Adventures in Baldur's Gate: the Prequel

I’ve been gaming on my Steam Deck lately (mostly playing Solasta) and I wanted to play Baldur’s Gate 3 after its official release. My only problem was that I already owned Baldur’s Gate 3 on GOG, since I bought it in early access, and I didn’t want to buy it again in Steam. This ended up being more of an adventure than I initially expected.

I updated the Heroic Launcher and tried - and failed early - to install it. Then I tried with Lutris. Lutris made it further and then failed. I eventually got it installed! Even got it added into Steam so I didn’t have to exit into Desktop mode.

Then I started the game, it loaded the launcher, and then immediately crashed. Great.

I checked out ProtonDB and there were reports of similar behavior when running it from GOG. Annoying, but hopefully there would be a fix soon.

I tried to load it again the next day and this time, it didn’t crash! I watched the intro cutscene and started to create a character.

During character creation, my mouse clicks stopped registering. I connected an external mouse and learned that, apparently, the game had started accepting right clicks instead. I forged ahead.

A few minutes later it stopped accepting any clicks at all. I had to force my Steam Deck to reboot to escape.

Okay, let’s try installing it on a different device.

My daily driver personal laptop is an M1 MacBook Air that once upon a time had enough space to fit BG3. Nowadays, though, doing that is just a dream.

I have a Windows gaming desktop that I could use. Heck, my home Linux server has a 3090 in it. But I want portability - that’s why I’ve been using my Steam Deck, after all.

The natural choice was my Thinkpad - it’s running Windows and it has a discrete GPU and a great screen. But both its drives were already basically full, too.

Naturally I decided to upgrade the drives - I went from a 256 GB nvme and a 1 TB nvme to a 2 TB and a 4 TB drive. I also ordered a second m.2 enclosure while I was at it.

I cloned the drives on my MacBook with Balena Etcher and everything was super smooth. I installed the new drives in my Thinkpad and booted into Windows without issue.

Resizing the data drive’s partition was easy, but the boot drive had been encrypted with Bitlocker and had a recovery partition that prevented resizing it.

I went ahead and kicked off the install on the D:\ drive through GOG Galaxy and let it run while I researched workarounds to enable me to resize the C:\ drive.

I found two different pieces of advice. First, a suggestion to disable Bitlocker, perform the resize, and then re-enable Bitlocker. This advice implied that Bitlocker would even use the same key. Great!

The second was a suggestion to run some commands through diskpart as an admin.

I did both, in order, and it worked! Kinda.

First, I should point out that Bitlocker did not use the same key when I re-enabled it. I didn’t immediately realize this, either. I normally back up the recovery keys right away, but in this instance I didn’t.

Second, the GOG install halted, for some reason, at 8%. I think this happened because my C:\ drive was full and that GOG uses %TEMP% to store temporary files and in my case that pointed to a folder on the C:\ drive.

After I killed GOG and restarted, it continued past 8%.

However, when I restarted, Windows interrupted my login for the third time. The first time it had been trying to get me to install Windows 11; on the previous interruption it had been trying to get me to enable some account feature that I had explicitly disabled, using dark patterns to make it difficult to skip. Now it was trying to get me to link my account to a Microsoft account.

Annoyed, I looked up how to use the Group Policy Editor to block both of these prompts.

The GOG installer never finished - it stalled at 99% for over an hour. I restarted, hoping that might help...

But then I couldn’t log in. My PIN didn’t work, and neither did my fingerprint.

Why? 🤷

And I couldn’t access the drive from another machine or a recovery disk because I hadn’t saved the Bitlocker recovery key. Oops.

I cloned my backup again and investigated. Turns out my account had, at some point, reverted to being a Microsoft account that just wasn’t connected on the Microsoft side, and when I had prohibited creating or logging in with them, I’d locked myself out. Fun.

After importing the game directory into GOG, it thought it was playable, but the launcher had concerns. So I deleted the old folder entirely and now I’m trying to install Baldur’s Gate 3 through GOG again.

Fingers crossed!

And if this doesn’t work, I’m just going to buy it again on Steam.