Baldur's Gate 3 Emergency Update Makes Important Fix

Game ZXC

Baldur's Gate 3

By Rory Young

Published Aug 10, 2023

Highlights

Baldur's Gate 3 had a problem with players' personal story databases being too small to handle all the interactions and choices made in the game.
Larian Studios issued an emergency hotfix, increasing the size of the personal story databases to prevent save file issues.
The hotfix also re-enabled account-based cloud saves.

Baldur's Gate 3 developer Larian Studios has issued an emergency hotfix addressing a problem unique to the massive RPG. As a Dungeons and Dragons game, Baldur's Gate 3 is packed full of choices players make as they adventure across Faerun and interact with its many interesting peoples. It seems that it was possible to do so much in Baldur's Gate 3 that players' personal story databases weren't big enough to handle records of all the interactions.

Dungeons and Dragons is a pen-and-paper role-playing game in which players have full control over their characters and how they interact with the world. So long as a choice makes sense within the confines of role-playing, and very lenient rules of Dungeons and Dragons, players are allowed to do what they want. Obviously, Baldur's Gate 3 can't allow for such unending freedom, but Larian has done as much as it can to inject creativity into the game. Those choices all have to be recorded, too, in case they impact future events in the game.

Larian has confirmed that Baldur's Gate 3 had an existing issue that was in need of an emergency address. Players' personal story databases, which held records of all in-game choices and actions from Baldur's Gate 3, were too small. While Larian doesn't say specifically what happens if those databases were to overflow, it does say that save files were at risk. Hotfix 2.1 for Baldur's Gate 3 has now been issued, making players' personal story databases as large as they need to be (or as large as each storage device allows).

It's unclear if the limited storage device issue ever actually led to errors for Baldur's Gate 3 players. Larian doesn't say, and there's no obvious feedback online regarding the problem. It's possible that the issue was widespread, but that Baldur's Gate 3 players never noticed. Without further clarification from Larian, players may never know the truth.

The personal story database hotfix wasn't all that Larian changed with Baldur's Gate 3 version 2.1. It also re-enabled account-based cloud saves. There was a serious issue when Baldur's Gate 3 launched that would lock players out of the game due to syncing issues with their Larian account-based cloud saves. The issue has now been resolved. This sets up the ability to carry over saves to Baldur's Gate 3's launch on PlayStation 5 in early September.

While Baldur's Gate 3 is technically now fully launched on PC, the size and scope of the game means that there are still going to be issues that need to be addressed. That's especially true given just how many players have bought Baldur's Gate 3. Millions of people are trying Baldur's Gate 3 out for the first time, doing things Larian likely never even realized were possible. This isn't the first, and likely won't be the last, hotfix Baldur's Gate 3 receives.