Larian Studios recently released a new hotfix for Baldur’s Gate 3 but reverted it due to a rare compiler issue that resulted in excessive crashes. Hotfix 4 is available again with the issue fixed, but the developer is changing its patch deployment to prevent the same thing from occurring again.
It explained in a Steam Community post, “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 was, unfortunately, plagued by compiler corruption, which was causing certain exceptions that 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 Malaysia worked to diagnose what went wrong, so that work could begin redeploying a fixed version of the hotfix.”
To ensure quality control in the future, Larian will ensure that any changes “no matter how small, or innocuous” will go through “our full and comprehensive QA pipeline, which includes a global in-house QA team, automated testing, unit tests, and save-game compatibility testing.”
With Hotfix 4 out of the way, Larian is now working on Patch 1, which features over 1000 tweaks and fixes. Patch 2 is also coming and will add some features requested by the community. It’s also working on the PS5 version, which launches on September 6th, with Digital Deluxe Edition owners gaining access on September 1st. Pre-loads go live on August 31st.
All fixes and improvements made thus far will carry over into the PS5 version and beyond. Stay tuned for more details, and in the meantime, check out our review of the PC version.