Baldur's Gate 3 patch turned chaotic evil and was removed - making some player's saves unusable

Some Baldur's Gate 3 players were left scratching their heads yesterday, after a hotfix was rolled back and recent saved games became unusable.

The story here is that Larian released the fourth hotfix for Baldur's Gate 3, but all was not well with the mini-patch - which suffered from an expected side-effect of causing crashes - so it had to be pulled.

However, those playing the RPG at the time the hotfix was implemented, who saved the game since the update was applied, have now found that those saves are greyed out and can't be loaded.

This is because those saves are now incompatible with the hotfix 3 version of Baldur's Gate 3, which has been reinstated. And they won't work again until hotfix 4 has been reapplied.

Larian clarifies (as spotted by TechRadar):

"We'll re-release it [hotfix 4] as soon as we've fixed the cause [of the crashes]. If you've saved since updating, you won't be able to load those saves until we've re-published Hotfix 4. You can keep playing on your Hotfix 3 saves, you just won't be able to load saves from today's Hotfix 4 until it's pushed live again. Sorry about the inconvenience."

If you hadn't done much in-game, that might not be too big a deal. But if you got something important nailed, then you're just going to have to wait - hopefully not for very long. Unfortunately, there's no indication whatsoever of how long the repair work on hotfix 4 will take - but clearly, it's something Larian will want to make sure is fully done and dusted before releasing again.

A second retraction for the patch would be embarrassing indeed, after all.

Hotfix 4 comes with the solutions for some nasty crashes (though ironically, it introduces another, as noted, that was the reason it got yanked), and makes some game balancing and tuning moves, too.

When hotfix 4 is done and rereleased, the next stop is the first major patch for Baldur's Gate 3, which will apply a whole host of fixes - over a thousand of them, in fact.