Baldur’s Gate 3 developer is “changing how patches are deployed” after rolling back a hotfix

Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian said it’s “changing the way we publish patches” after he was forced to roll back patch #4 yesterday due to crash issues – a move that temporarily prevented players from accessing any saves made during the time the update was posted.

Understandably, the rollback caused affected players to panic, and now, in a The message accompanying the repost of fix #4 today Larian says on PC, “We understand the frustration caused by this and we want to apologize. That’s why we’re turning things around.”

First, though, it provides context for yesterday’s failed release, explaining, “Fix #4 went through a strict QA pipeline and was confirmed as a release candidate yesterday. However, we launched a release rebuild at the relatively last minute to change the release number.” The cooked version unfortunately suffered from compiler corruption, which was throwing some exceptions that normally don’t cause – you guessed it – crashes.” Larian calls these types of compiler problems “extremely rare,” adding “We weren’t prepared for it. We should have been. We screwed up.”

“To avoid this happening in the future,” the studio continued, “we’ll make sure that any change made to candidates for future releases — no matter how small or insignificant — will always pass through our full and comprehensive line of quality assurance, which includes our global in-house QA team, automated testing, and unit tests, and compatibility testing with game saves. ”

Larian has already announced that the first major patch for Baldur’s Gate 3 is in the works following a series of substantial hotfixes to address issues that have surfaced since its launch earlier this month. Some of these issues (a missing underwear gnome, for example) were relatively trivial while others were vastly more serious, including a devastating bug affecting some players, an issue initially reported by Eurogamer after it Contributor Ruth Cassidy was touched while playing for their review.

A second major patch is also in the planning stages, which Larian says will “incorporate some requests,” and perhaps even the ability to change your character’s appearance mid-game.

Hopefully, all of this means that PlayStation 5 owners will have a relatively smoother launch experience when Baldur’s Gate 3 gets its general release on console on September 6th. As announced yesterday, those who pre-purchased the Digital Deluxe Edition on PS5 can start pre-loading the game from 5pm GMT on August 31st.