Don’t Rely On Quick Saves In Baldur’s Gate 3

One important tip for folks to keep in mind heading into Baldur’s Gate 3: always save your progress. Shit can go bad real quick in Larian Studios’ RPG, and I don’t just mean in combat scenarios. One bad dice roll, and you can lose a party member because you did something to annoy them. But friends, I come to you as the victim of the game’s save system because, despite my vigilance, I discovered that quick saves, which happen when you press F5 when playing on PC, aren’t the foolproof way to save your game as you journey through Faerûn.

Baldur’s Gate 3 seems to delete your quick saves as you accrue them. I went to reload an old save to show someone a scene (it was the Gale sex scene, okay), and as I scrolled through my save files, I noticed the majority of my quick saves were gone. Baldur’s Gate 3 only kept 25 quick saves before it deleted the oldest one. I had become so reliant on quick saves and just tapping F5 that I had, without realizing it, wiped around 100 old saves in just 10 hours of gameplay by quick saving with reckless abandon. You can mitigate this at least somewhat by going into the options menu, scrolling to “Save Options” and changing the maximum number of quick saves to 50. But there doesn’t appear to be an option to remove the cap entirely.

It sucks because I wanted to revisit scenes like the aforementioned sex scene, as well as other relationship-building moments and quest lines, but I think I’ll have to wait until my next playthrough, now. It’s a shame because just a quick press of F5 is such an easy, painless way to save your progress instead of opening a menu. You get peace of mind knowing an unexpected turn or bad fight isn’t going to set you back too far, and you don’t have to open a menu to do it. But had I realized before that the game was wiping my old saves without any sort of notification, I would have gladly paused the game and made a hard save and lost a few seconds, and pressed a few more buttons just to be able to go back. So learn from my mistakes, and make hard saves in Baldur’s Gate 3.