Baldur's Gate 3 patch 5 is scheduled to arrive this week, and a key part of its apparently hefty payload is a fix for a technical issue unintentionally introduced in patch 4, which forever carved the stain of your crimes into the RPG's memory banks.
Larian explained the technical hiccup, which resulted in slowdowns and stutters for many users whenever they committed some kind of crime or act of violence, in an in-depth comment to IGN.
Simply put, Baldur's Gate 3 patch 4 was supposed to prevent players from getting spotted when stealing while sneaking, invisible, or otherwise unseen. It's a classic stealth hangup for RPGs: you're totally out of sight, but as soon as you reach for the proverbial cookie jar, the cops just materialize out of the ether behind you. However, "this fix had the unintended consequence of causing unnoticed thefts and acts of vandalism to remain stuck forever within the 'did anyone see me' pipeline, rather than timing out and moving on, as is intended."
In other words, Larian explains, the dungeon master-like system working under the hood of Baldur's Gate 3 forgot how to forget criminal activity. Instead, it "constantly thinks about the acts of theft and violence the player keeps doing, without ever moving on or verbalizing them." The game would spend forever "mulling on it ad infinitum" like some sort of public conscience. The Sibyl System of Baldur's Gate, if you will.
The more of these criminal acts you'd rack up, the more bogged-down the game would become. It's an amusingly literal memory problem made extra funny by the fact that it imposes a self-inflicted karmic purgatory on repeat criminals. Do the crime, do the time (spent struggling with low frame rates).
"By Act 3 this caused slowdown 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," Larian says.
Once again, my goody-two-shoes Paladin, who kept even Astarion's sneaky ass from stealing most things, has been vindicated. This is one performance problem I didn't really run into in Act 3, and I'll thank my lucky stars for that. Here's hoping patch 5 fixes not only this issue, but some lingering others as well.
Let's not forget that patch 5 will also finally give Astarion some proper kissing animations.
