Baldur’s Gate 3 player reveals what happens when you skip Act 1

It’s assumed that you need to play through each storyline in the three Acts of Baldur’s Gate 3 to progress to the next one, but that’s not entirely true. As one player discovered, you can pretty much skip Act 1, and some interesting things happen when you do. 

Skipping Act 1 in Baldur’s Gate 3 requires some stealthy work, specifically because you won’t level up as quickly as you would if you go through the Act as intended. ‘Skip’ may also be a generous word to use as you don’t truly miss everything in the Act.  

There are large parts of content you can just ignore, however, which will take you straight to the Mountain Pass and into the Shadowlands. One player experimented with this in their Honour Mode playthrough. 

“Yesterday I decided to skip Act 1 as much as possible. I just ran to the Mountain Pass, running away from all fights. It yielded some interesting results,” ‘Competitive-Hall6922’ posted on Reddit. 

They noticed that, despite skipping a lot of the storyline, the game catches you up as best as it can given the circumstances: 

• Withers shows up even if you don’t find him in his crypt. 
• Raphael shows up in camp instead of interrupting your exploring. 
• Four camp night story events happened at once. 
• Minthara can be found in Moonrise Towers to be rescued as you didn’t kill her.

Baldur’s Gate 3 players in the comments were impressed with the OP’s decision to try this in Honour Mode, but they also noticed that they missed things too despite playing through the entire Act.

“My first playthrough I missed a LOT of things. Didn’t skip Act 1, but I didn’t find Withers, Mol, or Alfira. One day in camp Withers just appears. At the Tiefling party, I was just like who tf are these people? I was confused when Alfira acted like she knew me. And when Mol backed me up at Last Light… Who are you??” one player explained.

Overall, if you skip Act 1, it seems that some decisions are made for you and you don’t have as much control over the story as you would if you go through the questlines. As another player noted, though, even the devs couldn’t have planned for someone trying this out. 

“Incredibly Chad way to play Baldur’s Gate. The devs couldn’t even plan properly for how little you cared about Faerun. This rocks,” they commented. 

If you want to know more about the weird things players try in Baldur’s Gate 3, you can check out this rare cutscene where someone taught Shovel to be a dragon and how this player beat the game in cat form.