Baldur’s Gate 3 will drop Patch 5 later this week. According to developer Larian Studios, Patch 5 will fix an issue created in Patch 4 that caused the game to eternally ponder your crimes. In fact, it would think about your many larcenies so hard that the game could begin to lag at “unplayable” levels for some.
Larian shared a lengthy statement with IGN outlining exactly what was causing Baldur’s Gate 3 to experience slowdowns and stutters. In essence, Patch 4 issued a fix for an issue where thieving players were being immediately sprung by the cops, even while sneaking. Unfortunately, this fix had the unforeseen effect of caused the game’s back-end to dwell infinitely on every dirty little crime the player had committed. As a result, the game’s memory usage could become so bloated by Act 3 (if you were particularly partial to committing lots of criminal activity) that the game would struggle and noticeably slow for many players.
“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,” Larian’s statement said of the Baldur’s Gate 3 issue.
“This fix had the unintended consequence of causing unnoticed thefts and acts of vandalism to remain stuck forever within the ‘did anyone see me’ pipeline, rather than timing out and moving on, as is intended,” the studio continued. “Essentially, your dungeon master — in a real-world sense — constantly thinks about the acts of theft and violence the player keeps doing, without ever moving on or verbalising them.”
Larian said this caused the ‘dungeon master’ of Baldur’s Gate 3’s backend to “[mull] on [crimes] ad infinitum” as opposed to moving past all the untold violence, theft, and vandalism players had previously committed once time had passed. Sort of like a bad IRL dungeon master who keeps circling back to the same thing over and over for all eternity in a campaign, really.
“These unnoticed and eternally-active acts of theft and 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,” Larian said. “Essentially, the dungeon master becomes unable to operate. By Act 3 this caused slowdown 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.”
While many Baldur’s Gate 3 players did experience this issue, according to IGN’s report, it seems like those that felt too guilty to commit crimes probably didn’t experience as much of an issue – although given previous patches removed the ability for other pretty heinous acts due to how many players were committing them (including murdering a coffin maker and telling bereaved parents everything was fine), it’s more than likely that a decent chunk of the Baldur’s Gate 3 playerbase was struggling with at least some degree of lag.
Patch 5 for Baldur’s Gate 3 is scheduled to go live this week, and while obviously the in-game memory forever thinking about your misdemeanours until the system can’t compute is one of the major fixes, the patch fixes Astarion’s kisses (Astarion girlies globally cheer), adds new camp scenes and introduces companion Background Goals, amongst other changes and updates.
Lead Image Credit: Larian Studios
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