Baldur's Gate 3's next big patch is releasing soon, and by all accounts it will be a chonky one, featuring a host of performance improvements and other fixes. Even better, Patch 2 will apparently address Minthara, who has been hobbled by what director Swen Vincke describes as a "very, very stupid bug."
Speaking with IGN ahead of Patch 2's release, Vincke talked about how the scope of Baldur's Gate 3 can cause cascading reactions that can sometimes lock out content by accident. Such is the case with Baldur's Gate 3's drow murderess.
"The game is super reactive and there were a couple of bugs that caused some of the companions to not react as they should. And so that felt like the content was not showing up. So you weren't seeing it specifically with Minthara," Vincke explained. "So [lead writer Adam Smith] told me there's about 1500 lines of Minthara that weren't showing up as a result of a very, very stupid bug that we now isolated. So we're solving it."
Vincke said that the Minthara lines "worked" in previous versions, but that "something else caused them to not work anymore." Such is the challenge of making a complicated, interlocking RPG filled with thousands of tiny interactions.
'We'll see if we can do something extra for her'
Talking about the team's overall vision off for Minthara, Vincke says she went through "a few iterations." One key distinction is that she's not an origin character, meaning you can't play her from the start. In essence, she's what Vincke describes as a "sidekick."
"She's there to actually serve another character that you meet later on in the game, one of the antagonists," he says. "So, she was supposed to bring a different light on that antagonist in there."
He continues, "It doesn't help that some of her lines are not triggering. So that doesn't do her justice. But she never had a real actual quest — an origin quest... what you have for some of the others inside of act 3.. So people that were looking for that, it's just not there."
"There was a variation that they discovered of Minthara that we removed because it became too complicated. Then we didn't have the real estate across the game anymore to tell that story. So, they found some fragments of it. But I mean, every single companion that you've been playing has gone through those multiple iterations. So, it's not that it's something like we massively cut something there. It's just that Minthara also serves the power fantasy of going for evil."
Still, Larian Studios are leaving the door open for more development in the future.
"[W]e'll first fix what her problem is that blocks her content, and then we'll see how she's going to land with the fans, and then we'll see if we can do something extra with her. I mean, the feedback to the game has been phenomenal and overwhelming for us. So, it's definitely much more than we expected. So, we're taking it all in, and then we're...filtering through it. And so we'll see where it goes," Vincke says
"We made this game for the players, for them to enjoy it. If there's things that don't really land, I think you can be rest assured that we'll probably do something about it at some point, except that we can't do miracles. We're still a limited team with a limited amount of people that have been working very, very hard on making this."
In addition to restoring access to Minthara's content, Vincke says fans can expect a new epilogue for fan-favorite Karlach (he cryptically hints that if you see a cigar you'll know that you've found the new content), and that it will "make a lot of people happy." It will also include improvements to co-op as well as a "number of other things people have been asking about."
Baldur's Gate 3 Patch 2 is currently in QA testing and should be out this week. While you wait, check out how one Baldur's Gate 3 player found a way to make every character miserable, as well as our complete guide to Baldur's Gate 3's
Kat Bailey is IGN's News Director as well as co-host of Nintendo Voice Chat. Have a tip? Send her a DM at @the_katbot.
