Another day, another morsel of a patch for Baldur's Gate 3. It's only been three days since hotfix #8 set the world to rights by shaving Faerûn's most self-important cat and preventing your companions from dumping all their groceries on you, but Larian's already come out with hotfix #9.
This one stops your legs from turning transparent in a certain armour set, fixes some nasty bugs, and lets you fundamentally alter the appearance and identity of your summoned hirelings down to a practically molecular level, which is absolutely moral and fine.
It's that last one that jumps out to me. Ever since Baldur's Gate 3's third patch, your party campsite has come equipped with a magic mirror that lets you change your appearance however you see fit. Prior to hotfix #9, only your player character could use it, but the new order of things means that you can now march any of your hirelings—the cannon fodder you can get Withers to summon for you for 100 gold—down there and give them a full-body makeover.
You can now change hirelings' gender, name, and almost any aspect of their appearance. One thing you don't seem to be able to do is switch from masculine appearance options to feminine or vice versa, even if you switch a character's gender. When I told hireling Ver'yll Wenkiir he was a girl named Darryl now—a fact he internalised with admirable stoicism—I didn't get an option to choose from the femme face shapes. Ah well, you can't have everything, and at least the hotfix means I can see his legs when he wears Adamantine Splint Armour.
That's the main standout of hotfix #9 to me. The rest is mostly tweaks and fixes that I'll list in full below. Still, I'm very much enjoying this steady flow of patches and hotfixes. They only make an already great game better.
Here are the Baldur's Gate 3 hotfix #9 patch notes in full (beware a spoiler about the fate of an endgame boss in the section about Minthara):
- You can now use the Magic Mirror on hirelings.
- You can now change your name through the Magic Mirror.
- Fixed a rare crash that could occur when unloading or quickloading a game.
- Fixed an issue causing GPU crashes on PS5 Vulkan.
- Fixed the Guardian Statue repeatedly falling into a chasm, causing the server to stall.
- Fixed a splitscreen issue on PS5 that could cause a black screen when listening in on a dialogue.
- Fixed unpreparing spells not removing their buffs if the spell was upcasted.
- Fixed buffs being removed by unpreparing spells if the buff came from a different source (e.g. a scroll).
- Fixed some character positions and animations breaking if you skip lines in certain dialogues.
- Fixed the previews not working correctly in the Accessibility options.
- Fixed an issue causing Minthara's romance to unreliably trigger.
- Fixed Minthara's dialogue after you not triggering properly when you talk to her.
- Fixed the Adamantine Splint Armour sometimes making your legs transparent.
- Fixed a geometry stretching bug introduced in Hotfix 8 on Vulkan.
- Fixed characters showing up in their underwear in some intimate scenes even if you have nudity enabled.
- Fixed Feign Death causing an infinite leave–join combat loop in certain circumstances.
- Fixed prices in dialogues not displaying correctly in savegames that were made while the price was on screen.
- Optimised the line-of-sight system for entities with no sight range, like items.
Baldur's Gate 3's offscreen secrets include an 'asylum' for plot-critical NPCs and a 'magical teleporting death journal' to help particularly murderous players find Act 2
Baldur's Gate 3 players have downloaded 50 million mods since official support was added, and Larian is 'glad [it] could facilitate' 10,000 players renaming Withers to Bone Daddy
