As the title says. I severely dislike having to make accounts for every game publisher that wants to send me advertisements, collect data or whatever.

It’s usually an instant dealbreaker for me at this point

Publishers needing their own launcher already puts them on shaky grounds with me.

But I really liked the original BG 1 & 2, so I’m willing to not just refund it immediately and actually ask around first for solutions.

188 points

If you’re using Steam (or any kind of shortcut I suppose), add --skip-launcher to the launch options. Here’s how to do so with Steam:

  • Right-click the game in your library and select Properties.
  • Look for the Launch Options field at the bottom of the General tab.
  • Add “–skip-launcher” and close the properties window.
  • Launch the game as normal.
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50 points
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Thank you for the step-by-step. Steam can be a bit of a maze when you don’t fiddle with these things so often. :)

Edit: Apparently it’s " --skip-launcher" the extra dash matters XD

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16 points

In future, drop by the PC Gaming Wiki first - it’s a great resource for exactly this kind of question.

Skip Larian launcher on startup

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9 points

The Launcher bit was a helpful add-in by a another kind user. I didn’t ask about that specifically, just mentioned that I dislike extra launchers.

My question was far more stupid than that. However, people came through for me regardless. And very fast at that. And for that, I am thankful.

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1 point

I wish all these games had skippable launchers, i refuse to touch any game that needs a launcher beyond Steam

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12 points

Thank you for the info on this, will be using it going forward.

Not sure if you did this on purpose, or if something else did it as part of editing, but your bulleted steps included an en dash (–) instead of two short dashes (–).

Have had issues in the past with that, generally with WYSIWYG type editors combining your – into either – or —.

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6 points

Ugh word does this. I didn’t realize until I wrote some documentation for a cli tool I made for a client and I wrote the documentation in word because they are fairly non technical so I wrote in the documentation sample arguments they can copy and paste and shipped it feeling good that it would work flawlessly because I tested the crap out of it. Or so I thought because they immediately hit back with it doesn’t work. I spent hours recreating their environment and watching it work no matter what I tried to get it to not work. Then I hopped on a call and had the client step by step show me what they did and they opened the word doc and copied the example commands, changed the arguments to be correct and run it. I followed along on my own machine and then I fucking saw what had happened. Fucking Microsoft Word replaced my " " with “ ” (straight quotes for smart quotes for those who cant see the difference). A quick patch of the cli to properly parse those and things were working again.

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6 points

Copying out of MS products always seems to leave junk behind. The worst one is the zero-width space (unicode U+200B or hex e2808b) . Sharepoint loves to scatter these all over so any copy from a sharepoint source has to be put in a plain text editor and have a run through with a regex to find any invisible formatting characters.

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3 points

I typed them directly into my comment from an Android phone, and it continues to display as two hyphens/minuses for me. Are you it’s not your client trying to be clever?

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6 points

Does it launch with directx or Vulcan when you do this?

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10 points

You can also make it launch the Vulkan version with skipping the launcher. Seehttps://gamepretty.com/baldurs-gate-3-how-to-skip-launcher-and-use-desired-graphical-api-vulkan-dx11/

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7 points
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If anyone happens to be playing on Steam Deck (or any Linux desktop), the launch options are slightly different:

  • DX11 no launcher: –skip-launcher

  • Vulkan no launcher: bash -c ‘exec “${@/bin/bg3.exe}”’ – %command% --skip-launcher

Though for this particular title, the Vulkan one is really crashy on my system rn, which is ironic since the DX11 shaders are converted to Vulkan on Linux.

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7 points

directx is the default and you must apply another switch to start with vulkan https://gamepretty.com/baldurs-gate-3-how-to-skip-launcher-and-use-desired-graphical-api-vulkan-dx11/

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5 points

You can start the exe you want directly from the directory, there’s one for each renderer: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Baldur’s_Gate_3#Skip_Larian_launcher_on_startup

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4 points
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For me it chose direct x so I had to use the launcher. Vulcan is much better for me (just be sure to not use triple buffer for nvidia cards). Just choose skip and check the box that says ‘do not ask again’ and the launcher is less aggravating.

