Baldur’s Gate 3 Patch 5 adds new modes that can make the game easier or harder

By Tomas Franzese November 30, 2023

The fifth major patch for Baldur’s Gate 3 just dropped. It’s a literal game-changing patch, as it adds a new (extremely difficult) Honour Mode and a Custom Mode that will allow players to customize the difficulty of their adventure.

Minthara in Baldur's Gate 3. — Larian Studios

Honour Mode is essentially a hardcore version for Baldur’s Gate 3. It disables save scumming, removes some exploits, increases the difficulty in combat and conversation, and implements a new Legendary Action system to the game’s boss fights. Players technically only have one life to beat Honour Mode with, as they’ll be presented with stats from their perilous journey and forced to disable the Honour Mode difficulty additions if they die at any point. Those who make it all the way through will get a Golden D20 in-game.

That extraordinarily difficult mode might sound extremely appealing to Baldur’s Gate 3’s most die-hard players, but those who are looking to modify the game’s difficulty even further will want to look to Custom Mode. As its name suggests, this mode allows players to tweak various difficulty settings, making their adventure significantly easier or tougher in the process. On top of all this, Patch 5 also adds some significant new narrative content to the game.

It expands the game’s epilogue content by adding a segment taking place in the player’s base camp six months after the events of the game. There, they can speak with and say goodbye to various party members. Overall, Larian Studios says this added epilogue brings over 3,589 new lines of dialogue to the game. All of these new features Patch 5 brings certainly make it very enticing to hop back into Baldur’s Gate 3 before the end of the year.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is available now for PC and PlayStation 5. An Xbox version of the game will launch before the end of the year, with a specific date being revealed at The Game Awards 2023. Patch 5 is around 30 GB in size.

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Tomas Franzese is a Staff Writer at Digital Trends, where he reports on and reviews the latest releases and exciting…

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