Baldur’s Gate 3, Larian Studios’ masterpiece and GOTY nominee, will be receiving a dragon hoard’s worth of content with its Patch 5. Read on to learn more about the game’s new features and game modes.
Tons of Fun New Content in Baldur’s Gate 3’s Patch 5
Baldur’s Gate 3 is already overflowing with content and random things to do, but that’s not enough for Larian Studios and their newest patch to our beloved D&D-adjacent game.
The hotly-anticipated Patch 5 just dropped and it’s chock-full of things to throw into the ever-growing pile. We’ll be breaking down everything the new patch entails, including its 2 new game modes and a playable epilogue to round out your adventure.
New Playable Epilogue Gives Players a “Final Goodbye” To Their Beloved Characters
No adventure is complete without an ending, and Patch 5 introduces a new playable epilogue to round out your adventure with a "final chapter" of sorts. Slight spoiler warning for folks who haven’t finished the game yet.
Set six months after the game’s ending, this afterparty of heroic proportions serves as the culmination of all our choices throughout the game. Larian Studios even commented that "this resulted in some of the most complex writing in the game thus far, as it takes advantage of Baldur's Gate 3’s reactivity across the entire adventure."
This new epilogue is accessible if you finish the game the normal way or - for those who’ve already finished it - if you load up a save just before the final fight. In this epilogue, you’ll experience new cinematics that reflect your choices, reunite with your party to trade stories, read letters from old friends and compatriots, and even keep up with the times via the Baldur’s Gate Gazette. Other things to expect from the epilogue include new music, new faces at the camp, and special cinematic endings for Gale and Lae’zel, which are defined by your choices during their companion quests.
So there you have it, a heroic ending to a heroic adventure. Good endings aren’t guaranteed, of course, especially if you made questionable decisions along the way. One thing’s for sure, however, this ending’s gonna be a memorable one.
New Honour and Custom Game Modes
Two new game modes are also introduced with the release of Patch 5: Honour and Custom Mode. These were made to expand the BG3 experience and challenge even the most capable adventurers with dangerous encounters. Let’s dig right in, starting with the game mode that’s gonna give any min-maxer a run for their money: Honour Mode.
Honour Mode’s Here to Test Your Skill
Honour Mode brings a bunch of new changes to your standard run, but chief among them is the removal of "save scumming", or reloading a previous save to exploit the game’s random dice rolls. That’s right, you’re gonna need to keep those inspiration points handy from now because the dice are gonna lie where they land in honour mode.
This mode also promises difficulty spikes across the game for its combat and social encounters, so you’re gonna be in for a rough ride once you set up an adventure with this mode. New gimmicks and tweaks will be infusing 30 of the game’s iconic boss fights and even some smaller fights in between. D&D veterans would shudder in horror to realize that bosses get Legendary Actions now, which, for the uninitiated, lets the boss attack outside of their turn.
All of it won’t be for nothing, however, as finishing a run with this mode enabled will grant you the coveted Golden d20 cosmetic for your dice rolls. Now that’s a treasure befitting a hero of Baldur’s Gate!
Custom Mode’s Authentic Tabletop D&D Experience
Speaking of D&D, this game’s plenty similar to it already with its character-driven story and dice rolls, but Custom Mode ups that tabletop feel as high as it can go. Custom Mode lets you curate a game to your liking, providing various sliders and options to create your own unique BG3 run.
We’ll let the patch notes run through every option, but the most notable ones drastically change how you play the game, with some even changing rules to better reflect the tabletop D&D experience. You can enable a custom option to make failed Perception checks hidden, so you’d never even know that a roll took place. Enemy HP could be hidden, so you’re working off of your own intuition. There’s just so much that could be done to make this game feel like a D&D session among friends.
To go through a few more Custom Mode options, you can let Short Rests fully heal the party to make the game easier or - if you’re feeling particularly masochistic - completely remove death-saving throws from the game and have your characters die the moment they reach 0 HP.
Various Bug Fixes and Quality-of-Life Improvements
That’s most of the bigger changes done, but that’s not all that Patch 5 entails. In addition to fixing the issues caused by Patch 4, Patch 5 also introduces UI and inventory updates to improve the game’s quality of life.
These changes let you manage the inventories and equipment load-outs of companions not included in your party, which was previously not possible. Performance improvements for the game’s console versions have also been implemented, so console players should be experiencing a far smoother time from here on out.
That’s about it for the rundown. There’s so much more that this patch has in store that we’re sure Larian didn’t tell us just to keep us on our toes. There’s no better way to find them all than starting another adventure. See you in Faerûn, heroes!
Source:
Baldur's Gate 3 Official Patch Notes
