Baldur’s Gate 3 Reignites Age-Old Save Scumming Debate

ign.com:

After Baldur’s Gate 3’s explosive launch on Steam, millions of people are exploring its hardcore role-playing trappings with a single finger poised over one button on their keyboard: F5.

F5 triggers a quicksave without having to go through the laborious process of opening the main menu and manually saving. Many games have a quick save option, of course, but for Baldur’s Gate 3 it’s crucial, because this is a game seemingly built for save scumming.

Save scumming, for the uninitiated, is the act of saving before key decisions, or expected key decisions, so that you can reload if you end up with an undesirably outcome. Baldur’s Gate 3’s chaotic freedom and sometimes random, brutal difficulty are such that undesirable outcomes are part of the experience.

You might have failed a dice check, steering a conversation in a direction you hate. You might have passed a dice check but hated how things turned out because of it. You might have whiffed an attack when it seemed almost impossible to do so, making death at the hands of a horrible pack of goblins an inevitability. There are so many choices to make in Baldur’s Gate 3 and so many methods with which to make them, that things have a habit of going wrong.

But is there such a thing as wrong in Baldur’s Gate 3? This week IGN reported on a tip from Larian director of publishing, Michael Douse, who advised players “trust the dice”. While this is good advice in the context of Baldur’s Gate 3’s rock hard combat, it gets to the heart of save scumming, too. “Trust yourself, and trust the dice,” Douse said. “It reacts to your success and failures.”

Own your failures, perhaps? Resist the urge to save scum? Maybe. One of the best things about Baldur's Gate 3 is how it copes with player failure,