Developer Larian Studios had to roll back the latest Hotfix #4 due to a rare compiler issue. The team has now redeployed the patch and shared a lengthy explanation as to what went wrong and what steps are going to be taken to prevent such issues in the future.
The update consists of a variety of changes aimed to enhance flow issues, companions, and fix several crashes and bugs. Among other things, it makes it so players are no longer stuck mid-Long Rest due to the companions being sleepyheads.
The hotfix also enhanced multiplayer, adding a warning for hosts when clients join through drop-in during Character Creation. Hosts also must now grant approval before new players join.
You can find the full list of changes on the official Steam page. Beware of spoilers!
Baldur’s Gate 3 – Larian Redeployed Hotfix #4
“Hotfix 4 went through a rigorous QA pipeline and was confirmed as a candidate for release yesterday. 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.
Since compiler issues like that are extremely rare, we weren’t prepared for it. We should’ve been. We messed up.
It didn’t help that it happened at the worst possible time of day but luckily we have studios in multiple countries. Overnight (for Europe), our teams in Canada and then Malaysia worked to diagnose what went wrong, so that work could begin on redeploying a fixed version of the hotfix
To avoid this from happening in the future, we’ll make sure that any change made to future version candidates – no matter how small, or innocuous – will always go through our full & comprehensive QA pipeline, which include a global in-house QA team, automated testing, unit tests, and save-game compatibility testing.”
