The next big patch for Baldur’s Gate 3 is coming soon, and by all accounts it will be spotty, featuring a host of performance improvements and other fixes. Even better, Patch 2 will apparently address Minthara, who has been hampered by what director Swen Vincke called a “very stupid bug”.
Speaking with IGN ahead of Patch 2’s release, Vincke talked about how the scope of Baldur’s Gate 3 can cause chain reactions that can sometimes lead to content being locked by accident. Such is the case with the apparent killer in Baldur’s Gate 3.
“The game is super interactive and there were some bugs that caused some comrades to not interact as well as they should. So it felt like the content wasn’t showing up. So you weren’t seeing it specifically with Minthara,” Venky explained. “So [lead writer Adam Smith] He told me there were about 1500 lines of Minthara that didn’t show up due to a very stupid bug that we’ve isolated now. So we’re solving it.”
Minthara’s fonts “worked” in previous versions, said Venke, but “something else made them not work anymore.” This is the challenge of creating a complex, interconnected RPG full of thousands of micro-interactions.
We’ll see if we can do something more for her.
Speaking of the team’s overall vision for Menthara, Venky says it has gone through “some iterations”. One of the main differences is that she’s not an original character, which means you can’t play with her from the start. In essence, she is what Venky describes as ‘the sidekick’.
“It’s there to actually serve another character you meet later in the game, an antagonist,” he says. “So, you were supposed to shed a different light on that opponent over there.”
He continues, “It doesn’t help that some of her lines aren’t thrilling. So that doesn’t do her justice. But she never had a real actual quest—search for the original…what you have for some of the others inside Chapter 3..so the people who were looking Besides, he is not there.”
“There was a difference that they found in Minthara and we removed it because it got too complicated. Then we didn’t have the real estate in the game to tell that story. So, they found some parts of it. So, it’s not that we cut something to a large scale there. It’s just that Minthara also serves the power fantasy of going evil. “
However, Larian Studios still leaves the door open for further development in the future.
“[W]First we’ll fix her issue blocking her content, then we’ll see how she gets to the fans, and then we’ll see if we can do something extra with her. I mean, the feedback on the game has been amazing and overwhelming for us. So, it is definitely much more than we expected. So, we take it all in, and then we filter it out. “So we’ll see where it goes,” Finke says.
“We made this game for the players, for them to enjoy. If there are things that didn’t really work, I think you can rest assured that we’ll probably do something about it at some point, except we can.” “We don’t do miracles. We are still a limited team with a limited number of people who have worked very hard to make it happen.”
In addition to restoring access to Minthara content, Vincke says fans can expect a new finale for fan-favorite Karlach (he vaguely hints that if you see a cigar, you’ll know you’ve found your new content), and that it will “make a lot of people happy.” It will also include improvements to co-op play as well as “a number of other things people have been asking about”.
Baldur’s Gate 3 Patch 2 is currently in QA testing and should be released this week. While you wait, find out how one Baldur’s Gate 3 player found a way to make every character miserable, plus our complete guide to Baldur’s Gate 3
Kat Bailey is IGN’s News Director and co-host of Nintendo Voice Chat. Do you have advice? Send her a direct message at @the_katbot.