Key things
- Honor Mode was added to Baldur's Gate 3 over a year ago in Patch 5.
- In that time, 2.1 percent of players on Steam have successfully conquered the mode, with more than 1.2 million attempts ending in defeat.
Over a year ago, on November 30, 2023, Larian Studios added the notoriously difficult Honor Mode to Baldur's Gate 3. With only one save file, you're challenged to beat the entire game on harder than Tactician difficulty without dying. get the coveted gold cubes.
The bragging is nice too.
Larian Studios revealed earlier this year that 1.2 million plays of Honor Mode ended in defeat. It is clear that a large part of the community is trying to beat the game on its highest difficulty. But only a fraction have the courage to pull it off.
At the time of writing, 2.1 percent of Steam players have unlocked the Foehammer achievement for completing the game in Honor mode. In comparison, 22.8 percent percent of players finished the game and five percent faced tactics.
There have been many horror stories in honor mode
With 1.2 million kills, there are plenty of horror stories to share around the campfire about where Honor Mode runs went wrong.
One player made it through the entire game, defeating Absolute in a triumphant, well-deserved victory, only to die at the epilogue party. They decided what would be their downfall, becoming a Mind Flayer just to see how it would change the ending, which meant they had to roll a die to prevent themselves from eating the brains of their companions.
Since this is an Honor mode, you can't save the dirt, so lo and behold, they missed the rolls and everything went down.
Another player narrowly escaped death after three party members were killed in battle. They returned to the camp and asked Withers to resurrect them all, but while teleporting Gale's corpse to safety, his Nether Orb went off, killing them all.
But worst of all was the Honor Mode run that ended in Scratch. One player threw the Scratch ball and his teammate picked it up to continue the fetch round. But in doing so, he antagonized the entire camp—including a level 12 Oathbreaker Knight—and quickly ended his game in just four turns.
There's a lot that can happen in Baldur's Gate 3, something predictable, something from Oathbreaker Knight holding you back from playing fetch, so it's no wonder Honor Mode will be so difficult. 2.1 percent is a lot more impressive than it might seem at first glance, right?
Baldur's Gate 3 is the long-awaited next chapter in the RPG series based on Dungeons & Dragons. Developed by Divinity creator Larian Studios, it puts you in the middle of a thought flayer invasion of Faerûn, more than a century after the events of its predecessor.
