Larian promises Baldur’s Gate 3 patch overhaul after rollback complaints
Larian Studios has reassured fans that it will be overhauling the way patches are rolled out in Baldur’s Gate 3 after the latest hotfix caused crashes.
Despite meaning that some players who had already updated their game were not able to play on their saves until the issues were fixed, many fans praised Larian for its transparency.
Hotfix 4 was rolled back after causing problems in-game
Baldur's Gate 3 players found themselves unable to load their saves if they had updated their game to include the latest hotfix on 16 August after a build error caused the game to repeatedly crash.
In a statement on Twitter, Larian Studios said: "Due to a build error causing new crashes, we’ve rolled back Hotfix 4 for the time being. We'll re-release it as soon as we’ve fixed the cause. If you’ve saved since updating, you won’t be able to load those saves until we’ve re-published Hotfix 4. Sorry about the inconvenience."
The team later clarified that players could continue to play on the previous hotfix, but would not be able to continue where they left off if they had already updated.
Hotfix 4 was intended to fix a number of issues, including players getting stuck mid-Long-Rest, players being prevented from loading savegames, and several multiplayer and combat issues.
Larian promised to overhaul patch releases
After fixing the problems caused by the hotfix, Larian Studios issued an apology on Steam, alongside a promise to do better in the future.
The studio said: "Yesterday we had to rollback hotfix 4 because of a rare compiler issue. To avoid this from happening again we’re changing the way we deploy patches.
"Players who had downloaded hotfix 4 were unable to continue from their hotfix 4 saves once we had rolled back the patch. 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. We truly appreciate your patience & understanding while we worked to understand the problem.
"This situation is remedied now with the re-release of hotfix 4 but we recognize the frustration caused by this and want to apologize. That’s why we’re changing things up."
The team continued on to explain what had happened to cause the crashes, which led to fans of the game thanking them for their transparency.
They said: "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."
Larian Studios finished the update by reassuring fans that the error would never happen again, saying: "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."