Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Technical & Gameplay Problems Patch 4 doesn't work anymore

So a friend of mine and I have been playing this game pretty sporadically which is why we haven't finished it yet and still have a save game on patch 4. We got pretty close to finishing the first act, but then some sort of update a few weeks ago caused the game to crash instantly as soon as I press "play" in the launcher (same thing happening to my friend). Since we spent a decent amount of time on that save, it would be a shame if we couldn't finish it (and neither of us want to replay the entire game on patch 5 just to see the few areas we haven't been to yet).

Does anyone know how to fix this? I tried things like disabling fullscreen optimization, change windows compatibility mode, skip the launcher, directly run bg3.exe or bg3_dx11.exe and some other things mentioned in the FAQ of the larian support but none of those things helped. Any other suggestions?

Thanks in advance.

Edit: Forgot to mention that we both use the steam version

Well, before anything else... Did you select the "beta branch" that kept the client to Patch 4 instead of updating to Patch 5, as the update explicitly told you to do if you wanted to keep playing the same version?
Otherwise you wouldn't be able to reload your old saves to begin with.

That aside, you can sidestep the game launcher entirely by executing the game directly from its executable with Steam closed. But I'm not sure if that allows for multiplayer.

Thanks a lot for the answer. Yes, I selected the beta branch on steam.

Tried launching directly from the executables after exiting out of Steam, but the game still crashes instantly unfortunately (i.e., I get one second of a black screen and then return to desktop)