Developer Larian Studios has taken to the official Twitter account to reveal the plans to release Baldur’s Gate 3 Patch 5 later this week. This update aims to fix the eternally-active acts of thefts & violence causing slowdowns, introduced in the previous patch. It also fixes Astarion’s little kisses, and more!
In case you were wondering how Patch 4 managed to break the game and punish the thieving and murdering Tavs and Durges in the process:
“In Patch 4 we introduced a fix that would prevent the Scrying Eyes in Moonrise Towers from immediately calling the guards on you when stealing, even if you were sneaking, or invisible for example. This fix had the unintended consequence of causing unnoticed thefts & acts of vandalism to remain stuck forever within the ‘did anyone see me’ pipeline, rather than timing out and moving on, as is intended. Essentially, your ‘DM’ – in a real-world sense – constantly thinks about the acts of theft & violence the player keeps doing, without ever moving on or verbalising them. Mulling on it ad infinitum.
These unnoticed and eternally-active acts of theft & violence eventually bogged down the game. The more a player commits those acts, the more the game is trying to keep that all up to date and in memory, and so the more slowdowns start happening. Essentially, the ‘DM’ eventually becomes unable to operate. By Act 3 this caused slow-down issues, which after some sleuthing we’re extremely happy to say we’ve solved in Patch 5, which is in testing and scheduled to release this week.”
Thus Larian unintentionally delivered some choices & consequences in the game for the criminal behaviour that went beyond the expected. However, this has also rendered Act 3 largely unplayable for anyone that has toyed the line and acquired some ill-fated goods. Thankfully, the developers are in on the fix!
Stay tuned to find out more once Larian shares the patch notes for the upcoming update.
