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Game News Baldur's Gate 3 Community Update #9: Patch 1 - Launch

Infinitron

I post news
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Tags: Baldur's Gate 3; Larian Studios

The Baldur's Gate 3 Early Access launch last week was an unexpectedly massive success for Larian. Indeed, despite much complaining, our own thread for the Early Access release is already over 120 pages long. It was a bit buggy though, something which Larian scrambled to address with a series of hotfixes in the following days. Today they released the game's first major patch, entitled simply Launch. In addition to the patch notes, the accompanying community update also has details about Larian's experience during that momentous launch day and about the feedback they've been gathering.

We launched Baldur’s Gate 3 exactly 1 week ago, ish. The launch surpassed all our expectations. Our philosophy heading into Early Access was to hit a comfortable amount of players, gather feedback, and incrementally iron out and improve the game towards launch.

Good news! That’s still the plan. But the *bigger than expected launch* broke a few things. In chronological order, it apparently broke Steam, it then broke our launcher sign ups because the servers couldn’t keep up, and then it went on to break our support pipeline with a huge influx of support tickets. We’re not complaining. These are good problems to have.

The day before launch, the weather also broke the Ghent basement. Which was suboptimal because we were shooting a thing for those who get to the end of Act 1 (no spoilers).

Soon after, the power broke in Quebec. This is the 3rd launch in a row where Larian has had a powercut somewhere. One of the good things about upscaling to 5 studios globally, is that now if one gets defeated by water or electricity (please, not both together), we have 4 other studios to deal with the tornado, earthquake, or a Kaiju. At this point launching a game is basically like playing Sim City.

On launch, which we managed to get to in the end, we celebrated very socially, very distanced, and watched you all play the game. Someone at the office (we won’t mention the name of the perpetrator... I mean, we get it) stole Gale from the gateau. We have since recovered Gale.

Since then, we’ve shot out 3 hotfixes that have greatly reduced the number of crashes and stability issues experienced in the first week of launch. The real heroes in this are the community who stuck with us as we were working on those patches and hotfixes. We know that jumping into an unfinished game in Early Access, when your saves will eventually be wiped, is a big ask. We are phenomenally grateful to each and every one of you who’ve jumped in, provided feedback, and sent error reports. These reports are channeled back to our QA leads and producers, and the information you provide helps us to understand why certain things are happening, and thus reproduce and solve them.

Working with feedback
All feedback, positive or negative, is extremely helpful and important to us. We’re really grateful to everyone who organizes their thoughts and talks to us on Steam, or the forums, or the feedback form. For us, that’s a big part of what Early Access is about. Keep the feedback flowing, and we’ll keep shooting out those updates.

Under the hood we’re starting to get our first look at data, and decisions players are making, which teaches us how you’re playing the game. Before you launch a game, you’re making a lot of assumptions about what people will do, and why they’ll do it. When you launch, you can start to see if you were right.

As an example, let’s look at a cut down version of a heatmap (avoiding spoilers)! This is a *map of death* (make a spooky noise when you read that). *MaP of dEaTh*.

As our early access campaign progresses, you’ll see a shift as combat is tuned and content is altered. It might not look like much, but this shows us where to investigate. We can correlate this with direct player feedback, balancing feedback, and even bug reports to find out why people are dying where they’re dying, and also is it normal that people are dying there? It’s just one example of how people are helping simply by playing the game.

A strange point of interest is for instance that there are lots of deaths where you first meet Gale. Maybe people don’t like being ambushed by a spooky wizard jumping out of a rock? Something to investigate.

The amount of death in the camp is also surprising. We won’t spoil as to why that may be, but there are many, many in depth stories online, and on Reddit, about how death befell the campsite. They’re hilarious so please keep sharing them!

We also know how many times characters are dying. Gale died 333757 times. 333758 if you include the cake incident. Gale has a party-member kill-rate 4 times higher than any NPC in the game, so maybe he deserved it?

