Prior to the full launch of Baldur’s Gate 3, any early access progress you’ve made not only will be deleted but almost certainly should be deleted before the game is officially released, according to the team at Larian Studios.
On Aug. 1, just two days before the game’s Aug. 3 launch on PC, the developers of Baldur’s Gate 3 put out a public service announcement asking players with existing early access saves to boot up the game now, manually delete their saves, then fully remove any mods before completely uninstalling the game.
This isn’t to be cruel, though. Larian wants players to do all this to “avoid unintended conflicts at launch.” The version of the game that is going to launch is supposedly quite different from the most recent early access version, so early access saves likely wouldn’t even be able to load at all. Content like Origin characters, different subclasses, and two entire acts worth of story haven’t been a part of early access.
Related: Baldur’s Gate 3 countdown: Exact start time and date
While saves not carrying over is somewhat familiar for the full launch of early access games, the developers asking players to completely uninstall is a bit more uncommon. But, as mentioned earlier, there’s a lot of new content that will be appearing for the first time, meaning that an update rather than a complete reinstallation could very well take just as long. Still, it’s a bitter pill to swallow, especially considering players can’t pre-load the game that will take up over 100GB of disk space.
Sadly, this does mean having to say goodbye to characters that some players have been playing for years now. Early access for Baldur’s Gate 3 was first released in October 2020, with new content and features rolled out over the next two and a half years. Larian is attempting to make it up to players by giving players a free upgrade to the Digital Deluxe Edition if they’ve purchased the game on PC before Aug. 3.
