By now, you’ve probably already started (at least once) Baldur’s Gate 3, but, if you’re like me, you’re still learning new things, new strategies and new tricks. For a CRPG, Larian’s pride and joy is certainly dense and features a ton of options to tailor your experience, so don’t blame yourself for missing small functional tidbits, because, if you haven’t noticed, there is a LOT to play around with. After some experimenting and tinkering, I decided it was only fair to assemble my own small compilation to contribute to your wandering across this small corner of Toril.
Save Early, Save Often
Yes, this seems like a no brainer, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention this first. I’d hazard that at least two third of those now enjoying BG3 have already fallen afoul of this, losing hours of progress to sudden blips, glitches, power outages (as happened to a friend) or other. Seriously. Use your quicksave! If you haven’t figured it out, it’s your F5 key and with the latest update, the cap on save file sizes should be plenty…for at least one playthrough.
Love the Shove
Shove is a great mechanic in BG3, some even are calling it OP (overpowered) and borderline broken. Why? Because yeeting your opponents off cliffs is not only fun, but efficient. Falling damage is pretty substantial and in combat where you might find you’re having a hard time, a well timed shove can absolutely change the tide of battle. Or completely win it, depending on the fight. Do keep in mind, though, that you are not the only one who can shove, so mind your step in combat.
Terrain Tactics
As an addendum to the above, you should take the time to look around you when a battle starts. While barrelmancy (the use of explosive/flammable barrels against foes) isn’t quite as common as it was in Divinity: Original Sin (and its sequel), this is still a Larian game, so it’s very much a potential strategy for owning the battlefield. Not only that, but as noted, you can be shoved off of heights, but also, heights give benefits to ranged attackers, and can also limit how and where your opponents can reach you. Making clever use of Line of sight can also be handy, and saving a bit of movement to duck behind an obstacle can be the difference between life and death. Fighting smart will carry you farther than just about anything else, and while AI opponents aren’t as clever as human ones, the AI for Larian is clever enough to ruin your day if you’re not careful. 
Combat Concentration:
This should be standard to any avid gamer, but make sure to concentrate on one opponent at a time if possible. More opponents means more actions and more attacks, and means more chances for something to go terribly wrong. After all, a crit is a crit, is a crit. Throw in that the more enemies that are around, the less room you have to move to take advantage of terrain (and more enemies who can take attacks of opportunity if you try to), and it makes basic sense that you want to whittle down the numbers, rather than spread your damage around.
Interactions aren’t just for puzzles.
In addition to heights and barrelmancy, Larian has also brought in its standard environment hazards, like wet ground, fire and other. Keep an eye out for those as you can make good use of them in combat. Electrifying an opponent in a pool of water or lighting the spilled booze on fire is not only valid, but recommended, just make sure you aren’t standing inside them yourself, as your opponents will use the environmental effects against you too. You also have an action on your hotbar to dip weapons into a substance to get extra damage on your strikes, and really, in a fight, who can’t use a little more DPS? Aside from damaging effects there’s also lighting effects and vision effects, things like smoke and darkness spells can make it so that you can’t even see your opponents. Keep an eye out for large areas of dim lighting or less, since darkvision ranges won’t reach as far as most ranged weapon attacks and that, too, will have an effect on whether you can actually hit a target or not.
Conquer Cartography!
Explore every map. No, I mean it. You want to check every possible nook and cranny, every locked door and secret passage, climb every hill and go down into every ravine. Shake bushes and dig around trees. There are a lot of hidden places, secret chambers, and new locations you’ll want or even need to find to complete any number of quests. And if that doesn’t motivate you, think of all the loot you could be missing!
LOOOOOOOOOT!!!!!
Loot everything. You can teleport from your map to any waypoint, so don’t be ashamed to port and sell to merchants if you get overloaded. That being said, you will want to keep a lot of the loot you’ll find, as a large portion of it will either be supplies, alchemy ingredients, potions, gear upgrades, notes and books (which can be quest relevant-so make sure to read through them at least once). Keep in mind you can also store stuff at your camp, which you can always go back to to retrieve items. You don’t need to let weight limits for your party be your limit, you can always just store it and come back later. I can’t precisely list everything you should keep on hand, because that would take another page just to list them all, but as a general rule: if you’re not sure, keep at least one. Do keep a shovel on your main character though, as, if you followed my mention on exploration, you’ll need it to dig out hidden chests on the map filled with, you guessed it, more loot.
Gladhanding and Social Networking
Talk to everyone. Talk to your companions at camp, talk to the kids running around, talk to the guard standing and staring off into the distance. Seriously. You want to chat everyone up. Generally you’ll want your highest charisma character to do this, but you can swap around for hilarious results, though, as a warning, some might lead you straight into a fight. You also might want to talk first to the companion you want the highest relationship rating with in camp first, since depending on who you talk to can lock you out of conversation options with the others. For sneaky uses when you use a spell to cause an NPC to fall asleep or when you drop darkness on them doesn’t necessarily force you into combat, which means that if you’re looting everything that isn’t (and is) nailed down, this will give you extra options for safer thefts. Charms and failed mind reading, however, can absolutely make your conversational partners turn hostile (though not always violently so), so use it with care. Lastly, when you go to sell, you can take advantage of a high charisma to not only sell for more, but also buy for less.
In Co-op, friends are FOREVER.
It’s been thrown out there but bears mentioning again, especially since a large portion of players start with their own single player campaigns with an idea to have a multiplayer campaign later, if you have a co-op character in your party, they are there permanently. You won’t be able to kick them out of your party. For now, you’ll need to start an entirely new campaign if your friend opts out part way through. No word on if Larian has a fix in the works for this or not.
Respect the Respec.
At a certain point (fairly early on) you’ll get access to an NPC in your camp named Withers. Withers can not only resurrect dead companions, but also get hirelings and more importantly, allow you to respec your character completely. Yes, even your companions, though for understandable reasons, their class specific plotlines remain the same, so don’t expect Shadowheart to suddenly give up her goddess for a measly token fee in gold. If you’re really really keen on seeing as much of the game as possible, this can be cheesed quite a bit-as long as you have the coin for it. The potential is really limited only by how much you’re willing to take advantage of it-seeing as partial rests at camp don’t even take supplies. In the end, your most useful tip is to play around in Baldur’s Gate 3, experiment a little and make sure to read your tooltips and tutorial hints. Larian has a massive hit on its hands, and a large part of that is due to the sheer amounts of player agency in not just how a story plays out, but in how you play the story and how you make your way through the various combats and puzzles. While every playthrough is going to be a valid one, there’s no reason to miss out on more of their lovingly crafted content than you absolutely have to.
