Surprise! Baldur's Gate 3 got a fresh patch. Unsurprise! It's vanishingly small, but at least it repairs some corrupted saves

Baldur's Gate 3—a videogame about dressing up hot elves—had fans scratching their heads earlier today when it suddenly pulled down north of 100 MB with no explanation whatsoever. What could it be? What could it mean? What's Larian up to now?

Valid questions, and they all have quite underwhelming answers if you're of a "Why can't it be Christmas every day?" sort of spirit (as am I, comrade, as am I). No, the studio isn't preparing the ground for a surprise patch 9, nor is it gearing up for a shock DLC or some kind of Divinity tie-in thing. Or at least, if it is doing any of that, it's sure as hell not telling anyone about it.

It's just, you know, doing patch stuff: fixing crashes and ironing out glitches. Well. Fine.

The good news, though, is that some of those fixes will be quite meaningful if you fell victim to the bugs they squash. After teasing "Bet you thought you’d seen the last of these," on the Larian Discord, the studio wrote that "As it turns out, a few crashes and technical issues were still knocking about, so if you were getting stuck while loading saves, or trying to progress from Act 2 into Act 3, your corrupted saves should now be fixed!" That's as much as we're getting right now, in terms of patch notes.

That last one is especially heartbreaking for honour mode players. I took a crack at BG3's ironman difficulty a few times last year, and it was bad enough when I got vaporised by Zhentarim six hours into Act 1. Getting all the way to Act 3 only to find you can't load your save? I'd lose my mind, and it's not too hard to find examples of such players asking for help with corrupted saves in Act 3.

So hey, good news: those saves should work now. In fact, at least some players already report they do. "This update fixed my Honor Mode save, now opens again. BLESS YOU LARIAN" wrote a user named bladesmantis on Reddit. "My run that crashed at 75% on every load is now playable after updating. Blessed" writes another user, stahnke_as_pho. A lot of blessing going on. Larian's saving throws must be through the roof.