Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Technical & Gameplay Problems Post patch 4: Act III is profoundly broken

I own the game on both PC and PS5 and use the cross save facility to share saves between the devices. I am currently on my third playthrough, the first 2 playthroughs didn't show up any massive issues, but neither did the third until the start of act 3. I was using the PS5 that day and had just finished chapter 2 and arrived in Rivington, within a minute or two it became unplayable, companions not moving half the time, npc's frozen in place, the gate to the circus vanished and i could walk straight in without talking to anyone etc. I rebooted the PS5 but to no avail.

I then switched to my PC, using the cross save facility i used the same save as i was using on my PS5 and i had zero issues, it ran flawlessly. So for me it is only on the PS5, i am lucky enough to be able to switch between the devices but if i just had a PS5 i would be very unhappy as act 3 is currently broken on the PS5.

Hello everyone,

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.

All of you should now be able to continue your adventures, but essentially, here’s what happened:

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

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.

This was around patch 2. So my question what happened with backup plan? They run out of storage?

Honestly I play Larian Games for almost 20 years and this kind of behavior was never happened before.
I think fortune and fame got in they head.
And still internet is full with praise them to God hood.

Hello!

We're aiming to release Patch 5 this week, which fixes the eternally-active acts of thefts & violence that were causing slowdowns.

Hello!

We're aiming to release Patch 5 this week, which fixes the eternally-active acts of thefts & violence that were causing slowdowns.

Hi, thank you for this public statement on when we can expect the Patch being released. I saw the post on Twitter, as well. It's nice for Larian to finally use their social media to give users advanced information on these things.

However, I'm confused what "ixes the eternally-active acts of thefts & violence that were causing slowdowns" means. I thought the issues with Act 3 lag were related to assets and memory. Are you saying they are, in fact, caused by issues with the combat and thiervery systems in the game? I understand you're Community Manager, and not involved with actually working on game code, but a little clarification on what this means would be nice, since the announcements do not even say this is specifically targeting Act 3 lag which players have found to be caused by asset and memory issues. Thank you.

Hi, thank you for this public statement on when we can expect the Patch being released. I saw the post on Twitter, as well. It's nice for Larian to finally use their social media to give users advanced information on these things.

However, I'm confused what "ixes the eternally-active acts of thefts & violence that were causing slowdowns" means. I thought the issues with Act 3 lag were related to assets and memory. Are you saying they are, in fact, caused by issues with the combat and thiervery systems in the game? I understand you're Community Manager, and not involved with actually working on game code, but a little clarification on what this means would be nice, since the announcements do not even say this is specifically targeting Act 3 lag which players have found to be caused by asset and memory issues. Thank you.

Of course, here are some more details directly from the team:

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.
This fix had the unintended consequence of causing unnoticed thefts & acts of vandalism to remain stuck forever within the ‘did anyone see me’ pipeline, rather than timing out and moving on, as is intended. Essentially, your ‘DM’ - in a real-world sense - constantly thinks about the acts of theft & violence the player keeps doing, without ever moving on or verbalising them. Mulling on it ad infinitum.
These unnoticed and eternally-active acts of theft & 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. Essentially, the ‘DM’ eventually becomes unable to operate. By Act 3 this caused slow-down 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.