Baldur’s Gate 3 patch 7’s delay reminds us Larian’s a studio that still cares about its players
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We were meant to get the seventh major update to Baldur’s Gate 3 last week. However, on the day it was meant to launch, it was delayed. Larian released a lengthy statement explaining why – bugs – and it detailed when players should expect to see the closed beta launch. However, while fans from other franchises might have been un uproar had this happened to The First Descendant, The Finals, or Call of Duty, Baldur’s Gate 3’s fans were instead pretty unaffected. Why? Because Larian treats its players properly.
Well, the Patch 7 Closed Beta was set to begin today, but while preparing the build for you, we were once more humbled by the classic lesson taught to every game dev while playing bug-fix whack-a-mole: if you fix one bug over here, another one might still pop up over there.
This happened with one of the fixes we wanted to introduce in Patch 7, which has caused passive rolls to stop working. We’re trying to figure out how we got here, so while we do that, we’ll be pushing the Closed Beta back to later this week.
The apology addresses the fact that the patch renders the game nearly unplayable, but it doesn’t sugar coat it. It’s realistic and transparent with what went wrong, and it even plainly states that it is “trying to figure out how we got here,” without giving away too much of a suggestion as to when it’s coming.
One of my observations as a video game journalist is that new patches must be terrifying for game devs. Here’s an example of fans of The Finals contradicting claims that bugs were patched, or Dead by Daylight fans noticing game-changing nerfs were not included in patch notes, or an article from 2012 noting how a Mass Effect 3 patch renders the game unplayable. Whatever the case, it’s clear that rolling out a patch is a brutal process that – more often than not – leads to unintended issues.
I’m not going to generalise and suggest that all developers roll out patches knowing that these issues are there. They don’t. That said, there are a fair-few developers who pretty commonly gloss over these game breaking issues, whenever they’re from.
Larian cares about its players. We don’t need to be told that. It’s not a game littered with DLC and microtransactions, but it’s instead expansive, incredibly well-polished, and an all-round wholesome experience (if you don’t consider the brainsuckers). However, a couple of months ago, we found out that Larian were no longer going to be continuing with the Baldur’s Gate series, and that it was already focusing on its own IP. Bad news, or so I thought.
I feared that this meant that BG3 would get forgotten about, receive few patches, and end up the secondary focus in the face of Larian’s next project. There’s something about the delay for Patch 7 tells me that’s not the case, and it never would have been the case.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is here to stay, and Larian is here to make sure that its players continue to enjoy it. When a studio turns up and it has a proven track-record of listening to and considering its players – I think it’s a sign that you should hold on. They aren’t that common. I’m glad that Patch 7 has been delayed. Instead of a buggy and broken build of the game, we’re going to receive a polished and well-thought through update that breathes life back into a game that is still hitting 100,000 concurrent players nearly a year after its initial launch.
