New Game+ is a stock and standard feature in RPGs for decades. It allows for players to experience a fresh take on the game with their over-powered characters to leisurely progress through the story or even take on more challenging enemies, depending on what New Game+ actually entails. So it was a surprise to me that Baldur’s Gate 3 didn’t have New Game+, and that’s largely because this feature was present in previous games. But maybe not in the way you’d expect.
Yes, that’s right. New Game+ has always kind of existed in Baldur’s Gate. At least, it did in Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn (and the Throne of Bhaal expansion). The feature just appeared in a not very conventional way. Baldur’s Gate allowed for players to export and import their character data, which wasn’t limited to use in multiplayer games. You could effectively load a character into a new save file with all of your items, levels, and spells with this function. It made playing the game a second time around a lot easier, as a true easy difficulty wasn’t introduced until the Enhanced Edition version of the games.
While Baldur’s Gate 3 does have the ability to select different difficulties, which is a benefit to the game, it would be nice to import my character into a fresh save file. This is mostly just so I could speed through on a fifth playthrough to see if I’ve actually missed anything. Granted, I’m almost certain I’ve done everything I possibly can do, which included modding my favorite NPC into my game as a companion character.
But I think this could be for the benefit of anyone looking to run through Baldur’s Gate 3 again as their favorite “Tav.” Maybe you want to see where your path would diverge if you went down the path of absolute evil or absolute good, and you don’t want to juggle save files. Maybe you just want to make your character as strong as possible and collect every single spell in the game if you rolled a Wizard, Warlock, or Sorcerer.
Regardless, having this option would be nice. It isn’t necessary to enjoy the game. Plus with no DLC on the horizon (at least not yet) there really isn’t a need for an import or export option. But who knows, maybe Larian Studios will end up adding this feature, or even New Game+, just so you can experience Baldur’s Gate 3 with the same character without needing to swap saves if you want to take a different path. Or if you just want to romance a different character and experience that different storyline and the multiple endings you can achieve based on choices made throughout the game. There’s a lot of reasons why this feature existing could be beneficial to the overall experience of the game.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is available for PC and PlayStation 5, and it will come to the Xbox Series X in 2023.
