Readers, our long national nightmare is over. An injustice has been rectified, light shines where once there was only darkness, your children can sleep soundly in their beds. I speak, of course, of Baldur's Gate 3's latest hotfix, which has restored His Majesty—everyone's favourite overweening feline—to his original, superior, and hairless form.
It's also fixed a bunch of other bugs, but, like, whatever.
As PCG's Ted Litchfield covered not even a day ago, BG3's third patch tweaked and fixed a lot of stuff when it dropped in September, but it also made one controversial change: His Majesty, a pompous cat you can meet at the Last Light Inn in the game's second act, had been updated from a hair-free sphynx to a fluffy longhair. To be fair to Larian, it was a change made so that His Maj was no longer identical to Steelclaw, another cat you can meet in the same act, but fans (myself included) weren't happy. The furball look just didn't suit the moggy monarch.
After some reflection, Larian clearly agreed, because today's hotfix #8 has "Shaved His Majesty, who is once again a sphynx," and instead changes Steelclaw's eye colour so the pair are no longer twins. Phew.
The hotfix wasn't solely about fixing that cat, mind you. It's also rolled back a patch 3 change that was intended to make party members you dismiss hand over all the story items in their inventory before they go back to camp. While that change worked fine in post-patch new games, it ran into some issues if you were running a pre-patch save. Namely, it made your dismissed party members hand over every single item with an orange highlight—including their incredibly heavy camp supply packs—before toddling off, which pretty much guaranteed you'd find yourself overencumbered.
That system is now gone entirely, and companions "will no longer give you all the items they deem important for you to carry, like a toddler in a grocery store". The way the studio has done that is to revert companion behaviour back to its pre-patch 3 status. That is to say companions now just keep hold of all your orange items—whether camp supply packs or quest items—when you dismiss them.
I've got my fingers crossed that Larian can bring the system back in the way it originally intended at some point, though. It'd be good to get my story-relevant gear back from party members without also getting their camp supply packs and alchemy pouches.
I've reached out to Larian to ask if the magic pockets system will return in a new and improved form in a later patch, and I'll update if I hear back.
Those are the headline items, but they're far from the only changes Baldur's Gate 3's hotfix #8 makes. You can find the full patch notes below:
- Companions will no longer transfer story items in their inventory to the player upon dismissal, restoring Patch 2 behaviour.
- Fixed reaction popups sometimes showing no text descriptions of the reactions available.
- Fixed a multiplayer crash that would occur when listening to a dialogue after an active roll.
- Eavesdrop will no longer trigger when a character is in any Character Creation session, such as level up or the magic mirror.
- Fixed a bug in Vulkan causing DEVICE_LOST crashes.
- Fixed a bug where Skeletons created using Animate Dead were missing their ranged weapons, despite specialising in them.
- Fixed an issue where the Weapon Master Feat would show as incomplete if a player was already proficient with all weapons.
- Fixed a crash when re-assigning characters in splitscreen.
- Fixed a visual issue with volumetric fog and materials generation.
- Fixed an issue with invalid savegames being created.
- Restored Raphael's hair colour and horns. The House of Hope is once again fashion-forward.
- Fixed an issue where Splint Armour for Githyanki Females caused some unnecessarily psychedelic visual effects.
- Shaved His Majesty, who is once again a Sphynx. Steelclaw's eye colour has been adjusted so they are no longer identical twins.
- Fixed Raphael's portraits after restoring his hair colour. Maybe he's born with it, maybe it's Avernus.
- Fixed Twitch drops not being claimable on PS5.
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