back.

In my email over a month ago, the Larian agent replying seemed to think it was a known issue (an exceept):


I figured I would write here since they suggested looking at the forums, and I'm still having the issue over a month later. Seemed like a pretty important bug, definitely makes me miss the level up process, but I'm sure other players have found worse bugs than this. So I don't know where this one would rank in priority.


Then again, maybe I just haven't gotten enough XP in a month to level up yet... but I wouldn't know since my XP bars are blank. So it is invisible XP. (I do still get the "+250 XP" pop-up text over character heads when I complete quests, though.)

Regardless, I will double-check to see if I am already at Level 12.

Yeah, I guess you were right I'm at Level 12 for my characters. About 53,000 XP for each.

Seems weird to me to have a hard cap at Level 12. No more "level-up" screens, HP additions, spell slots opening up, or STR/DEX/CON/INT/WIS/CHA things to get?

I was already bummed Larian chose not to do an expansion or anything. Adding more levels, spells, and spell slots would've been pretty cool, though. It feels a little unfinished to cap leveling at "12", imo. I'm okay with them focusing on other ideas/games, but leveling seems unfinished. I can't remember the last game I've played that stops leveling so early. That said, I'm impressed by the number of spells and such there actually are. I just wish I could level up a bit more to more easily take advantage of more of that depth and breadth while playing through the game

I've probably played at least 100 hours since I last leveled up, shortly before or after reaching Act III, and I haven't beaten the game yet. That's a lot of campaign gaming -- 44,000 XP in my case so far -- where you're just coasting along with the same abilities and only able to have one Level VI spell casting slot during combat, for example. I have several side quests and main quests to go yet.

Gale, Shadowheart, and Jaheira each also still have eight empty/unusable slots when I look at their spell books (hotkey "k")

If the game will be permanently capped at Level 12, I think they should at least have better messaging to the player so it doesn't look like a bug. I've been playing a month thinking it was a bug because the UI/UX is unclear (not intuitive) regarding this. The character XP bars are blank, too. Maybe some, "Max Reached" messaging somehow would be nice. Their customer support seemed to think it was a bug, so I wasn't alone. (Who knows, though, maybe we'll find out in a future patch that Levels 13+ open up and it actually was a bug.)

It's an ambitious thing to allow higher levels because of the difficulty scaling. However, there are mods that expand the base level in the game, and mods that give you (some) of the spells you should have, and mods that add those spells to scrolls, and mods that rescale the difficulty. There's even mods that add custom classes, buff existing ones, or give gear to classes rather lacking it.

All in all, it's the sort of thing best installed before starting a new playthrough. If anything breaks or is done in the wrong order, you might need a complete reinstall of Bg3, destroying all save games.

Originally the game was to be capped at 10th level, the extra 2 added late in the day.
Interesting that for Larian development of 6th level spells was easier than better management of XP.

By the way, in D&D spell levels usually go up to around half the level of the caster. So a level 12 character can cast up to a level 6 spell. So that's why your spell levels only go up to 6

Ahh, cool! That's great there are so many mods. Too bad they might be unreliable, though. In that case, I'll probably end up waiting to see if Larian updates the game more... even though chances seem very slim the game would get any substantive updates like these

Wow! I can't imagine only having 10 levels! Hard cap at 12 is bad enough (imo)

Interesting! Good to know