Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Redoing the difficulty levels: separate Quest Difficulty and Battle Difficulty

I'm only a few months into it and love playing, but I find myself being what I call "dead ended" where my game progress basically stops around a game-pivotal quest or quests. At that point, I've honestly tried everything I can and can't move the game forward because I either don't have enough quests done, or not done in the right order, or some other thing. It makes the quest system feels like a Rube Goldberg machine instead of a fun thing, and I've seriously considered putting the game away permanently more than once because of it. Searching for quest solutions online is very annoying at best - it makes me feel like I'm stuck inside a broken Rube Goldberg machine.

[img]https://www.flickr.com/photos/rocor/40020297094[/img]

I'd like to see two levels of Quest difficulty. An easy mode, where you're not exactly handed everything on a silver platter, but it's definitely not as challenging as it currently is. Maybe you could have "ask the DM" functionality and get hints and answers without soul-selling-level penalties to do it. I'd find that a lot less frustrating when I'm completely dead ended.

The other Quest difficulty level would be normal mode, i.e., what the game currently is. Developers being developers, I'm sure they'd tweak it so that flipping back and forth between the modes wouldn't gain you much advantage, or at least not all the time. Seems fair to me - tweak on.

Battle difficulty seems to have taken care of itself. I've not played the levels above story mode, but my thought is that the difficulty is based on battle variables like the creatures having more hit points, your weapons doing less damage, or both. My understanding is that the current difficulty levels keep the quest stuff the same.

My personal gaming preference would be to increase the battle difficulty and make it easier on the quests. Choosing the levels for each separately would allow you to do that.

I've never played Honor Mode, but I'd make it normal quest difficulty only with no switching allowed; the metaphorical top of the mountain should stay the top of the mountain.

EDIT: Just found out that BG3 development is effectively dead. So sad. Hopefully Divinity 3 will be great when it comes out.

As you figured out, there's a story mode where battles are not difficult, for adventures who are more interested in exploration than fighting. The quests are the same either way as far as I know.

Here are some tips:

1. Read everything you find. Most are just flavor, but some are involved in quests. You may see a popup that says check your quest journal J for more details. You don't have to literally read it, just the read mechanic from the right click menu.

2. Explore a lot. Some quest notes are inside locked red chests. You'll have to figure out a way to get at it. Most of these, fortunately, are not out in the open with a dozen people standing around, so hide and waiting a bit for people to wander away works.

3. Check the journal. It usually has a suggestion what to do next. Often it will put something on the map to go to next.

4. Keep pushing into new areas you haven't uncovered in the map yet. This helps for quests (especially higher-level quests) that seem at a dead end.

5. Some quests set things up for later in the game, and you have no access yet. There's quests you get in Act I you have to shelve until Act II or even Act III.


I don't think there's any quest you really need to get done to finish the game, though you may miss out on interesting questlines or "phat loot". IIRC, the fastest speedrun is less than 4 minutes!