Baldur's Gate 3 PSA: "Long Rest as often as possible. It will reduce bugs"

Baldur's Gate 3 players believe they've identified an issue "halfway through Act 3", which some believe hint at "a weird error with the way [Larian has] designed the whole narrative progression".

In a post on the official subreddit that has racked up hundreds of up-votes, u/Neville_Lynwood has identified that although lots of players prefer to avoid Long Rests, failure to do so can impede progress, as Larian has "a lot of events, companion quests, romances, side characters, and even main story events to you having a Long Rest".

Neville_Lynwood points out that whilst "thematically [it] makes sense" to Long Rest in order to "reflect on stuff that has happened", we're all essentially "de-incentivised" from doing so because you lose your temporary buffs and elixirs… which is a problem, given some think that a lack of rest results in "breaking the narrative progression which leads to event flags and triggers getting jumbled", leading to "all kinds of bugs".

"I must say I've had very few issues myself, but reading about what happens to others and seeing how the game handles it, I think lack of Long Rests are probably one of the bigger root causes," the player posited.

"So, unless you really want to cherish a temporary buff or an elixir, take regular Long Rests, even if you have no need for them. Every time there's a main story progression or a companion development - take a rest."

PSA: Long Rest as often as possible. It will reduce bugs.
by u/Neville_Lynwood in BaldursGate3

"It's like clearing your e-mail inbox every day, instead of allowing the emails to pile up and causing a mess when you finally try to follow along a correspondence."

"The thing that gets me, though, is that the game really steers you away from resting too much story wise, since there is usually some arbitrary talked about time limit," commented DeusVult181.

"'We are going to turn into mind flayers any day now!' 'The goblins will attack at any moment!' 'I don't know how much longer my powers will last!' Are these real time limits? Unless you look it up you have no idea. So it makes you not want to long rest in case the game says 'Whoops - seven long rests is way to much. BAM! You're a mind flayer now'. Or something to that effect."

But even too much rest can be a bad thing.

"Keep in mind however that if you long rest too often, some quests will progress without you. The timed is generous. But it's still there regardless," warned dadvader.

"If I recall correctly, I saw a guy taking too many long rest that Halsin basically break out of prison and already killed every goblin guards. So there has to be a specific balance somewhere."

"It’s incredibly frustrating because I didn’t know this and basically didn’t rest at all for the vast majority of act one," adds Firm-Channel4260. "I took a bunch of long rests back to back before finishing once I learned that there were story elements tied to resting, but I’m worried I screwed things up."

"My recommendation would be to 'soft force' rests," Neville_Lynwood suggests. "Give players a pop-up that says: 'your party would like to a take a rest to reflect on the events that have happened'."

On Friday, Larian released some Baldur's Gate 3 stats on Friday to celebrate its first week and that's where we learned that 368 players had managed to complete the game in the opening weekend.

"Baldur's Gate 3 is a great game then, and unlike many recent PC releases, it launches in a polished state with no game-breaking issues, shaming the technical quality of other big AAA releases," Alex wrote in Digital Foundry's Baldur's Gate 3 tech review.

"I wish it did a few things better, like having FSR 2 at launch, fixing a few minor DLSS issues or improving frame-times when traversing NPC-populated areas on lower-end CPUs like the Ryzen 5 3600. Other than these minor aspects though, Larian has done a fine job on the technical side of things - and that's a genuine pleasure, given just how well this clear game-of-the-year candidate has been realised."