Baldur's Gate 3 developer Larian has said it's "changing the way we deploy patches" after it was forced to rollback yesterday's Hotfix #4 due to crashing issues - a move that temporarily prevented players from accessing any saves made during the time the update was deployed.

Understandably, the rollback caused consternation among affected players, and now, in a message accompanying today's redeployment of Hotfix #4 on PC, Larian says, "We recognise the frustration caused by this and want to apologise. That's why we're changing things up."

First, though, it offered context for yesterday's bungled release, explaining, "Hotfix #4 went through a rigorous QA pipeline and was confirmed as a candidate for release yesterday. However, we triggered a rebuild of the version relatively last minute to change the version number. The version that was cooked was unfortunately plagued by compiler corruption, which was causing certain exceptions that normally wouldn't cause crashes to - you guessed it - cause crashes." Larian calls these kinds of compiler issues "extremely rare", adding, "We weren't prepared for it. We should've been. We messed up."

"To avoid this from happening in the future," the studio continued, "we'll make sure that any change made to future version candidates - no matter how small, or innocuous - will always go through our full and comprehensive QA pipeline, which include a global in-house QA team, automated testing, unit tests, and save-game compatibility testing."

Larian has already announced a first major patch for Baldur's Gate 3 is in the works following a series of substantial hotfixes to address issues that have surfaced since launch earlier this month. Some of those issues (missing gnome underpants, for instance) have been comparatively trivial while other have been considerably more serious, including a save-corrupting bug affecting some players, an issue initially flagged by Eurogamer after contributor Ruth Cassidy was impacted during a playthrough for their review.

A second major patch is also in the planning stages, which Larian says will "incorporate some requests", maybe even the ability to switch up your character's appearance mid-game.

Hopefully all this means PlayStation 5 owners will have a comparatively smoother launch experience when Baldur's Gate 3 gets its general release on the console on 6th September. As announced yesterday, those who've pre-purchased the Digital Deluxe Edition on PS5 can start preloading the game from 5pm BST on 31st August.