Baldur's Gate 3: Do Early Access Saves Carry Over To Full Game?

Baldur's Gate 3 has been available in early access since 2020, meaning that players have had a full three years to get used to their saves and their characters. Unfortunately, with the release of the full game coming up extremely soon, those same players are going to have to face a hard truth when it comes to those saves. 

Will Baldur's Gate 3 Early Access saves be carried over to the final game?

Larian Studios have gone as far as to recommend that people looking to buy the early access version of the game as a pre-order, since saves won't carry over to the full release of the game, stating:

"Release is right around the corner, so as a thank you to everyone who supports the game prior to launch, you'll be getting the Digital Deluxe Edition content for free. Save Games made prior to launch will not be compatible on or after launch, so we only recommend buying the Early Access version as a pre-order including the Digital Deluxe Edition content, and not to play through the current Early Access content."

This will likely come as a disappointment to fans who've been playing the game since it first launched in early access, but they can rest easy knowing that at the very least they'll be able to fully play through the game from start to finish without ever having to worry about that happening again.

The length of the early access build is around twenty hours long, only allowing players to complete the first act of the game. According to comments from Larian Studios themselves, the full game will be around 75-100 hours depending on the amount of side content you do and the amount you invest yourself into the story, so this is as little as a quarter of the full game that you can play in the Early Access release.

There's also a hard level cap, with players only able to hit level 5 and choose from a certain amount of races, classes, and subclasses, with Larian promising that we'll see more options in the final release of the game. 

Larian Studios themselves have recommended that anybody who still has the early access version of Baldur's Gate 3 should uninstall the game as soon as possible before the final game drops, along with going into the game in order to delete any save files that you might already have. If you don't do it this way, then the Steam Cloud server will still have backups of your saves and won't be able to reconcile them with the final release version of the game.