Baldur's Gate 3 veterans share the game's biggest secrets to prepare for the end of early access

As Baldur's Gate 3 Early Access draws to an end ahead of the game's full release next week, players are pointing out the things that their less eagle-eyed peers might have missed.

Larian has confirmed that the game's first act - the only part of the game you can play in Early Access - is going through some changes with the full release. Some of those are pretty minor, but others, such as Origin character Karlach's transition from NPC to playable character, make for some much bigger tweaks to the current state of the game. With that in mind, some players over on Reddit are looking out for the parts of the game that the developers have kept better hidden than others.

After a pretty brief stint at the initial launch of Early Access, I've pretty deliberately avoided Baldur's Gate 3, but I've jumped back in for a couple of short playthroughs to get a sense of how I want to play the full game. Over the past couple of weeks that's amounted to about 20-30 hours of gameplay, but there are things in that Reddit thread that are apparently so well hidden that I'm not sure whether the game's die-hard fans are making fun of those who don't know any better.

For instance, I've not yet made it to the Baldur's Gate 3 underdark in my current playthrough, but now I've learned that not only is there a bunch of fish people lurking down there, other characters lurking in the deep will guide you to a mysterious, puzzle-filled forge which appears to be its own complex mystery. Elsewhere, I've spotted plenty of references to fights, rare weapons, and enemies that I know about, but haven't managed to actually find for myself yet.

I want to say, in my defence, that I'm mostly playing Early Access to get through the different permutations of the story - an important task when there's 17,000 endings to consider. That said, I'm feeling pretty smug that I do actually know about some of this stuff - one commenter says that they only discovered one hidden area after 300 hours of gametime, but I came across it on my second playthrough.

It's worth noting, of course, that if you're planning on going into Baldur's Gate 3 as fresh as possible, that thread is filled with spoilers. That said, some of these stories will change slightly with next week's release, so perhaps something you think you know right now might not be true when 1.0 finally comes around.

Just a few days to go, and just enough time to check out our Baldur's Gate 3 preview.