Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Question about patch #1 and game saves

So, I come from playing a lot of other games where a major patch will break most game saves. And, we know that the next patch is most likely a major patch, and #2 promises even bigger changes. One of the things I would like to know from the Devs is will the patch 1 and 2 break our current games and if it will, therefore maybe we might get a general idea of how long we have before that might happen. Apologies if this was already posted somewhere I did not see it.

I'm not a dev, but saves have been forward compatible with all hotfixes so far. Breaking saves in a game of this size would be pretty crazy. Backward compatibility is a different problem (see the recent hotfix rollback).

Save-breaking patches is a bit of an industry no-no in general. Not sure what games you have in mind, but it's not a problem I see very often these days.

You could also just set steam to not automatically update your games... and play until you know that patch isn't breaking anything.

Well, I am a big grand strategy game player, and this happens all the time with major updates. As much as I want to believe it is not going to happen, I want to hear it from the devs mouth before I believe it. If too many mechanics are changed or added to, as they seem to be suggesting particularly with Patch 2, I can see the potential for problems, is all. Just want to be prepared.

I figured this, but I also want an updated game, so I guess we shall see.,

They are not going to break all of their customers’ playthroughs of this 100 hour narrative game. That is 100% not going to happen. This isn’t EA anymore.

Most games, the overwhelming majority in fact, do not have saves broken every time they are patched.

Save breaking patches are very common in grand strategy games, not so much in RPGs.

Rolling back patches does major damage though.
I do my saves by cycling through my last four.
When Larian rolled back that patch, I lost all four of my cycling saves - and about 6 hours progress.
In my 30 years of game play, I never had something like that happen before. And I hope to never see it again.
Fortunately - BG3 is good enough that I really did not mind (much) replaying those six hours.

To be honest, I am coming to about 16 hours on my recent playthrough and I find myself itching to try a new playthrough, having ideas of what I might do differently with a new character build, so if the patch messes with my current game, I will just be Zen with it and move on, as I have been with other games. No sense crying about that which I cannot change, especially if it comes from an attempt to make the game even better.