Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Technical & Gameplay Problems So many bugs left (and ignored) after 2 years

I played BG3 both during EA and at the release, 2 years ago. I remember reporting a number of bugs, about 80 of them, I think.

I've decided to play again, and I'm really surprised to see the number of remaining obvious bugs, including a series that I had already reported, with saved games, screenshots and reproduction steps. And I don't mean obscure bugs in some specific configurations, but

• Comparing weapons and items in trading or multi-inventory screen is incorrect most of the time because the comparison is often made with the wrong character and the wrong character's stats: if I select Shadowheart and hover over an item in Gale's inventory, I see a comparison between that item and the weapon Lae'zel (or my MC) is currently wielding, and Lae'zel's stats for the damage etc, instead of Shadowheart. If I move the mouse over something else then come back, then it shows the correct stats. It's so confusing when buying / changing equipment, I can't believe they haven't fixed that.
• turn-based combat has so many problems, especially when the rogue starts hidden. Rounds are frequently denied in those conditions (often the 2nd round), or sometimes enemies would continue moving in real-time and attack several times before entering TB (like at the Arcane Tower when fighting the arcane towers).
• The auto-selection of supplies before the long rest frequently selects twice or thrice the correct amount when 40 packs are still available. I had sent them the correct knapsack algorithm 2 years ago; it uses dynamic programming and is very light on resources to give an optimal solution with a few lines of code, but no, it continues to misbehave and I often have to hand-pick the supplies (though I now have ample reserves).
• The game doesn't remember the login, at least the GOG version. It's a mess: the launcher does remember the login in some circumstances and depending the browser (because it relies on the current browser's cookies through some hack). Fortunately, it looks like there's no advantage for a single player to log into the game, but I sympathize with MP aficionados.
• UI windows suddenly close, be that the very small alchemy bag (which often opens behind the inventory window, just to be helpful...) when it's resized, or the reaction window when switching characters
• And so on (most of the above being 100% reproducible)

I wonder if they're using a bug tracker.

Of course, I suppose they're done with fixing bugs now, but still. It's been two years, and those are things you see (and endure) all the time. Although the bug page is still up, there've been two recent updates, and sending bugs still sends back the automatic replies that they "are working hard to get back to everyone as quickly as possible", so it's not clear that they stopped.

Don't get me wrong, I love the game, as I loved their previous D:OS games, but those bugs are so distracting when one's playing that it frequently breaks the immersion. Shame.

They choosed to work with console, PS and PC version of the game all at the same time, even though its probably different set of teams unaffecting one another, but I feel that kinda contributes to making it increasingly more difficult squashing all the bugs.

Normally and traditionally its been more like doing one system at a time before branching the game to another.

Most of those bugs are in the core logic, so people will see them on console / macOS as well. I doubt that the people doing the port to other platforms (or rather the console- and macOS- specific parts) are the same as those working on the core logic, as it requires specific skills.

They fixed an incredible number of bugs, but I think the problem is one of priority. Flagrant bugs in the combat system or in gear stats are arguably more important than some of the more remote bugs that were squashed. They also had time to add more content, which is nice but should come second to fixing that kind of bug.

Right now, I'm not even sure it's still worth reporting bugs. I don't know what they're doing with those reports, but it seems they're just ignored.

Anyway, great game, but it's a little sad to have to frequently reload when the combat forgets character's turns or suddenly deprive them of actions or bonus actions in some situations.

Fun fact: no non-trivial program is ever free of bugs.

Well, "trivial" is maybe the wrong word. You can prove programs, but thats not possible for really large programs.

In sufficiently large programs, it is estimated that they have a bug every 50 lines of code.

Some programs like TeX are famous for having been carefully finetuned for decades and being practically bug free, but thats the absolute exception.

Vim is another program I can think of that is at least extremely low on bugs; its an editor used for programming. Its complicated to learn but super powerful. I never heard any programmer losing their source code when using vim, though of course you also should use version control for backups (and coordination with other programmers etc).

So yes, Baldurs Gate 3 will always have bugs. Its the natural consequence of being at the cutting edge of how complex a program can be. That said obviously all known big bugs should be fixed. Fortunately Larian has said they will continue bugfixing, even if adding new big features to the game has finished with 8.x.

But if you ship a program out with bugs more than likely something you could improve upon to make it less buggy in the first place and increase the life expectancy of the program before it needs a replacement, could also just be bugs that could just be a small deviation in the code that only manifests maybe one in a millionth time being performed as an extreme example, but thats less about video games and more about tirival codes.

So of course it will always be riddled with trivial and barely noticeable bugs, I just really hope they stick to the word to fix the more obvious ones and some of it in the core logic and the msot obvious ones that affects the gameplay negatively.


Good luck enjoying your companion Karlach to the fullest, something's wrong with the flags pertaining to her romance scene since patch 8 as an example of an elephant in the room that should not be left abandoned.
I just really hope that we will have bug fixing patch maybe clsoer to Q4 of this year or Q1 of next year.

As I said, I'd understand if it were some rare bugs after 2 years of fixing, but not something you have to endure each time you compare your gear, each time you do a long rest at the mid-game, or half the time you do a combat.

I've been a developer for a long time, so I perfectly know bugs exist. I agree that more complex programs are more likely to have them, but I also know there are methods to keep track of reports and good validation strategies to ensure basic functionalities are reliable and integration gives the expected results. So yes, of course you can validate really large programs to a satisfactory level.

As for one bug every 50 lines of code, that's probably true or even conservative for code generated by LLMs, but it's way more than what I saw in my experience. It'd simply mean nothing works at all. Don't forget 99% of the statistics are made up.