Larian Studios Forums Beyond Divinity (English) Technical Problems Need to get out of Hardcore Difficulty!

Hello forum.

I'm replaying Beyond Divinity (never finished it) in anticipation for Divinity II...

Somehow during my play all my save games got put into Hardcore difficulty. When I exit the game, and restart it, it's on Action, but whenever I load a saved game it goes to Hardcore and I can't change it.

I have no idea how this happened, but it's very frustrating because I just started Act II and I'm getting absolutely clobbered by guards and mutants.

Is there any way to reset the difficulty to a manageable level?

Well, normally, you should be able to access and change the difficulty setting from the menu by hitting escape during a game. If for some reason it won't change, I'm not sure...

Once the difficulty level is set to hardcore it can not be lowered. With the other levels you can switch back and forth in the options.

Have you tried all of your previous saves? You would have to revert to an earlier save to play at a lower difficulty level. I'm not sure how the level could have been changed if you didn't do it yourself...


If you start a new game, it would be possible to cheat to get up to your current level / stats, and put your characters in the citadel room with the stairs leading to the start of act 2. If you would rather try this than continue with your current save, you should play enough to get the summoning doll, or use the inventory file trick to get it; the act 1 doll is the only one that can equip a ranged weapon (crossbow).

Hex editing - gold, experience, stat/skill points

Inventory files

Teleporting anywhere (via hex editor)


Alternately, you could use one or both of the first two links above to give your current characters a boost to compensate for the difficulty level.


On Hardcore, some of the random encounter, non-plot related NPCs are doubled. For example, there will be pairs of ghosts in the cells close to the arena, rather than one, and more rats in the starting cell block, but the guards there will not be doubled. While the greater number of opponents can make things more hectic, they also provide additional experience points which will level your characters faster than otherwise.

In general, your characters get one skill point each time they gain a level, with one extra skill point whenever the character level is evenly divisible by 5. There is a random bonus when playing on Hardcore, which gives each character a 30% chance of getting an extra skill point each level. This means there is a 9% chance that both characters will get an extra skill point at any particular level up.

In each act you can receive a summoning doll. The doll’s stats are determined by the difficulty setting when they are first summoned, and are better in harder difficulties.

When using permanent potions created by Alchemy, the effects do not depend on the difficulty setting for vitality, magic points or stamina potions. However, the potions for the primary stats do have a minor difference between settings; on Very Easy the bonus is 7, on Action or Tactical it is 8 and on Hardcore it is 10.

Sorry for the late response... I was out of town.

I don't know how it got set on Hardcore mode. I do remember scrolling through the difficulty settings in-game, but I most certainly did not leave it on Hardcore mode... All of my save games are affected. I have five quicksaves and five custom saves... Either I played on Hardcore mode for ten saves without realizing it, or I found a bug that somehow infects all game saves as soon as you select Hardcore.


I'll have to think about cheating to get back to where I am... This really is discouraging.

I appreciate the advantages of playing on the harder difficulty, but that level is past the point where the game becomes more work than fun for me. It is a good game to me more for the humor and uniqueness of play than anything else.

If I have time this weekend I can see if I can find where the difficulty level is stored. Assuming it is possible to edit some part of a save file to change the difficulty, opponent stats may drop correspondingly (at least in the current act, though, any extra opponents added would not be removed). I'm not sure how extensive the changes are when the game is switched to hardcore, so this may or may not be feasible.

If it's not too much trouble, it would be greatly appreciated!

I was hoping there was a hidden registry setting somewhere or something... sorry to see it isn't that easy.

If you don't come up with anything, it's not a big deal. I've decided to stop being a wussy and I'm slowly nibbling my way through the map.

I started a new game on tactical, saved, then switched to hardcore and saved again. After making copies of both save folders and swapping the data.000 files, I confirmed that was enough to change the difficulty level. Replacing sections of this file, I was able to narrow down where the difficulty level setting is stored.

I played the new game up to the arena in hard and tactical, then did the same with the hardcore save edited back to tactical (starting off with an extra 255 stat points to speed this up). The stats for Fergus, the ghosts near the arena and the spiders were the same in the original tactical game and the hardcore save edited back to tactical (which were a little lower than in the hardcore save). The DK's armour class (which depends on his character level and the difficulty setting) was also the same in the original and fixed tactical saves.

Playing in hardcore, the game does not add in the extra opponents until you are close enough that it has to start keeping track of them anyway (most likely the same range that shows up on your mini-map, though I did not check that). This means if you hex edit out of hardcore mode, you will not encounter extra opponents when you enter new areas.


To get out of hardcore difficulty, edit the data.000 file in a hex editor (see the hex editing topics above as reference), and search for the text string 'PlayerInfo'. Two rows below the 'I' is the difficulty level; change the 03 (hardcore) to 02 (tactical), 01 (action) or 00 (easy), and reload the save.


Check your messages (click 'My Stuff' in the top menu bar, then 'My Messages').

Whoa... that's awesome.

I used XVI32 and the whole "two rows below" didn't quite work out... so I just looked for an 03 value in the vicinity of the "I" ... I changed one to no effect, then I changed another one and it worked beautifully.

I thank you for your work, and if you have a PayPal account I'll send you $5.

Hardcore difficulty isn't that bad if you save your game before each level up and make sure your character and the death knight get that extra skill point each. Then you make sure that you do every quest, kill every monster and explore every battleground. Those extra skill points are just too big a perk to turn down, IMO. You'll be wanting to buy any holy water you see for sale, too, because you can increase your stats permanently with them.

Crawdaddy79;
The XVI32 hex editor defaults to 17 columns (that can be changed in the options), rather than the standard 16 (which is what I assumed for my instructions). In that case the difficulty value would be two rows below the 'e' (so in XVI32 you would move one byte left for each row down to compensate for the extra byte per row compared to other hex editors).
Anyway, glad you got it working.


Undesirable;
At least for the start of the game, opponents in hardcore get fairly modest bonuses, if at all (less than 10% extra health, mana and stats if there was any difference; only 1 of the resistance stats I looked at changed, and that was only by 1 point). It seems the doubling up of some opponents would prove more trouble than specific creatures being a little bit tougher. Playing again I would go with hardcore difficulty, but I don't think I would have the patience to reload at each level-up. On tactical with a warrior / archer combination I pretty much always had spare skill points (though I never got around to trying out traps or playing with many spells...).

Oh right, I didn't realise there was such little difference between tactical and hardcore. I only started playing through the game properly in hardcore because I read about the skill point bonus.

I still haven't finished playing through the whole of Beyond Divinity or even Divine Divinity, because I get sidetracked by just about every other game that's released. Fallout 3, Sacred 2, Far Cry 2, Mass Effect, Racedriver - GRID, Devil May Cry 4, The Witcher, Dead Space, etc. I've even got Eve Online and World of Warcraft accounts. Lord help me when Diablo III arrives.