Yesterday, Larian Studios outlined its current roadmap for patches and hotfixes and rolled out its latest, Hotfix #4. But, after that hotfix started causing crashes, the studio quickly undid the move.
So today, there’s some good news: not only has Larian redeployed Hotfix #4, but it’s also vowed to learn from the experience and change the way it rolls out fixes in the future, it said in a new Steam post today.
We're redeploying Hotfix #4, and changing the way we deploy future patches.
— Larian Studios (@larianstudios) August 17, 2023
Read more: https://t.co/XtpfbCy45t pic.twitter.com/0YV4OMWIBq
As Larian originally explained, “a build error” caused new crashes with the implementation of Hotfix #4. However, once they rolled the hotfix back, “players who had downloaded hotfix 4 were unable to continue from their hotfix 4 saves once we had rolled back the patch,” Larian said in today’s post.
“While this is not ok, rolling back the patch in order to diagnose the problem and limit those exposed to it was the lesser of two evils,” Larian continued.
The problem was apparently caused by a “rare compiler issue,” the studio added, which is one of the reasons they weren’t prepared for it, combined with the fact that it happened “at the worst possible time of day.”
“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,” Larian concluded.
Hotfix #4 remedies a number of issues, including players getting stuck mid-Long Rest due to companions not waking up and fixing a script issue that prevented some players from loading savegames. It also slightly increased Isobel’s health so she doesn’t die quite as easily, and made it so resources are correctly restored after Act II. Read the full details here.
Patch 1, as unveiled yesterday, is set to include 1,000 fixes and tweaks. For more on Baldur’s Gate 3, check out our review-in-progress so far.
Alex Stedman is a Senior News Editor with IGN, overseeing entertainment reporting. When she's not writing or editing, you can find her reading fantasy novels or playing Dungeons & Dragons.
