All Baldur’s Gate 3 difficulty settings, explained

The road to the titular city in Baldur’s Gate 3 is fraught with peril and difficulty ahead. Because of that, you might want to take note of which difficulty setting you lock in for your Baldur’s Gate 3 campaign, especially when it comes to what options you’ll have available after doing so.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is out now on PC. It comes with three difficulty options to choose from at the outset, letting the player calibrate their own degree of challenge. That said, you’re not hard-locked into them either; you can, at any point, swap difficulties if you’re feeling up for more or less challenge. Still, it’s nice to know what you’re getting into, and especially about one big caveat for the lowest setting.

Which Baldur’s Gate 3 difficulty should you choose?

Of the three options, there are the following difficulty selections in Baldur’s Gate 3: Explorer, Balanced, and Tactician. At their base levels, they deliver what you’d expect.

Explorer lets you focus on the story, easing up some combat challenge. Balanced evens it out, and hits the medium point between Explorer and Tactician, which is the hardest setting.

While most of this pertains to combat difficulty and other resources, it’s important to note that we’re also seeing reports that you cannot multiclass on Explorer difficulty. It’s worth being aware of that before you lock into the lower difficulty.

In our own experience, Balanced is what it says: a pretty solid level of challenge without being overbearing. While you won’t breeze through every fight the first time, and might even want to get in the habit of making frequent saves, nothing should be too overbearing. But if it does get excessive, you can always toggle the difficulty of Baldur’s Gate 3 mid-campaign.

You can change difficulty mid-campaign

What’s also worth noting is that you can change your difficulty at-will, so if you end up feeling Baldur’s Gate 3 is a bit too easy or too tough, it’s easy to throttle that to your liking. Similarly, multiclass issues could probably be subverted by swapping the difficulty when you want to.