The Owlbear Cub has killed 5717 of you brave enough to try and tame it. Exactly 4000 people died as a result of interrupting the intimate moments of Ogres and Bug Bears.

And Shadowheart is the only companion that died more than the player character.

We’ll continue to share more data and insights over Early Access, but this is early days. Play however you want, in whatever way you want. There’s no one way to play the game. We’ve created systems that try to react to whoever you are, and whatever you do. The results of this make the game better.
As for the patch itself, it seems to be mostly about bug fixes, although it does include a few dialogue tweaks as well. See the full update for details.
 

MicoSelva

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Dear Infinitron, we, members of RPG Codex forums respect the hard work you are doing for the site. However, we are sincerely hoping you are not going to post news about every patch to this game.
By this point it should be rather obvious that people interested in playing early access of Baldur's Gate 3 will most likely already know about the patch. And the rest does not care.
Thank you.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
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Messages
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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Dear Infinitron, we, members of RPG Codex forums respect the hard work you are doing for the site. However, we are sincerely hoping you are not going to post news about every patch to this game.
By this point it should be rather obvious that people interested in playing early access of Baldur's Gate 3 will most likely already know about the patch. And the rest does not care.
Thank you.

I post every Baldur's Gate 3 community update, not every patch (though these will likely coincide during Early Access).
 
Self-Ejected

Joseph Stalin

Totally not Auraculum
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"Your progress will be wiped after the EA".

This basically confirms that there will be story changes to Chapter I in the finished game.
 

Iluvcheezcake

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Le Balkans
"Your progress will be wiped after the EA".

This basically confirms that there will be story changes to Chapter I in the finished game.

Guys, guys!!

Swen contacted me via sms and told me that in the final version you start as a tadpole and gotta choose whom to infect.

Tis true! I swear on me mum!
 
Self-Ejected

Joseph Stalin

Totally not Auraculum
Joined
Jul 16, 2020
Messages
796
"Your progress will be wiped after the EA".

This basically confirms that there will be story changes to Chapter I in the finished game.

Guys, guys!!

Swen contacted me via sms and told me that in the final version you start as a tadpole and gotta choose whom to infect.

Tis true! I swear on me mum!
Sorry, but your Mom's busy sucking my fat Georgian cock.
 

KeighnMcDeath

RPG Codex Boomer
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Mom???
9qsfPPE.jpg
 

jac8awol

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These numbers are astounding! This is valuable data! Who'd have thought so many chumps would fork out that premium dollar to playtest and spoil the experience that the rest of us will get to enjoy one day bug-free and at a discount?
 

Grotesque

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Of course Inshillitron will post every community update!

Maybe people don’t like being ambushed by a spooky wizard jumping out of a rock? Something to investigate.

So if people don't like something that's out of their comfort zone, we must... investigate (aka dumbdown)

Also, information overload
 

Tyrr

Liturgist
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Maybe people don’t like being ambushed by a spooky wizard jumping out of a rock? Something to investigate.

So if people don't like something that's out of their comfort zone, we must... investigate (aka dumbdown)
So they're changing the story based on player reactions/feedback? That's an "interesting" approach..

On the other hand, nobody plays a Larian game for its story.
 

wtrboy

Novice
Joined
Sep 16, 2018
Messages
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Maybe people don’t like being ambushed by a spooky wizard jumping out of a rock? Something to investigate.

So if people don't like something that's out of their comfort zone, we must... investigate (aka dumbdown)
So they're changing the story based on player reactions/feedback? That's an "interesting" approach..

On the other hand, nobody plays a Larian game for its story.

...and it's a shame because they finally have the resources to create an excellent story (if only they could).
 

KeighnMcDeath

RPG Codex Boomer
Joined
Nov 23, 2016
Messages
12,859
Started to watch a few gameplays of BG3 so here's the first:







meh, youtube is littered with em. I almost bought it before but ehhhhhhh..... I'll still wait for it in the cheap-O bin. I just can't get hyped on alpha.
 

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