Baldur’s Gate 3 has emerged as quite the success story for Larian Studios, as the one big release of 2023 that fans didn’t expect to become one of many GOTY contenders.
It’s been a steady stream of good news for Larian and their recent release, right until Hotfix 4.
As reported by Video Games Chronicle, Larian had a new blog post out explaining exactly 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’s admirable for Larian to take ownership of the issue. But we do have to talk about how this problem seems completely avoidable. Based on their description, all the developers wanted to do was change the version number, which doesn’t really affect how the hotfixes affect the game.
But this change led to some other unexpected changes, because they didn’t check everything before they hit publish. While it’s easy to understand that Larian would want to get those hotfixes out as soon as possible, this rush led to a mistake that harmed players’ experience of the game.
Larian then explained what they intend to do moving forward to avoid these issues.
“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.”
Larian’s reputation is likely still aboveboard in spite of all this. Baldur’s Gate 3 has just been so good that fans would be defensive of it, even if they were directly affected by this flub.
Nobody questions Larian’s good faith out of this, and we’re sure they won’t make this happen again when they trigger their next most important update, the long anticipated first patch. We had previously reported that this patch will have over 1000 fixes and changes, and could change the experience completely.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is still scheduled for release to the PlayStation 5 on September 3, 2023. It is also planned for release on Xbox Series X|S.