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4 points

What differences do you see when you use Vulcan? And what’s the deal with triple buffering?

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2 points

It looks like the following should work (from one of the links above)

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154 points
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Not to sound like a dick, but how does this have so many upvotes? There’s a button to skip it and never ask again right there.

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36 points

It’s lemmy, we hate anything regarding accounts, privacy and the corpos man!!

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21 points
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Yeaaah, also f*ck sync D:< /s

Posted from Sync

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13 points

Apparently others also found the advice helpful.

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6 points

yeah thanks for posting this. super helpful to learn i can skip the launcher entirely.

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7 points

lemmy saw an opportunity to hate on something and started roaming at the mouth

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134 points

Select the “continue without login” option

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89 points

I am an idiot. I didn’t click to the next page after it suggested I make an account.

I just close down the launcher immediately.

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52 points

nah, asking the question still gave us the ‘skip launcher’ instructions, so this is a win!

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16 points

Thanks for making me feel slightly better about it. ;)

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9 points

I had the same issue. Feels a bit shady to make people click Get Started anyway, but at least the launcher is skippable entirely.

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4 points

I’ve just kinda gotten used to there not being an easy way around it. Hence my ‘Going Straight to the Forums’ reaction.

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7 points

i didn’t see that option anywhere. Gimme a sec, I’ll check again

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105 points
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Oh, are we starting the reddit tradition of making no effort at all and just immediately asking the community for help instead?

Great.

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72 points

I can certainly see we’re keeping the reddit-tradition of being an angry little muppet at any given opportunity alive.

Yes, I asked a public forum for help about something I didn’t know. And they came through for me, more so than I would have expected.

You can go back to being angry elsewhere now. Shoo…

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32 points

You could have just… LOOKED. I’ve got no problem when its a question with more nuance than a google search can answer easily, or if its an opinion based question, but all I ask is people just TRY before making a post somewhere when the answer is so simple.

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20 points

And you didn’t even have to click on my shitty post as it already had (SOLVED) in the title

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21 points

It literally says “Skip” right underneath the thing you’re complaining about. If you’d taken the time to look at the screen, you’d have seen it itself.

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22 points
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Some people have bad eyesight. Some people have been deeply trained by the modern web to ignore most of what’s on the page (most of it being ads or other bullshit). Some people make mistakes.

Have some patience and kindness.

And to those who wont be patient or kind, just know that the next time the self-checkout machine yells at you and the cashier has to come scan their badge and gives you grief, you deserve it. Can’t you just use the machine correctly!?!

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7 points

Before that, there’s just a button that says “Get Started!” Right underneath the sentence “Sigh up for a Larian Account.” Otherwise the launcher was blank.

I mistook that as being a forced sign-up, as with some many other games nowadays.

Also, I’m not complaining about anything. I was looking for advise as there seldomly are easy, search-engine friendly, solutions to forced sigh-ups.

If you’d taken the time to read through the comments, you might have gleaned the context for yourself. But since you took the time to click on a (SOLVED)-post and then write the same message the guy before did, I felt compelled to spell it all out. Just for you.

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8 points

That button in the corner saying skip account is really hard, okay?!?

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2 points

Repeating other peoples sentiments two days later is really constructive, okay?!?

Get out of here, Sleepy.

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4 points

Imagine if you put all this effort you made from this post, including it’s whiny, snarky comments, and like… idk took less than 5 seconds to be constructive and figure out your answer.

I mean seriously, a 10 year old could have figured it out.

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1 point

I had no skip button.

It’s not as clear cut as you might think.

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53 points

Just hit skip, dumbass

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40 points
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Deleted by creator
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4 points

Agreed. If you have a point, make it. No need to be rude about it.

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7 points

Don’t gotta be rude. Let’s be better than that

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