Size up every god in all the realms of Baldur's Gate 3 and you'll find no force mightier than the quicksave key, an ancient relic capable of instantly anchoring you in the timestream. In newly released player stats, developer Larian reveals that the most devoted among us have invoked the key's divine power over 1,400 times in a single playthrough.
Once again breaking down Baldur's Gate 3 by the numbers, Larian, in one slide of its report, puts perfectionistic players under the microscope.
"560+ manual saves were made by a handful of players in a single playthrough," the studio explains. "1,400+ quicksaves were made by an even smaller handful of players. You doing okay there?"
I should hope they're doing okay after that many saves. If anything, I'm surprised these figures aren't higher. I was pretty new to the genre, and even I, in the 140 hours I put into Baldur's Gate 3 on my first run, surely racked up a few hundred combined saves. That was me actively trying to limit save scumming, believe it or not. I was just being meticulous about backing up my progress after a few unfortunate crashes, I swear. Generally, I try (not always successfully, I admit) to follow the Slay the Spire rule of save scumming in all games: mistakes are forever, but honest and disastrous misclicks can be undone.
Frankly, few things more reliably dispense relief than slamming the quicksave button after something good happens. That lucky break was just a memory before; now it's recorded history that those explosives that I definitely saw before casting fireball just so happened to kill everyone except my party.
But it's a slippery slope. The key's power can be habit-forming. A lockpicking check here, a stealth check there, and then before you know it, you're min-maxing the whole timeline, flickering in and out of existence in a way that would surely alarm the Faerun pantheon. "What is that mortal doing?" one perplexed deity would ask, checking in on the mortals as you or I would watch birds. "I think they're trying to hit two nat 20s in a row," another would answer.
This is, of course, why Larian saw fit to test humanity with Honor Mode and forbid any and all save scumming. Fortunately, other games have gone all-out with it and built entire combat systems around making the most of your saves.
