Honour Mode is Baldur's Gate 3's biggest challenge - a permadeath option where the difficulty is dialled way up and a single party wipe means starting the game from scratch. Which is why I was quite so surprised to learn that 40,000 players managed to beat it with the D&D equivalent of hands tied behind their backs.
In the new stats released to celebrate Baldur's Gate 3's second anniversary, developer Larian revealed that 500,000 players have beaten Honour Mode at one time or another. Of those, it said, more than 45,000 chose to do so in…suboptimal ways.
Of the half a million brave heroes who finished the game in Honour Mode, a few of you decided to go about it in creative ways. pic.twitter.com/oHHGlAa5xDAugust 4, 2025
Larian says that those brave souls managed to beat Honour Mode "using only a level 1 character." I can only imagine that's only possible with a fair bit of sneaking along a very carefully-planned route, as many of the Honour Mode bosses are specifically designed to rock your world even if you're actually at an appropriate level for the fight. I'm actually kind of shocked that so many players have made their way through Honour Mode like this, but we're looking at a feat that's only been accomplished by less than 1% of Honour Mode winners.
Larian's been sharing plenty of other unhinged build options to celebrate. There's the 350 players who transformed simple-minded fighter Minsc into a Death Domain cleric, and the fact that Shadowheart is the most-respecced character in the game, because that Act 2 transformation meant that it was time to leave Trickery behind.
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