Honour Mode Save File Workarounds - In Case of Playthrough-Breaking Bugs

[RandomAndros]

Let me say off the bat that I 100% do not advocate making indiscriminate use of the techniques I'll describe, but a lot of people, including myself, seem to have fallen victim to a variety of potentially playthrough-breaking bugs when playing in "honour mode" or custom difficulty settings that only permit a single save file.

I find honour mode a lot of fun - having played tabletop D&D and Pathfinder for much of my life, as well as the original Baldur's Gate games when they were first released, I'm lucky enough to be deeply familiar with the rules and systems, and how to utilize them to my advantage. Thus, the added challenge of honour mode is just my cup of tea, in addition to providing a good disincentive to "save scum" when I get undesirable outcomes on major plot points in conversations. Anyone who doesn't know what they're doing with D&D probably shouldn't be jumping straight into this mode, anyway.

All of that said, the game can throw quite a few bugs at you, and there are several workarounds for honour mode's save file restrictions. The two most useful, in my experience, are as follows:

(1) Enter task manager to "end task" BG3, preventing an exit save from being made. Alt-F4 to hard exit the program still results in an exit save being produced;

(2) enter the local save files on your hard drive, copy and paste your current save into a different folder, then, when desired, transfer that save back into the save folder when the game isn't currently running, overriding the existing save files and effectively restoring an earlier save.

Again, please use with care, and try to preserve the spirit of honour mode.

[Dude]

why dont u peeps just setup duplicati and auto copy stuff every few minutes with incremental backups?

but i also dont get why you not stay with tactician when you plan on breaking the honour rules anyway

[RandomAndros]

Originally posted by Wölki:

why dont u peeps just setup duplicati and auto copy stuff every few minutes with incremental backups?

but i also dont get why you not stay with tactician when you plan on breaking the honour rules anyway

I did say more than once pretty clearly that I don't advocate breaking honour mode, except in cases of being unable to proceed because of a bug, not through your own failure.

Also, not everybody is super-savvy to what you're referring to, and the process of copying and pasting is pretty simple.

[RandomAndros]

Originally posted by Wölki:

why dont u peeps just setup duplicati and auto copy stuff every few minutes with incremental backups?

but i also dont get why you not stay with tactician when you plan on breaking the honour rules anyway

Not to beat a dead horse, but I had to replace my files three times in the last couple of days because I got stuck (1) in camp unable to sleep or leave camp, due to a bug; (2) in a conversation loop from which I couldn't proceed due to a bug; (3) when a required NPC failed to spawn, again, due to a bug.

None of these are instances wherein I "lost" the game, and, had I not backed-up and replaced my save file, I would have been out about 20 hours of progress.

If your party dies, or you get a bad outcome on a conversation, you shouldn't use the above methods to continue your honour mode playthrough, in my opinion.

[Wyrtt]

Originally posted by RandomAndros:

Originally posted by Wölki:

why dont u peeps just setup duplicati and auto copy stuff every few minutes with incremental backups?

but i also dont get why you not stay with tactician when you plan on breaking the honour rules anyway

I did say more than once pretty clearly that I don't advocate breaking honour mode, except in cases of being unable to proceed because of a bug, not through your own failure.

Also, not everybody is super-savvy to what you're referring to, and the process of copying and pasting is pretty simple.

if you consider THAT to be tech savvy than I have a bad news for you

[RandomAndros]

Originally posted by Wyrtt:

Originally posted by RandomAndros:

I did say more than once pretty clearly that I don't advocate breaking honour mode, except in cases of being unable to proceed because of a bug, not through your own failure.

Also, not everybody is super-savvy to what you're referring to, and the process of copying and pasting is pretty simple.

if you consider THAT to be tech savvy than I have a bad news for you

Useful and on-topic, thanks.

[Gaslov]

I think doing this will disable the achievement.

[アンジェル]

Originally posted by Gaslov:

I think doing this will disable the achievement.

No, it does not if you do it right.

[RandomAndros]

No, moving around save files outside of the actual program doesn't have any affect on progress towards the achievement. The game is actually fairly oblivious of a lot of things that should impact achievements - you can still obtain achievements by adding .pak mods without a mod manager (at least, as far as I've experienced).

Again, though, please just allow me to reiterate and please take it to heart when I say that I don't condone using save workarounds for anything other than avoiding loss of progress due to a glitch, bug, hardware failure, et al.