The next Baldur's Gate 3 patch has arrived, and in typical Larian fashion, it's overwhelming in scope and peppered throughout with jokes. Over 1000 tweaks, bug fixes, added animations, features, revisions, and changes have been implemented, and the patch is now live on PS5. You can read the complete list here.
Further improvements to optimisation have been made across the board, with the Lower City getting special attention, as well as the addition of yet more camp idle animations for Minthara, Halsin, Shadowheart, Lae'Zel and Karlach, which feels like a flex.
Additional options have been added under the Accessibility tab, and players can choose between protanopia, deuteranopia, or tritanopia. This will apply to character outlines and circles, character map markers, frame portraits in turn order, and party portraits, making these aspects more distinctly differentiated.
Finally, Wither's Wardrobe has additional functionality, which he will now explain in-game. The appearance of Hirelings can now be customised on recruitment. Players can now dismiss dead avatars to the Wardrobe, banishing them there for good.
How have your Baldur's Gate 3 adventures been fairing? Are you still playing? Let us know in the comments section below.
[source baldursgate3.game]
Comments 29
How about doing this stuff before you release a game? Ever thought of that?
That is dedication to bug fixing.
Most would not bother.
I would really love to play this game but man the gameplay is just not it for me.
@ durxll123
Game nowadays are too complex, reaching that 100% bug free would take forever.
Maybe when it finally comes out here in Japan it’ll be perfectly patched. Looking forward to playing
@Loamy that’s sad that you think wanting a game to be bug free, is asking for a lot.
Still enjoying it. Slowly progressing through act 3. Playing a few other games in between.
@KorsaRaph So if these games are too complex, why can they do it now? This doesn’t make sense.
@Max_the_German because once a game is released the public will find glitches for the devs to patch. Not every single scenario can be replicated in ‘testing’ and devs need a game to be released to reveal those hidden bugs. Sad but it’s the way it is
@Mikey856 Oh yes, I remember these weekly patches with hundreds of fixes after the launch of GoW:R and TotK.
@Max_the_German I don’t think god of war or totk are even close to BG3 in terms of complexity lol
BG3 is absolutely amazing. Any bug I have encountered has been relatively minor, and sometimes hilarious and hasn’t been disruptive to the overall flow of the game.
That being said, since this patch combat has felt a bit more sluggish than normal, with button presses taking some time to be acknowledged. I’m not sure if it’s coincidence or a result of the patch. Anyone else noticed anything like that?
@Ward_ting I’ve had a complete game breaking bug in Spider-Man 2 and I’m not past 20 hours playtime yet. Nothing like that in BG3 which is frankly astonishing considering the difference in scope
@Max_the_German No game is bug free. Even GoW:R and TOTK had and have bugs. LOD pops, hitching, clipping, collision issues, physics issues, you can find them if you know what you're looking at and you're looking hard enough.
God of War also had a few patches for bugs and new content and features post launch. Post launch is included in the dev cycle nowadays to encourage people to buy the game later, keep playing, or play the game again.
With BG3 day one, it was still a full experience. They've just added more things because post launch is a core part of Larian's dev cycle, they will compile these fixes, enhancements, and added features into a Definitive Edition of some sort as they have for their previous games, and even those games will have some sort of post launch support. That's how modern dev cycles work nowadays.
@Constable_What Every studio and publisher can decide whether to use that „modern“ dev cycle work or the classic one instead. Nobody stops you to have a long and thorough QA phase. And a polished product at release receives better initial critis, which is key for a high Metacritics score and therefore high initial sales for a high price. I don’t get why someone releases a game half-baked after 4 years of development when it could be released in a great state after 4.25 years.
@Max_the_German you’re completely missing the point bro
@Mikey856 Yor are right.
Removed - flaming/arguing
@Max_the_German BG3's metacritic is a 96. That's is not a half baked product. Sure you can choose how you want to release a game, and whether or not to offer post launch support, but why would any studio not want to offer that? Even TTK has that with updates and DLC.
