Whether you’re in Baldur’s Gate 3 or Dungeons & Dragons, long rests are important – but sometimes it seems like Larian would much rather you stayed awake exploring instead.
Conveying urgency in a game like Baldur’s Gate 3 while still having a campaign that takes around 70 hours to complete is a tricky situation. On one hand, you have a tadpole in your brain that could turn you and your party into Mind Flayers at any minute, and on the other, you have tons of quests to complete and companions to romance.
Interestingly, neither of those can be done without players heading into camp, and according to the fanbase, long resting is something Larian apparently doesn’t want you to do in Act One.
Sharing their discovery on the Baldur’s Gate 3 Reddit, one player mentioned that it’s “kind of amazing how hard the game discourages long resting.”
Along with it, they revealed various reasons why a new player may think a long rest is a bad idea. They cited the lack of companion event alerts until you get into camp, the berating by your first companion if you rest too soon, the imminent danger of the tadpole, timed events, and of course the camp supplies which suggest a limited number of times you can rest.
The poster wasn’t the only player who avoided long rests in the first act. Others took to the comments to share their own experiences, with one saying, “I didn’t camp on my first run until I’d collected every single companion and explored a sizeable amount of the map because I was pretty convinced I had a limited number of rests unless I progressed the story to a certain point.”
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They went on to add that Larian “really don’t make it clear that it’s not real urgency.”
“I assumed ‘camp’ was a place I had to physically find, not teleport to” added another player, citing the lack of instructions as a key problem.
Another fan shared, “It is genuinely bizarre that long resting contains something like half the story beats in the game, but the game makes someone who isn’t metagaming think they need to long rest as little as possible. It would be nice if the scenes you unlock could all cue on the same long rest or something”
Of course, there isn’t a specific number of times you can long rest and no danger usually comes by doing so, but as the fans have realized, new players could be easily discouraged from setting up camp thanks to all the added elements present in Act One, therefore missing out on several key lore components.