Ah, two days after Valentine’s Day. Cupid has shot his arrows, the chocolates have gone on sale, and the flowers have started to wilt. The perfect time to release a patch!
Patch 6 for Baldur’s Gate 3 launches today, and it’s packed full of quality-of-life improvements, fixes, and a little bit of romance. The full extent of today’s update has once again been defeated by the Steam character limit, so if you want to dive into the full notes, head to the official website here.
Still reading? Excellent, on with the show.
Love Is in the Air
Watch out for garlic breath.
We’ve made improvements to locking lips with your chosen romantic partner! All characters now have unique kisses that reflect their personality, with an emphasis on the plural. These kisses are randomised and vary from the incredibly romantic to… uh, a little more intense. Kisses have also been improved for shorter and taller body types, so embrace without delay.
A forehead kiss for tender moments or for when there’s a bit of food stuck to your eyebrow.
In addition to improved smooches, we’ve also improved some of our endgame cinematics to better reflect the connection between players and their partners - love truly has been in the air in the office, or perhaps it’s something in our air fresheners.
Every Whittle Helps: New Camp Animations & Improvements
Keep at it, Halsin.
Whilst exploring your campsite, you’ll notice new idle animations for some of your companions. Not everyone enjoys standing around, and these behaviours should help your campsite feel more alive. Though, we wouldn’t interrupt Shadowheart when she’s polishing her spear. In addition, you’ll now be able to dismiss a party member while speaking to the party member you want to replace them with - so no more going back and forth like a Machiavellian party planner!
Improvements and Fixes Galore
Have fun.
Patch 6 isn’t all ambience and canoodling, though. We’ve fixed a deluge of player-reported issues (Shield Bash fans, rejoice!), and made several tweaks and improvements to the game. If you’re playing in Honour Mode, expect a few extra surprises in the form of new Legendary Actions for bosses, and maybe a bit of extra trouble from a certain Mound. Good luck with that one.
We’ve also made some improvements to speaker selection. When dialogue triggers automatically, the game will now try to prioritise your avatar as the main speaker - so your party members should have less main character syndrome when clearly you’re the star of the show.
We continue to work on future updates to Baldur’s Gate 3, with further improvements, fixes, and patches yet to come, but before we dive into the full highlights for Patch 6, a warning about mods! If you experience issues after installing our latest update, please check whether the issue persists with mods uninstalled. Currently, mods aren’t officially supported, so some mods may become temporarily incompatible with new patches and hotfixes. If you continue to have issues after uninstalling all mods (yes, even that one), please reach out to our support team.
Patch 6 will be going live today on PC, PlayStation, and Xbox, and will require approximately 150GB of free space to install for those playing on PC and Steam Deck. If you find yourself without the space to install the update, we recommend uninstalling BG3 and then re-downloading the patched version.
We know Mac players will be keen to get hands-on with the latest fixes and improvements, but we’ll have to ask that you sit tight for a little longer while we continue to work on bringing future updates to Mac alongside PC versions. We truly appreciate your patience, and are sorry for the inconvenience. We’ll keep you updated with our progress, so make sure you’re following us on Twitter and Facebook to see when Patch 6 will drop for you!
HIGHLIGHTS
- You can now dismiss a recruited companion from your party while speaking to the companion you want to replace them with.
- When a dialogue triggers automatically, the game will now try to prioritise your avatar character as the main speaker.
- Your partner now has a few different kisses! They're brand new, unique, and randomised - and we’ve also made improvements to how kisses look across the board, particularly for taller and shorter body types.
- Improved the cinematic scenes in the Elfsong Tavern to feel more intimate when you and your romance partner decide your future together after defeating the Netherbrain.
- Reworked the reflection scenes that take place after wrapping up the defeat of the Netherbrain for characters without romantic partners to better match the scenes for those who do have romantic partners, and to bridge the gap into the epilogue.
- Added a new cinematic scene to support the combat encounter that occurs after you choose whether to side with Nightsong at Sorcerous Sundries or not.
- If you sit on the stool in Shadowheart's camp corner, she will now react to you with a line based on your relation with her.
- Added new idle animations for some companions at camp, including:
- Lae'zel: Studying a githyanki disc.
- Minthara: Contemplating a skull, tending to mushrooms, expressing violence, adjusting her armour, plotting her future, and being bothered by the sun.
- Jaheira: Sitting, kneeling and whispering to a rat messenger, and whittling.
- Minsc: Cooking and shaving his head. (These are two separate animations. Although we wouldn't put it past him, he's not, in fact, cooking his head.)
- Shadowheart: Polishing the Spear of Night.
- Halsin: Whittling.
- If you started your game on a set difficulty, you can now switch to Custom Mode (except when already playing Honour Mode).
- Fixed an issue that would prevent travel between acts.
- Fixed an issue causing quicksaves to fail to upload to cross-saves.
- Characters in the epilogue camp party will now have fitting titles below their names.
- Fixed the Shield Bash and Rebuke of the Mighty passives not triggering Saving Throws.
- Added light bar colours for the DualSense controller on PC.
- If you romanced Lae'zel, grab a red dragon and saddle up - you can now join her in the rebellion against Vlaakith, even if you are not gith yourself.
- Fixed graphic settings not being applied for some 4k monitors.
- Fixed a crash on Xbox that would sometimes occur when starting or ending a game.
Gameplay
- You can now toggle off Repelling Blast as expected.
- If you Long Rest with only alcohol as camp supplies, you will now get the new Hungover condition for 10 turns.
- Auto-selecting your camp supplies before a Long Rest will use resources more optimally - sometimes you just don't feel like cooking.