I work in QA, it is a very long and thorough process. Some bugs are not even present on our equipment the way they are on some of the end user's equipment. This is due to the sheer amount of people getting to play verses the very limited amount of QA Functional and Requirements testers that are testing the game.
There are also deadlines and end user expectations. Delaying due to the game being a little buggy just wouldn't make any sense. Even a two week delay is a big financial hit, as you have to play your employees, and not only that, but it can cause more stress and more potential for burnout in the organization which will lead to a worse products. Delays to meet an arbitrary standard by some random people online just don't make any sense when you can ship a game that is up to Publishing's or the studio's quality standards.
And when you look at analytics, these games are released in a "great" state. Most of these bugs the typical end user wouldn't run into. They're either bugs a few people ran into, or bugs picked up by more extensive QA testing during the post launch cycle.
Hard to care unless they fixed the embarrassingly bad inventory system and baffling inability to tilt the camera to look upwards.
@figboot @Max_the_German yes I know I am. Isn’t that how it’s supposed to be though, top down, like a board game ?
@figboot It is meant to be like that. It's a CRPG so it's a top down perspective for most everything but exploration. Being able to move in third person with a controller is very unusual for genre, and on PC on mouse and keyboard you can't even do that, it's all top down and you point and click where you want to like the genre standard.
That's like asking for an FPS to fix not being able to go into third person. It's by design, not baffling at all.
As for inventory the game already gives you all the tools to organize your inventory. You can go back to camp whenever you want, even when you're overencumbered and have chests there for each type of item you have, or even put them into bags to organize them... What else could you possibly want? It's an RPG with a lot of items, and the game will already let you sort them by type? So really not seeing how inventory is bad or even obtuse in any way.
@Constable_What Thank you for this interesting insight! It’s understandable that most of these hundreds of fixes are encountered by only a small fraction of the consumers. As long as the game doesn’t crash often and there are no irreversible locks or game-breaking bugs, it’s fine.
Most of these bugs would not present themselves until people encounter them in the real world. Quite literally millions of people have played the game, @durxll123, and clearly Larian have nowhere near that number of QA testers...
You are absolutely right, @Constable_What. My full playthrough took me 300 hours. Bearing in mind that Larian said there were 17,000 differing permeations of the ending, can you imagine how long it would take to fully iron out every bug in QA, and how many testers they would require? It would take decades for even a sizable team to go through the game so thoroughly that all bugs were exterminated...
@Max_the_German I agree, and I am glad my insight is appreciated. You are very welcome.
The types of bugs you are talking about are very high priority, and get fixed fast. There aren't going to be too many of them out in the wild if any, but sometimes things happen and it is very important for the end user to call that out so it can be fixed ASAP!
In BG3, I encountered 1 bug that kinda locked me out of, not an ending, but a possible resolution to a quest due to doing things out of sequence. QA didn't account for me not wanting to commit to something, and then coming back later! I could still finish the quest, and get the "same" resolution but I had to lie to an NPC and tell them their family was still alive lmao. Which in and of itself, is amazing, I think, that is even considered.
@Fiendish-Beaver This is exactly why early access is good for games sometimes. You can play the game in a unfinished state and follow the development, you're not obligated to submit bug reports, but if something bad happens you will probably talk about it and the devs will take notice once more and more people start talking about it.
A game like this, with so many different outcomes for so many quests....oh man. It'd be so fun to be QA for this game.
Like I said in the comment above, bugs that lock out a resolution to something might not even lock it out entirely because of the bevy of systems in place to utilize.
One other "bug", but more like a quirk of the game's systems is an NPC having me protect them while they do something, them finishing, and me still having wall of fire up. To which they walked into it, went hostile, turned into a zombie, walked back through the fire, and then died.
Gotta remember to unconcentrate those spells... Classic D&D DM trap right there. That'll teach ya to leave walls of fire everywhere, you think I'm made of wall of fire tiles?
@durxll123 devs actually don't fix bugs until the games release . Good point bud
Whenever I see one of these articles about an additional 1,000 fixes and whatnot, it validates my decision to wait a while before I play BG3. As amazing as the game probably is already, it's just going to get more and more solid an experience with time.
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