Baldur’s Gate 3: Honor Mode in BG3, explained

With the launch of Baldur’s Gate 3 Patch Five, the most experienced and dedicated players now have a new challenge to conquer in Honor Mode.

Honor Mode is an “intense” version of the campaign that makes the already challenging advanced difficulty Tactician Mode look like a walk through the grove. In fact, Honor Mode takes the ruthless and unforgiving Tactician Mode and somehow makes it even more daunting. But for those who can overcome this great challenge, a gilded reward awaits.

Want to know what to expect? Here’s everything we know about Baldur’s Gate 3 Honor Mode, including the enhanced difficulty modifiers and the completion reward.

All Baldur’s Gate 3 Honor Mode details

Think of Honor Mode as Tactician Mode but with a couple of added modifiers. On its own, Tactician Mode is a significantly greater challenge than the default Balanced difficulty, and these same challenges are carried over to Honor Mode:

• Enemies have more health, are less likely to miss, and use stronger gear, spells, and ruthless tactics. Bosses get the largest health boosts.
• Enemies will use new tactics and gear in an attempt to catch players off guard during combat.
• Camp Supplies needed for a long rest are increased from 40 to 80.
• Trader baseline attitude is reduced, making initial buy prices higher and sell prices lower.

In addition to these increased modifiers, Honor Mode has its own modifiers that make for an extremely intense experience: even stronger bosses, stricter rules toward actions and damage bonuses, and a single save file.

Stronger bosses

In addition to larger health and more powerful gear, the boss fights in Honor Mode are made even more challenging by the addition of “over 30 new tweaks” to each encounter, designed to catch the player even more off guard. A new “Legendary Action” system allows bosses to perform new actions and abilities that add “twists and turns” to all the game’s signature boss battles.

Stricter action and damage bonus rules

On top of the added difficulty increases from Tactician Mode listed above, Honor Mode also features stricter rules to both action economy and damage bonus rules “toward the end of the game.”

Action economy effectively reflects the number and type of actions players or characters can perform in a single round. Towards the end of the game, leveled-up characters were able to breeze through much of the third act thanks to multi-action turns and very high damage bonuses, so this change in Honor Mode should make it so the difficulty will go up, or at the very least not go down as it progresses.

Single save file

You get one and only one save file in Honor Mode, meaning your choices and consequences always stick. You won’t be able to reload older saves if you make a mistake or a bad choice, so make sure your choices are made carefully.

How to get the Baldur’s Gate 3 Honor Mode reward

If the entire party is defeated in Honor Mode, then your Honor Mode run is ended. When your run ends, you’ll get a stats presentation that includes how well you did, and you can complete the campaign as a Custom Mode, but it will not count as a completed Honor Mode game.

Those who complete the entire game in Honor Mode without dying will be rewarded the Golden D20, a dice skin that you can use in future playthroughs and a symbol of your BG3 excellence.

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