When my friend asked me if I wanted to try Baldur’s Gate 3’s (Larian Studios, 2023) Honour Mode with them, I immediately said no. I didn’t have the time or the patience to challenge myself with what could lead to over a hundred hours spent in a turn-based roleplaying game, especially knowing that a single mistake could end the run and mean we had, essentially, wasted our time.

In BG3’s Honour Mode, which is also the game’s hardest difficulty, the player only has access to a single save file. If the entire party dies or is knocked out, the player can choose to either delete the save or, if you are unable to let go, continue playing at a custom difficulty. In terms of honour, though, the idea is to be able to accept the end as it comes, and eventually that unplanned ending began to draw me in.

I have never believed in the age-old idiom “gamers have infinite lives”. I can vividly remember one of my first ever experiences attempting to play a PC game, which led to me drowning in Half-Life’s tutorial level (when I was far too young to play the game). I can still recall the feeling of disappointment as if I had somehow ruined the main character’s story by leading him to his untimely death. To this day, whenever the player-character dies in a game, I feel that same feeling wash over me and repeat the deadpan line:

“And that’s how the story ends.”

Yet there are always save files to go back to, and I’ve been able to at least continue playing a game despite the sense of failure that often overtakes me. Out of fear that the disappointment might truly get the best of me, though, I have never thought to challenge myself with single save files, which is why I was surprised when something about the Honour Mode sparked my curiosity.

I have only ever played Baldur’s Gate 3 with my friend and with a heavy focus on roleplaying, where we play the characters and only make choices that match their motivations. That’s what led me to ask my friend if they’d be interested in roleplaying the Honour Mode, meaning we’d have no intention of optimising the run or trying to metagame our decisions.

If it made sense for our characters to do something brash, we’d let it happen and live with (or die from) the consequences.

We set off with a few guiding ideas: our characters would lean toward good or neutral choices, and my character Sebastian (a scared people pleaser) preferred to avoid trouble while my friend’s Paladin Penelope focused on trying to protect Sebastian, their charge.

Everything started out well enough. We cleared the tutorial and entered the first area of the game with little trouble, but the roleplay quickly led us down a path of unexpected situations we were surprised to survive. For example, who could have guessed that a Paladin, desperate to save a child, making the split-second decision to use the Friends spell to influence a character’s mood would cause an entire settlement to turn on us at the very start of the game? Not us, and least of all did we expect to survive the massacre that followed – by (so very honourably) sneaking out before anyone could catch us.

The trauma of the event, and our characters blaming themselves for the deaths of the dozens of innocent people who were blamed for our transgressions, led us down a dangerous path of wanting to rescue any survivors we could find… And with far fewer options to earn experience and level up than we had intended, now that everyone hated our guts.

So, what went wrong?

Nine hours in, Sebastian wholeheartedly believed that Lae’zel, a party member he felt drawn to due to the volatile nature of his upbringing, was the key to the party’s survival. When Lae’zel ran off to meet her people and ask them for guidance, Sebastian followed, only to immediately misspeak and turn them against the group. The end was swift.

Lae’zel was taken out in a single strike; the Paladin yelled at Sebastian to run before they, too, were taken out; and Sebastian, desperate to get away after witnessing everyone getting crushed due to his mistake, was caught in a Hold Person spell before being surrounded by four people who struck him down in a flash.

It was over in a single turn, and my friend and I couldn’t stop laughing.

“I guess we’re deleting the save?”

“Yeah.”

And that’s how the story ended. Or did it?

After we deleted the save and said goodnight, I kept thinking about the consequences of our untimely ending late into the evening. My story, or Sebastian’s, may have been cut short, but in my mind the world of the game moved on without us, and I imagined how our characters’ (inevitable) deaths could have inspired the few remaining party members to take over and finish the story in our absence.

Even months later, I keep coming back to these characters, and I can’t help but to chuckle every time I remember the chaos that our brief take on the Honour Mode had been. I think rather fondly of Sebastian’s lost potential and the honourable Paladin Penelope who had followed him until the end: They may not have been the main characters of the game’s narrative, but that made the experience and their impact no less valuable to me. And perhaps this experience will help alleviate my disappointment in the future, too, when I inevitably die in a game and, once again, begin to feel like I have somehow failed the characters and the worlds they inhabit.

The overall experience is what I play games for, and a gruesome death can be just as memorable as a clean victory – and every now and then, it can be the failures that matter the most. I just need to remember that.

Basic Information

Game Baldur’s Gate 3

Publisher and Developer Larian Studios

Platforms Windows, macOS, Linux, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S

Release Date August 3, 2023

Genre Role-playing, Fantasy

PEGI 18

Picture Credits

Screenshots from Baldur’s Gate 3 (Larian Studios, 2023), taken by the author