Just 11.6% of Baldur’s Gate 3 players have successfully completed Honour Mode, the game’s toughest difficulty setting, Larian Studios said in a chilling infographic that lays bare just how hard this road is for those who take it.
For the unitiated, Honour Mode joined the game with Patch 5 at the end of November. The bosses are tougher, players get just a single save slot (so, no “save scumming”), and permadeath ends your run if the entire party is killed off. But, beat it, and you get a set of golden dice for all your future rolls.
Here’s how many, in whole numbers have completed an Honour Mode run of BG3 eight months after it was added to the game:
141,660 brave souls completed Honour Mode.
1.2M of you failed.What, like it’s hard? pic.twitter.com/7dVU8uEmrl
— Baldur's Gate 3 (@baldursgate3) August 7, 2024
As Polygon pointed out, a week after Honour Mode’s debut, 158,000 Baldur’s Gate 3 players had attempted a run — and just 464 had finished one. So it has gotten better, up from a 0.2% success rate to 12%! But still, finishing this sucker sounds about as easy as getting into a very selective university, say, New York University, or Georgetown.
What is Honour Mode in Baldur’s Gate 3?
To explain the second part of that graph, once a player fails an Honour Mode run, they have two options — delete the save file (and try, try again, even unto one’s own madness) or take it into Custom difficulty to continue, although from there it’s no longer Honour Mode and players won’t get credit for finishing it.
Little surprise then that only 27% chose to go into Custom Mode, because really, what is the point there, other than masochism.
Larian had other fun facts to observe the anniversary week of BG3’s launch (it was Aug. 3, 2023). For example, they’ve observed 75 million kisses exchanged (dawww, although really, get a room); counted how many times animal companions have been petted (Scratch the dog, a no-surprise leader) and broken down the most popular avatar choices among players.
