Astarion fans rejoice - Baldur’s Gate 3 patch 5 will let you kiss your favorite vampire properly again

Astarion in Baldur's Gate 3
(Image credit: Larian)

It’s fantastic news for all members of the Astarion fanclub - Larian Studios has confirmed that it’s aiming to release Patch Five for Baldur’s Gate 3 this week, and it will come with an all-important fix to the vampire’s kissing animations. 

For those out of the loop, as TheGamer explains, Astarion’s smooches have been facing issues since the release of Patch Four at the start of the month. At first, he stopped expressing interest in kissing anyone at all, but a later hotfix changed this so that he would attempt to kiss again but completely miss and aim for the air instead. Needless to say, it’s been a turbulent time for those who’ve romanced him.

Thankfully, that’s now set to change very soon. In a post published on Twitter today, Larian Studios wrote: “We're aiming to release Patch Five this week, which fixes the eternally active acts of thefts and violence causing slowdowns, introduced in the previous patch. It also fixes Astarion's little kisses, and more!”

As for the “slowdowns” that were mentioned in the tweet, Larian Studios’ director of publishing, Michael Douse, clarified that these were “caused by a specific bug in Moonrise [Towers] that caused a systemic error that stacked over time, which means the further you got, the worse it got.” This means that the recent performance issues that players have been seeing in Act Three should be ironed out when the patch is released.

Otherwise, Larian also confirmed that it’s “preparing a community update that talks about some new features coming to Baldur’s Gate 3,” although it didn’t give any further hints as to what these are, so fans will have to stay tuned to see. 

In other Baldur’s Gate 3 news, Larian recently revealed that the release date for the highly anticipated Xbox version of the game will be announced during The Game Awards on December 7. At the same time, it was stated that it’s “on track for a December release,” but it’s not known if that could have changed in the meantime.

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Catherine Lewis
News Writer, TechRadar Gaming

Catherine is a News Writer for TechRadar Gaming. Armed with a journalism degree from The University of Sheffield, she was sucked into the games media industry after spending far too much time on her university newspaper writing about Pokémon and cool indie games, and realising that was a very cool job, actually. She previously spent 19 months working at GAMINGbible as a full-time journalist. She loves all things Nintendo, and will never stop talking about Xenoblade Chronicles.