Highlights
- Baldur's Gate 3 offers different difficulty levels, but some side quests can be extremely challenging to find and complete.
- The toughest quests in the game require a combination of specific skills, critical hits, and luck, rather than just a difficult boss fight.
- Important quests like "The Strange Ox" and "Breaking Yurgir's Contract" involve finding hidden objects and making specific dialogue choices to progress.
Baldur's Gate 3 isn't a tough game overall, and players can choose the difficulty level of each game, but some side quests are really difficult to finish. Never mind finish, they can be difficult to find just to begin with, hidden in some obscure corner of a basement behind a Perception or Strength check.
The toughest quests in Baldur's Gate 3 aren't always about a hard boss fight at the end. Often, it's a precarious combination of Sleight of Hand, a series of critical hits, or just dumb luck that results in a quest being among the toughest to complete.
7 The Strange Ox
The player has to have a few things going to get this quest started, which makes it hard from the start, and it begins near the beginning of Act 1. Not only does the player need to have Animal Speakig handy, but they also have to pass some Persuasion or Intimidation checks, and most important and tricky of all, they have to decide to talk to a random farm animal in the Druid Grove.
Three oxen are standing near The Hollow of the Grove, and it's easy to miss that one of them is marked as "strange." Talk to the ox and get him to reveal as much as that he's traveling to Baldur's Gate. They can talk to him again at the Last Light Inn, but again, only if they happen to walk around talking to random farm animals.
When the party travels to Rivington in Act 2, if they happen to walk through a small stable on the edge of town, they can find the strange ox again. This time, he turns into an apple which the player can carry into town.
6 Recruiting Withers
The Dank Crypt is a tough mini-dungeon-type adventure for those just starting at level one near the remains of the Illithid ship. It's full of traps, locks, and undead enemies, but finishing the Overgrown Ruins quest is a great way to grind experience points and find some quality gear, loot, and items connected to other stories and characters.
It's easy to miss the small, isolated room where Withers, likely the old death god Jergal in retirement, rests comfortably in an ornate crypt hidden behind a secret door. Fail the Perception check, even after fighting through a small group of wraiths and disarming several traps, and the party might not find him.
5 Breaking Yurgir's Contract
Killing the Orthon Yurgir is one of the toughest fights in the game, and when faced with either beating him and his various minions or breaking his contract, it might be easier to just fight him. Breaking the contract involves delving into the temple sewer and speaking to almost every rat in the place, then killing all them, so either get those AoE spells ready or prepare kill the demon.
This quest opens up through a specific dialogue choice with Yurgir, and for those who are trying to gain approval with Astarion or Karlach, it's not a good idea to get into it. However, should they decide to forge ahead anyway, they have to find a book at the very foot of the massive Shar statue, and good luck getting down there, and deal with a swarm of sewer rodents and a hidden Dark Justicar.
4 The Necromancy Of Thay
A long, obscure quest that starts in Act 1 with a few chance finds, so a tough quest but an ideal one for those players who loot literally every vase, crate, and body they come across. Other than just being a fun "trail of breadcrumbs" type of quest it also rewards persistent gamers with some worthwhile benefits and abilities.
First, players have to find the book in a hidden alcove behind the giant spider underneath the Alchemist's House in the Blighted Village, which contains the book. They can open it provided they find a special gem also in the underground tunnels beneath the house, and what follows is a couple of high-risk rolls before the book snaps shut,
Should the player succeed in these rolls with their psyche relatively unscathed, they'll gain the ability to cast Speak With Dead one per day and a +1 to their Wisdom checks, but the quest doesn't stop there. Follow the path of another random side quest, Free The Artist, and the player will also find a character that can tell them how to finish the book. It's based on a random set of coincidences that are tough to follow.
3 Saving Sazza
What's tough about this is the long and persistent round of Charisma, Intimidation, and Persuasion checks this requires. The other alternative is to slay everyone in the Druid Grove that questions the player escorting the prisoner out of town, which might be easier than this series of social gymnastics.
As soon as the player walks into the Druid Grove, they can walk to the top of the gate to find two Tieflings crying over a dead body. They walk away but can be found later by Sazza's cage, threatening to kill the prisoner to avenge the death of their friend.
After talking one of the angry Tieflings out of killing the goblin, they leave the player alone with Sazza. Depending on the main character's own moral leanings, they can take her side as a way of getting into the Goblin Camp.
2 Dribbles The Clown
This quest is on every list of difficult, annoying, and long quests in Baldur's Gate 3, and it deserves the negative attention. It's a fetch quest of the worst kind but it has a fun and gruesome start that draws in the player, so they end up getting stuck with it despite how tough and totally necessary it is.
The quest starts with finding out exactly what happened to Dribbles, but discovering he's been murdered and dismembered is just the start of this adventure. The player must find his body parts scattered throughout Act 3 in various random locations, such as being looted from bodies or found in chests and crates. It takes forever, so most players just skip it, but it can be satisfying for completionists who want to finish the whole game.
1 The Underwater Prison
There are a few times when turn-based combat kicks in when the party has to face a hostile environment, and getting anything done with limited movement in the shadow of a ticking clock is going to be tough. In this case, there are two characters in the Underwater Prison that the party might want to rescue, one of them as an offshoot of the main quest and part of Wyll's storyline and the other connected to a random NPC that the player may or may not have met in the Underdark.
Either way, it takes a few serious magic tricks to get this done, literally. Charge up every spell or ability the party has, which means Misty Step, Mage Hand, and Dimension Door to name a few, along with a few haste potions, and a bit of luck and strategy.
Baldur's Gate 3 is out now on PC and PlayStation 5. An Xbox Series X|S release date is yet to be announced.
