‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ to take a new approach to patches after hotfix 4 havoc

Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian Studios shared that it is rethinking its approach to patches after the third hotfix caused chaos with players’ saves.

“If you’ve saved since updating, you won’t be able to load those saves until we’ve re-published Hotfix 4. Sorry about the inconvenience,” apologised the Swedish studio in a post to X about the issues with the fourth hotfix.

Seeing that players are averaging approximately five hours a day in Faerûn, this would have led to a lot of progress being lost as a result of the error.

It’s the fault of a “rare compiler issue”, explained the team, in an announcement on Baldur’s Gate 3‘s official Steam listing. Larian Studios also acknowledged that rolling the game back to hotfix 3 is not an ideal outcome at the time, but it was “the lesser of two evils”.

“Hotfix 4 went through a rigorous QA [quality assurance] pipeline and was confirmed as a candidate for release yesterday,” continued the developer. “However, we triggered a rebuild of the version relatively last minute to change the version number. The version that was cooked was unfortunately plagued by compiler corruption, which was causing certain exceptions that normally wouldn’t cause crashes to – you guessed it – cause crashes.”

In order to avoid events like this in the future, all changes regardless of scale will “always go through our full and comprehensive QA pipeline, which include a global in-house QA team, automated testing, unit tests, and save-game compatibility testing”.

Larian Studios also thanked the action of its Canadian and Malaysian teams for containing the chaos of the fourth hotfix as quickly as possible. The latest hotfix is now active in the game and now attention has turned to the game’s first patch.

In other news, there will be more than 1,000 “fixes and tweaks” in the first patch for Baldur’s Gate 3. However, the second patch is imagined to include “some requests” from fans such as the ability to change a custom character’s appearance.