Official banner art for Baldur's Gate 3.

Early Access Players: Remember to Do This Crucial Thing Before Playing ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’

Tomorrow. LITERALLY tomorrow. We will finally be able to play Baldur’s Gate 3. I cannot overstate how much I am chomping at the bit. I’ve already got two playthroughs in mind, one singleplayer and one multiplayer, and a part of me is dreading all the time I’m gonna be sinking into these playthroughs. (But it’ll be so worth it.)

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However, before ANY of us get started, it’s important to take care of some brass tacks first! If you’ve been playing the game in Early Access, Larian Studios itself urges that you take some final steps before booting up the full game, in order to avoid troubleshooting issues.

To reiterate: make sure to go into your game, delete every single save file (yes, even the ones with silly names, like “omg i kiss girl now??”), then leave the game and uninstall it from wherever you’re playing it from. On top of this, you’ll want to delete any and all mods, and to be extra safe, I’d recommend going into any mod-managers you might use and uninstalling the game from there, too. (They often auto-install/update mods, at least in my experience using Vortex.)

Larian’s blog page on Steam goes further into steps you should take, with the last two being installing BG3 on a solid-state drive (SSD), since the game will be utterly massive; and updating your graphics card, since the game will be utterly gorgeous. Moreover, if you really are attached to your old saves, Larian had this advice: “If you want to back up your saves before removing them from the cloud, you can move them from %LocalAppData%\Larian Studios to another location for safekeeping, before removing them.”

Other players also had some input regarding a “clean uninstall,” which I followed just to be safe:

We all want to be able to play the game upon release (although many of us will have to wait until after work, while the rest of us will “be out sick,” surely), so do take care and make sure you’ll be able to do so as soon and smoothly as possible! Happy adventuring everyone!

(Featured Image: Larian Studios)


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Madeline Carpou
Madeline (she/her) is a staff writer with a focus on AANHPI and mixed-race representation. She enjoys covering a wide variety of topics, but her primary beats are music and gaming. Her journey into digital media began in college, primarily regarding audio: in 2018, she started producing her own music, which helped her secure a radio show and co-produce a local history podcast through 2019 and 2020. After graduating from UC Santa Cruz summa cum laude, her focus shifted to digital writing, where she's happy to say her History degree has certainly come in handy! When she's not working, she enjoys taking long walks, playing the guitar, and writing her own little stories (which may or may not ever see the light of day).