Baldur’s Gate 3 just received its fourth major patch. Once more, the thing’s big enough to break the Steam notes. While there aren’t any new major features—like the third patch’s appearance-changing mirror or, equally as important, letting small characters kiss Karlach—it’s still packed with changes.
A huge quality of life improvement comes in the form of some much needed personal hygiene. You can now use sponges and soap to wash the grime off your party members—which is nice, since Baldur’s Gate 3 features Dragon Age: Origins levels of blood splatter which, while immersive, does undercut more sensitive moments by saddling you and your crew with axe murderer vibes.
Another gamechanger: when purchasing a statue from Boney in the Circus of the Last Days, you now have your choice of modesty—fully armoured, camp clothes, or butt naked. I’ll be disappointed if you don’t get any unique dialogues for just plonking down your bare hind, rendered lovingly in stone. Arguably though, it also makes just as much sense for them to ignore the elephant in the camp.
There’s also—as is customary—a huge list of bug fixes, animation tweaks, and story flow changes. Far too many for me to list here, but here are some of my favourite highlights.
The Self-Same Trial at Shar’s temple will no longer make a dark, twisted copy of your familiar. While this means your pet cat can no longer battle with its inner demons, that’s probably for the best.
Opening up Lae’zel’s romance is now a little harder, requiring you to do more than just nudge up her approval rating. Instead, “you must have also proven yourself worthy through your actions.” Granted, doing stuff she approves of will usually tick that box, but it’s a nice touch.
Someone has explained to Tav the difference between naps and death: “Player characters will no longer react to seeing knocked out characters as if they’re dead.” Also, that one glitch where you can play the whole game as a gang of mind flayers is gone.
Or, in Larian’s words: “you can no longer waltz around the early game as a squiddy boy or use this trick to form a whole squid squad”. RIP squid wizard money gang, you loved casting spells. Speaking of wizards: “Gale will no longer thank you twice for giving him his first magic item,” is followed a few bullet points later by “Gale will no longer thank you twice for giving him his second magic item.” Too polite for his own good.
Finally, there’s also a colour-blind mode added under accessibility options. This covers deuteranopia, tritanopia, and my personal flavour of colour machine broke: protanopia. It adjusts “character outlines and circles, character map markers, frame portraits in turn order, and party portraits”. Granted, while I never had too much trouble with those UI elements—my bane has always been with the game’s spell slot pips, which this patch sadly still doesn’t fix—it’s nice to have more clarity for those who need it.