PSA: Delete your Baldur’s Gate 3 early access saves before starting the full game

By Tomas Franzese August 2, 2023

Larian Studios’ Baldur’s Gate 3 leaves early access with its 1.0 launch on PC tomorrow, August 3. While I’m sure those who played the game on Steam during early access are quite excited, this is a reminder that you need to delete your early access save file — and even uninstall the game to be safe — before the launch version of Baldur’s Gate 3 comes out.

A Baldur's Gate 3 character lights the way. — Larian Studios

The developers of Baldur’s Gate 3 revealed that this would be the case in a community post in July, saying that, compared to what was available in early access, the version of the game coming out on August 3 “is so vastly different that it’s not possible to make those save files compatible.” So, you will have to start fresh when this RPG leaves early access, but Larian went on to clarify this week that the safest thing for players to do to avoid any issues is to delete their early access save and even uninstall the game altogether ahead of August 3.

It broke down the steps to do this in the latest community update post. To delete a Baldur’s Gate 3 save, you’ll need to pick the Load Game option on the main menu, choose an old campaign save, and then choose the Delete Campaign option that appears at the bottom of the screen. After that, Larian recommends players delete any mods and uninstall the early access version of Baldur’s Gate 3 from their computer altogether.

To uninstall it on Steam, simply right-click on Baldur’s Gate 3 in your library, choose the Manage tab in the pop-up menu, and then pick the Uninstall option from there. Once you do all of that (and make sure your graphics card drivers are up to date), you shouldn’t have any issues installing the launch version of Baldur’s Gate 3 once it’s available.

Baldur’s Gate 3 launches for PC on August 3. For those that don’t want to deal with these early access shenanigans, the game will come out for PS5 on September 6 and for Xbox Series X/S sometime in the future.

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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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Karlach in Baldur's Gate 3.

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