- The Long Rest camp supply menu is now better at pulling supplies from inside containers in companion inventories. Stop hoarding the cheese, Wyll.
- Group Hide now works on all party members controlled by the player, including followers and summons.
- Made it possible to dismiss party members during camp nights. Also made it possible to recruit hirelings to a full party - they'll hang around at camp until you need them.
- You can now talk to the circus bard Medrash and get a short but enthusiastic response from him.
- The owlbear cub will no longer gobble up Auntie Ethel's Hair before you can take advantage of the bonus it grants.
- The Elixir of Hill Giant Strength now applies its effects when thrown.
- Creating harmful surfaces beneath NPCs will now trigger a crime reaction.
- Scratch can no longer equip certain weapons. Like the Everburn Blade.
- Added the option to scale the density of crowds on Xbox.
- As a quality-of-life improvement, the Pact Weapon condition now remains after a Long Rest.
Combat
- The Shambling Mound is now a fully-fledged Honour Mode boss,
- with brand new bespoke Legendary Actions and tuned-up abilities. Good luck.
- The drider and Dror Ragzlin have new Legendary Actions in Honour Mode!
- In Tactician Mode, the drider has a special Sanctuary, called Spindleweb Sanctuary, that erupts in a psychic explosion when the status condition ends. In addition, his Spindleweb Fanaticism aura will now debuff his enemies.
- In Tactician Mode, Dror Ragzlin's Leadership Aura will now also debuff his enemies.
- Jaheira could be in bad shape by the time she arrived at Moonrise Towers since she already had to fight. Now she's smart enough to heal up before she goes there, which we're hoping lets her last at least an additional second in combat.
- The Frightened condition applied by Ketheric's Dreadful Aspect will now correctly end if the combat with Ketheric ends before the condition does. (This will also fix other similar cases.)
- Improved combat AI pathfinding through dangerous surfaces and through steep terrain.
Flow and Scripting
- Increased the number of valid methods of knocking Minthara out to recruit her.
- Halsin no longer blames the goblins for his death in his Speak with Dead dialogue if he managed to get killed much later on.
- Fixed a case where the lanceboard scene between Raphael and Mol would never trigger because of the script being too defensive when checking Raphael's current in-game state.
- You can finally tell Halsin that you found that letter that was sent to Kagha.
- Wyll will react accordingly if you fail to save Ravengard from the Iron Throne when the pact with Mizora is broken.
- Fixed an issue preventing you from talking to Mayrina after the fight with the hag.
- Fixed an issue that could lead to the game being stuck on Flind's turn if another player entered combat with her while her dialogue was ongoing
UI
- The trade interface got a graphic overhaul, clarifying which character is bartering for the party, what their Persuasion score is, and how much of a discount they're getting for the trade. The feedback when bartering has also been improved to indicate the status of the offer.
- The whole party's inventory is now present in the trade interface, which doesn't require you to switch characters to sell their items from their inventories anymore.
- You can now change the size of text in books and other legible items in the Interface Options.
- Updated the interface visuals for the Options and Difficulty menus.
- Renamed the 'Class Passives' panel for sorcerers on level up to 'Metamagic' and added a description for it. This was to make the naming more precise, given that all the class passives for sorcerers are Metamagic and the main level up window already tells you that they're passives.
- Renamed the 'Camp Companions' button to 'Camp Inventories' to more clearly indicate what it does.
- Added the Custom Mode settings to the Lobby UI, giving you time to create your personalised experience while waiting for your friends. (And also giving you time to argue amongst yourselves while coming to a compromise.)
- Camp chests are now integrated into the Camp Inventories UI.
- Fixed incorrect button prompts and mappings showing for Switch Pro Controller on PC.
- Reverse-pickpocketing (planting things into others' inventories) should now work correctly on controller.
- Improved how the combat log indicates XP gain. Now, if everyone in the party gains XP from several different sources at the same time - like when you Fireball a bunch of rats - you'll get one entry in the combat log with the calculated total XP gained, rather than separate entries for each XP, clogging up the whole log.
- Added sub-sorting to throwable items on the Hotbar so the most recently picked-up items will appear first.
Writing
- When faced with certain choices after the Netherbrain is defeated, you can now tell Lae'zel to make her own decision.
- Added additional Avatar Karlach and Avatar Astarion reactivity within God Gale's dialogues in the epilogue, allowing them to request a cure for their conditions.
- Added some new lines to Minthara's epilogue dialogue to account for different paths where the player character has partnered up with her.
- Added some extra Narrator lines for the Dark Urge when interacting with Gortash in his office.
- Added new dialogues and reactivity for Lae'zel regarding the githyanki egg from Crèche Y'llek.
- If Gale is a mind flayer in the endgame when returning to Elysium with Mystra, she will now transform him back into a human.
- Rephrased some journal entries to account for NPCs being knocked out instead of killed.
- If you're romancing Shadowheart in Act II, she'll have more banter as you're walking around.
Cinematics
- You can now give Shadowheart a hug when she's crying after losing or saving her parents.
- Gale can now kiss your hand if you agree to marry him. This scene was also improved with a new intro and outro.
- Added a new version of the kissing scene with Astarion after he Ascends.
Sound
- Fixed Gortash's Speak with Dead dialogue missing its VO.
- Fixed the Main Menu audio not starting for several seconds on Xbox, and sometimes playing in the game.
- Fixed the Character Creation music not triggering until the tutorial.
- Fixed dice roll sounds playing if you have the 'Hide Failed Perception Rolls' setting enabled while exploring. We asked the narrator to quieten down when rolling the dice for your immersion.
Looking for the full patch notes? Head to the Baldur’s Gate 3 website.