Larian Studios has just announced that the second Baldur's Gate 3 patch is out now. It's only around 580MB in size, much smaller than the previous one, but it may prove to be more important since it delivers significant performance improvements, reduces the huge save file size, and adds the first of a series of character epilogues for the Tiefling Barbarian Karlach. She also got new 'moments' in the first two acts, allowing the character to delve more deeply into her peculiar predicament.
First things first: performance. Here's a full overview of the enhancements made by Larian with this Baldur's Gate 3 patch.
- Improved performance and made optimizations across the game.
- Improved CPU load.
- Made performance improvements related to controller movement.
- Made optimizations for when moving around the world on controller.
- Moved surface texture and decal creation to worker threads.
- Moved loading shroud textures to worker threads.
- When AI can use a nearby AI hint, limit AI flooding.
- Improved minimap performance.
- Optimized the controller map by removing some duplicate items.
- Reduced the size of savegames.
- Made changes to make loading savegames made in older patch versions significantly faster.
- Removed some unnecessary calls for the hotbar to update to improve on stuttering.
- Slightly delayed when tooltips pop up when hovering over things like actions, items, and spells. This prevents the game from unnecessarily loading and unloading tooltips. The delay is now set to 200 milliseconds. Still reactive, more performant.
- Made optimizations for selectable elements on the controller.
- Removed an irrelevant sound analytics event for optimization.
- Fixed a memory leak when opening the inventory with a controller connected.
- Fixed a memory leak when streaming textures.
- Wrote velocity vectors to help with overall visual quality (e.g., when using TAA to reduce visual aliasing).
There is also a veritable treasure trove of User Interface (UI) improvements, such as item rarity filters in the inventory, new icons for equipped items, and various tweaks to the combat log, HUD (Heads Up Display), character sheet, radial menu, and lots more.
Of course, the second Baldur's Gate 3 patch also fixes a great many bugs and crashes of many kinds. You can read the massive changelog in its entirety on Steam.
As a reminder, the game will launch in a week for PlayStation 5, while the Xbox Series S|X version is coming later this year.
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