Baldur’s Gate 3: Aug. 31 patch notes

Larian released its second patch for Baldur’s Gate 3 less than a month after the game’s launch at the beginning of August, and the patch notes include an option to significantly alter one popular companion’s ending.

This piece will include a couple of spoilers to potential end-game cutscene options for one specific companion that Larian patched to include alternate endings. Larian’s official patch notes post includes a blacked out option for people that don’t want spoilers.

Now that we’ve gotten rid of those readers, here are the highlights from Baldur’s Gate 3 Patch two.

Baldur’s Gate 3 Patch 2: Aug. 31 patch notes highlights

Larian’s patch notes today include “bug fixes, substantial performance improvements, and much more,” according to the developers post. However, the most significant changes are a couple of added features and changes to the end-game scenes involving Karlach.

Related: Baldur’s Gate 3 devs finally fix Minthara problem that basically deleted her entire story

Features and fixes

Larian has added “Withers’ Wardrobe of Wayward Friends.” This new feature will allow players to dismiss co-op party members from their campaign. So if you have a friend that can’t continue playing, you won’t need to keep their character in your party.

Additionally, the game has “performance optimizations across the board.” There are about 18 bullet points under a section labeled “performance and optimization” that includes a wide variety of little tweaks that will hopefully make our games run smoother.

Baldur’s Gate 3’s save game sizes have also been reduced.

Crash fixes

Many more fixes for crashing have been added with Patch Two, including issues with saving and loading games, crashes in various menus and character creation, different dialogue scenes, and more.

Controller

There are fixes and improvements for just about everything you can think of when using controller to play the game in Patch Two. Probably important, considering the impending release of the game on PlayStation, as well as Xbox (eventually).

Karlach scenes

Perhaps the most substantive change in Patch Two is to end-game cut scenes including Karlach. This patch has added a scene to the end of the game that allows Karlach to decide to travel back to Avernus.

If Karlach is in your party at the end of the game and the Blade of Avernus offers to go to the Hells with Karlach, you will be presented the option to go with Karlach, go with both, or let them go themselves. Larian also added “new moments” for Karlach that allow her to reflect on the state of her Infernal Engine between acts. There is also a new moment that makes Karlach reflect a bit more about the possibility of her engine burning out right after she gets the second upgrade from Dammon.

Related: How to romance Karlach in Baldur’s Gate 3

I, and many other Karlach fans, am glad that Karlach will have the option to go back to Avernus at the end of my campaign. Having seen her fate prior to Patch Two, I was not looking forward to the extraordinarily sad outcome that awaited.

Those are some of the biggest highlights that Patch Two has given us. There are many more detailed aspects to the patch notes though, with myriad tiny fixes to gameplay, bug fixes, and more. If you’re the type of person that likes to thoroughly comb through patch notes, you can find them on Baldur’s Gate 3’s official Steam page.