Just when you thought you knew everything about Baldur’s Gate 3 – all the top tips and tricks – a fresh handful of them come along and take you by surprise. Well, they take me by surprise – I bet you’re much more savvy than me. Just in case you aren’t, though, and you’re a kindred spirit, here’s what I stumbled upon.
The tip that really took me by surprise is this. Did you know that you can initiate combat during an interaction cut-scene to affect the outcome of it? It means you can potentially save a character scripted to be attacked – and maybe killed – during the cut-scene before it actually happens.
The tip comes from content creator ESO Danny. As the video points out, you can interrupt a cut-scene by selecting the “Attack” circular button/option in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen.
The example shown in the video is of an interaction which, if you interrupt it, has you save the life of a character and in doing so, unlock a monastery door that would otherwise – if you let the scene play as normal – be locked, and be impossible to lockpick.
Another tip in the video highlights how you can trade with anyone in the game – any character, regardless of if they’re highlighted as a trader or not. Why would you want to? Because apparently – and I love this – you can simply buy the quest reward from them for whatever the quest is that’s associated with them. That means you can skip the quest and still get the reward, assuming you’ve got the cash, and that you can access the reward even if you fail the quest.
This is done in a very similar way to the first tip. During the dialogue interaction, there’s a Trade option on the same row of circular buttons/options in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen. Select it and it will open up the trade screen. Tadaa. It’s a handy way of selecting people to pickpocket, too.
Other tips include closing doors at the end of your turn in combat to stop enemies range-attacking you, and carrying crates around to place in doorways during battles so melee enemies can’t get through. You can also carry locked chests up to the top of high ledges, drop them off and break them, scattering their contents below.
There’s also a tip about throwing potions on the ground near characters to break them and cause them to splash over multiple people. Do this with a Potion of Speed, for instance, and you’ll give Haste to your whole party (if you do it in turn-based mode just before you initiate combat, you’ll benefit significantly from it).
However, the information in the video about it costing an action to drink a potion, and a bonus action to throw a potion, is wrong. It’s the other way around – an action to throw and a bonus action to drink. It used to be the other way
There’s another healing potion tip I didn’t know about whereby if you Drop one into a Cloud of Daggers, the potion will splash each turn on people nearby, for as long as the spell lasts. Just don’t stand in the Cloud of Daggers, obviously.
Drop is a free ability, meaning it doesn’t cost an action or bonus action, which also means you can do it as many times as you like during your turn. So if you, say, have some flammable things you can drop onto a flammable surface nearby, like alcohol or explosive barrels, you can cause a lot of mischief for ‘free’.
I also hadn’t realised the game had added a shift-click ability in inventories, meaning you can bulk select items to “add to wares” for much speedier trading later.
You learn something every day, eh!
Baldur’s Gate 3 has been a huge hit for Larian on PC, although there’s still considerable effort going into ironing out bugs and performance issues, and some content quibbles, which are particularly prevalent in the final third of the game. A second patch is apparently “just around the corner”.
The PlayStation 5 version of the game is imminent now, too, with early access beginning 2nd September and full release on 6th. You can apparently pre-load the game from today.
Meanwhile, there’s finally some relatively good news for Xbox owners regarding Baldur’s Gate 3. The Xbox versions will no longer be held up by the split-screen issue on Series S and will be released, it’s confirmed, “later this year”. That’s because – in an unprecedented platform-parity-breaking move – split-screen is being pulled out of the Series S version for launch, and Larian will work on adding it afterwards.
