Baldur's Gate 3's latest hotfix stops character faces "turning into stretched eldritch horrors with pits of flesh in place of eyes"

Withers, a husk of a mummy from Baldur's Gate 3, looks disappointed at you with glowing eyes, as you have incurred his wrath. — (Image credit: Larian Studios)

You can always expect Baldur's Gate 3 to deliver, even when what it's delivering is as mundane as patch notes. Earlier today, Larian launched Hotfix #15 for its world-beating fantasy RPG, and the accompanying Steam announcement is gripping before we even get to the patch notes. "Have you found some characters' faces turning into stretched eldritch horrors with pits of flesh in place of eyes?" it reads. "That should not be a problem anymore."

This troubling sentence relates specifically to something Larian has dubbed "the Pinocchio issue", which sounds like a rejected title for a John Le Carre novel. Instead, it's a bug whereby character noses and cheeks "get stretched in cinematics" to the point where "they also happen to lose their eyeballs, turning the sockets into pits of flesh." Chilling.

The hotfix also addresses a bunch of other, less horrifying issues, including an issue "related to lava bubbles near the Sentient Amulet in Grymforge causing savegames to become very large" and "companions not being able to jump when following the player character". I particularly like the notes that says "fixed some wrong character behaviours likely introduced in Patch 4", simply because some of the character behaviour in BG3 is pretty darn wrong even when it's working properly.

The most notable change in the hotfix, though, is probably this: "The Deal with the Devil" quest now accounts for different outcomes in the Epilogue. Larian talked recently about how they'd increased the number of endings relating to its charismatic demon Raphael, and it appears this change relates to that, although it's not clear whether this hotfix actually adds those endings, or if it's just making existing endings work properly with the epilogue. On the subject of things from hell, the patch also ensures that Karlach gets her scene in Avernus "regardless of whether she's an avatar or a companion."

You can read the full hotfix notes here. We've been finding out a fair bit about Baldur's Gate 3 lately, with Larian spilling details about how little Lae'zel's character changed during development, how the Paladin was originally going to be the default Dark Urge class, and why its evil drow character Minthara doesn't have a redemption arc. And I expect we'll be seeing more weird patch notes and fascinating facts about the game for months, if not years, to come.

Rick has been fascinated by PC gaming since he was seven years old, when he used to sneak into his dad's home office for covert sessions of Doom. He grew up on a diet of similarly unsuitable games, with favourites including Quake, Thief, Half-Life and Deus Ex. Between 2013 and 2022, Rick was games editor of Custom PC magazine and associated website bit-tech.net. But he's always kept one foot in freelance games journalism, writing for publications like Edge, Eurogamer, the Guardian and, naturally, PC Gamer. While he'll play anything that can be controlled with a keyboard and mouse, he has a particular passion for first-person shooters and immersive sims.