Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Custom mode with Honor difficulty?

Hello all,

I noticed that when setting up a custom difficulty, the maximum difficulty in the dropdown is "tactician".

Is it possible to create an Honor mode in Custom mode?
The idea is to have Honor mode with saves, due to some save-bugs that occur sometimes.

Thank you!

I hope not. Let the better players who likes challenge have something exclusive to them.

The point of honor mode is to have a dangerous experience with unpredictable encounters, if you can save scum you will just learn how to beat everyone , then cheese out Honor mode as you will know every encounter and then cry how easy honor mode is.

Plus besides a cosmetic dice that most players don’t care for there would be no point in honor in general if you can get the same experience with save scumming.

So keep honor mode the way it is please

I think so?

If I understand Mortismal video, you can turn off perma save even during ongoing Honor mode to continue. I assume all other features would be kept.


[edit. it seems reports are conflicting. Apparently there are some features unique to Honor mode, which don't seem accessable any other way. That seems unnecessarily - especially stuff like extra enemy behaviours and balanced fixes. I am sure someone will mod those in in no time though]


Nonesense. Making certain features (outside iron man mode) exclusive to honor mode would solve none of the "problems" you mentioned. Even so, why would it bother you for others to not have access to honors mode difficulty enhancement. I have no interest in ironman mode - but harder difficulty mode would be welcome.

I just wanna fight Monsters with legendary actions.

Why do you feel the need to be so weirdly gatekeepy about that?

Because I will have absolutely zero incentive to play honor mode if they do that. I will just play custom.

Having new and dangerous boss encounters that are potentially lethal is the only reason I am enjoying this mode, if I can save scum with zero downside , then why wouldn’t I?

I don’t care about golden dices , but the boss encounters is why I play it.

If I can get the boss encounters via custom then I will never touch Honor.

Also harder bosses doesn’t reward any new loot or experience so the challenge is the only incentive here.

Honor mode absolutely needs something other than a useless cosmetic dice to be relevant and special boss mechanics are it

I fully agree! I just wanted a harder playthrough. I finished Tactician with like 80,000 gold, 200 unused scrolls and potions and was a bit disappointed. However, I don't want a bug (falling to your death when the green landing circle clearly said the jump could be made) or a sudden brain fart deep into act 3 to make me start all over again. Why can't the people who want the extra challenge not have it exclusively combined with ironman mode? I don't want the golden dice or the Steam achievement. I just want to run the game again with better (translation: harder) economy, mobs, bosses and whatever cheese factors removed.

I think not having honor mode difficulty in custom settings is a mistake for those who don't care about the achievement but want to run the game in a harder setting. I would suspect it eliminates a good chunk of people.

And you still get all that you want in Honor mode . All your little complains about bugs are stupid a if you fall off a cliff your companions can rezz you and I have yet to see a bug that wipes the entire party .

Hell if you are so paranoid about it you can always just perma leave one person of your party in camp this way even if you wipe he can just talk to withers and have everybody rezzed.

There are other ways to get around it as well- the game still only auto saves at the same spots as before . Meaning if you are about to get slaughtered you can hard reboot your PC and then start from that save. It’s not like the game auto saves at every turn in combat. I almost wiped at the spider queen under blighted village and rebooted the laptop and the last save was from before I even entered the cave.

So unless you are a terrible player who needs constant save scumming and dozens of tries to beat a boss, it really isn’t that hard to beat Honor mode as it currently is

As has been posted in another thread, luckily the mod is already there: https://www.nexusmods.com/baldursgate3/mods/4743

But why do we need a mod for that? Larian, why?

I recall more than once that when my main fell to the bottom of the earth, the "game over" showed up and I didn't have the option to rez him with party members. Maybe it's been patched since then. I finished Normal then Tact quite some time ago (pretty sure before even patch #2) and haven't been back since. I recall about 0.7% had completed the game in tactician at the time (Steam). Anyways, everything you just mentioned as a workaround including a hard reboot is another way to "disable" the intent of ironman mode, so then why point out that it's great to have (your original reply) but also point out artificial ways to work around it? If you're such a boss (and not a terrible player like me), then play the mode as intended and take the wipe on the Spider Queen and start over. Don't come to the boards to flex, and discredit people suggesting there should be an option to play Honor difficulty without the single save. The Honor Mode achievement for the "better players who likes challenge have something exclusive to them" will still be there to get said achievement and the nice little dice, but adding an option to play new mechanics without the achievement should be there. And your little argument about learning all the tactics in a "safe environment" only to then come back in Honor Mode to win the game... So what?? What do you think I did? I learned what I needed to know on my normal play-through and then built a party to wipe the floor on tactician.

So, I got killed on Honour mode, and I didn't want to do the early Act 1 all over again, figured I'd go on in Custom

Guess what, if you do that, you keep the Bosses with Legendary Actions. So, just go Honour Mode until you die and continue on Custom. Solved.

That is intresting I have the same issue but I don't died. And it's still says on save game I am on Honor mod.
You know when you die you will get the run time and the question do you want to continue.

I don't understand you. You play Honour mode *until* you die. Also... How would you *know* you get that screen, *unless* you died?

Exactly I don't died don't get the screen. But now I am in custom mod after 6 hour +.
I was not sure if this was a bug or i will still get the Honor achivment playing /continue this run. So because you pointed this out I gues it's a bug and I started a new run.
I just replayed to say thnx because for me it was useful to know.

The Honor/Honour mode is essentially a teasing mode:

Hey, are you up to a brand new challenge? if not, go play other modes.

Well, if you are determined to take this challenge, be warned: anything that cause your only save to corrupt or otherwise become unusable will bring an end to your adventure. Are you up to the new challenge? if not, go play other modes.

The whole idea about this new mode is no saves (well, since we are humans, even without life outside games, we still have to eat, sleep and use toilets at the minimum. So, Larian is generous enough to enable 1 save. This way, we can take a break and later resume our gameplay.)

I like how this mode is designed. Based on 500+ hours playing this game on Tactician mode, I have yet to see a game-over screen (meaning: I've never died. Or more accurately, my party have never got wiped out - even during my tests). I wouldn't be worried about bug-induced premature termination of a Honorable playthrough - the probability is way too low to be a real concern.

As reported by Larian on X, as of Dec 5, 2023 (just about a week after this new mode was made public), more than 480+ players worldwide were known to have completed the game in Honor Mode.

481 as of today as I completed it today. And it was trivial past lvl 5 and easy as soon as I got to act 3z

Even soloed some of the encounters like Ansur and laroikan , Orin got 2 shooted like always , House of Grief and Cazador got cleared in 2 turns with my party, Raphael got cleared in 1 turn before anyone could take a turn etc etc.

Zero fears of a wipe anywhere as soon as I hit lvl 5 and walk in the park in act 3 as usual.

I think the reason not many completed it is because they are too scared of 1 save thing and either chose not to even try or modded the game

..Also because it has only been out a few days and for most, this game takes a while to finish. 40hrs is quick for me, and that's a whole week's worth of work.