Summary
- Baldur's Gate 3 has three difficulty settings: Explorer, Balanced, and Tactician, each offering a different level of challenge and gameplay experience.
- Only one achievement, Critical Hit, is tied to the Tactician difficulty mode, making it the most challenging to obtain.
- While the difficulty setting affects gameplay and enemy strength, players can still obtain the majority of game achievements at any level of difficulty.
Baldur's Gate 3 allows players to choose their difficulty level, but doesn't make it clear whether that affects the achievements or trophies they can get. Depending on how players approach it, Baldur's Gate 3 can be surprisingly hard. It's an open-world game with no level scaling, which means that it can be easy to run into overpowered monsters with a low-level character. Of course, like any good game of DnD, there are ways to make defeating enemies easier in Baldur's Gate 3 and deal game-breaking amounts of damage with the right character build. But achieving that requires careful planning, and can suck all the fun out of a campaign.
There are three difficulty settings in Baldur's Gate 3: Explorer, Balanced, and Tactician. Explorer is the easiest, and is geared toward peaceful, story-focused roaming through the scenic Forgotten Realms. Tactician is the hardest, requiring careful choice of the party's every move, and Balanced naturally lands somewhere between the two. While the experiences these difficulty levels provide are pretty self-explanatory, what exactly they change about the game is a more complicated question.
Baldur's Gate 3 Difficulty Levels Only Affect One Achievement
There's only one achievement in Baldur's Gate 3 tied to the chosen difficulty level, and that's Critical Hit. This achievement is for completing the game on the Tactician difficulty mode. It's entirely possible to get all 52 of the other achievements in a single Baldur's Gate 3 playthrough. However, that's no easy feat. Many of them revolve around one-time opportunities, like knocking a dragon out of the sky or defeating potentially missable characters. Others are unique feats, like earning a certain amount of gold from performances or beating a certain number of enemies while drunk, and still others are story-based. Varied though they are, all of them - with the single exception of Critical Hit - can be obtained at any difficulty level.
How To Get The Critical Hit Achievement In Baldur's Gate 3
The only way to get the Critical Hit achievement is to complete Baldur's Gate 3 on the hardest available difficulty level. This requires setting the difficulty to Tactician when starting a new game, and playing through the entirety of the main campaign without switching over to a lower difficulty. Difficulty switching is quite easy from the pause menu, but in order to get the Critical Hit achievement, players will need to resist temptation. That means facing enemies with higher HP, and succeeding at rolls with higher difficulty classes across the board. It's a challenge best reserved for the most experienced players - DnD and RPG newcomers should content themselves with lower difficulty modes, unless they insist on total completion.
Difficulty settings in Baldur's Gate 3 provide a much-needed degree of customizability to what can often be a difficult game. However, it doesn't limit player freedom by reserving just one achievement for its hardest mode. At the same time, it provides a true challenge for those who want to complete 100% of the game or earn Baldur's Gate 3's platinum trophy on PS5. It only goes to show how dedicated Baldur's Gate 3 is to its philosophy of letting players customize their experiences.