After days of basically edging the community with videos of new kiss animations, Larian Studios has finally released Baldur’s Gate 3’s patch six. The roughly 21GB update brings new kisses for your lovers, quality-of-life improvements, and a slew of bug fixes. Here are a few of the highlights:

New kisses for your lover(s)

Everybody has fallen in love with at least one of Baldur’s Gate 3’s companions. While the game’s big-budget sex scenes are a big draw, you can also just have a nice little smooch with your babe of choice at camp whenever you feel like it. There have been a few updates to existing kisses over the past few months, but the patch introduces some entirely new ones, just in time for Valentine’s week. They include a forehead smooch from Halsin, a cute game of hide-and-seek with Shadowheart, and something completely different in tone from both of those with Astarion.

Better party management

One of the most annoying things in Baldur’s Gate 3 is party management, which historically has required you to return to camp to swap out companions. Once there, you had to talk to the character you want to remove before you could add a different person to your team. Patch 6 streamlines this process by letting you remove a party member while talking to the person you want to take with you. It would still be nice if they just let you build your party on the way out of camp so you wouldn’t have to talk to companions to add and dismiss them at all. But we’ll take baby steps.

Some fixed abilities

Larian specifically notes that it has fixed the abilities Shield Bash and Rebuke of the Mighty, which will now correctly trigger Saving Throws that determine if they’re effective or not. This is one of many bug fixes that will be included in Patch 6.

Your teammates won’t steal the spotlight

In both of my Baldur’s Gate 3 playthroughs, I was frequently annoyed with how the game would sometimes have one of my party members handle a conversation as opposed to my custom main character. This happened at random times, and not getting to use my protagonist in those conversations felt like it decentered him and the way he had been positioned in the story. Patch 6 will make it so that if a dialogue is triggered automatically through a story beat or questline, the game will default to your custom character over Astarion or Shadowheart. If you want to control one of the other heroes for a scene, relax; this will only apply to automatically triggered scenes.

It’s gonna require some hefty hard drive space

According to Larian’s posts on the matter, Patch 6 takes up about 21GB of space. Because the patch has to be applied to existing files, it will require 150GB of free hard drive space to install. Larian recommends uninstalling Baldur’s Gate 3 and redownloading the game in its entirety as a workaround to install the game and the patch.

The full patch notes are as follows:

HIGHLIGHTS

• You can now dismiss a recruited companion from your party while speaking to the companion you want to replace them with.
• When a dialogue triggers automatically, the game will now try to prioritise your avatar character as the main speaker.
• Your partner now has a few different kisses! They’re brand new, unique, and randomised - and we’ve also made improvements to how kisses look across the board, particularly for taller and shorter body types.
• Improved the cinematic scenes in the Elfsong Tavern to feel more intimate when you and your romance partner decide your future together after defeating the
• Reworked the reflection scenes that take place after wrapping up the defeat of for characters without romantic partners to better match the scenes for those who do have romantic partners, and to bridge the gap into the epilogue.
• Added a new cinematic scene to support the combat encounter that occurs after you choose whether to or not.
• If you sit on the stool in Shadowheart’s camp corner, she will now react to you with a line based on your relation with her.
• Added new idle animations for some companions at camp, including:
• Lae’zel: Studying a githyanki disc.Minthara: Contemplating a skull, tending to mushrooms, expressing violence, adjusting her armour, plotting her future, and being bothered by the sun.Jaheira: Sitting, kneeling and whispering to a rat messenger, and whittling.Minsc: Cooking and shaving his head. (These are two separate animations. Although we wouldn’t put it past him, he’s not, in fact, cooking his head.)Shadowheart: Polishing the Spear of Night.Halsin: Whittling.
• If you started your game on a set difficulty, you can now switch to Custom Mode (except when already playing Honour Mode).
• Fixed an issue that would prevent travel between acts.
• Fixed an issue causing quicksaves to fail to upload to cross-saves.
• Characters in the epilogue camp party will now have fitting titles below their names.
• Fixed the Shield Bash and Rebuke of the Mighty passives not triggering Saving Throws.
• Added light bar colours for the DualSense controller on PC.
• If you romanced Lae’zel, - you can now , even if you are not gith yourself.
• Fixed graphic settings not being applied for some 4k monitors.
• Fixed a crash on Xbox that would sometimes occur when starting or ending a game.

Gameplay

• You can now toggle off Repelling Blast as expected.
• If you Long Rest with only alcohol as camp supplies, you will now get the new Hungover condition for 10 turns.
• Auto-selecting your camp supplies before a Long Rest will use resources more optimally - sometimes you just don’t feel like cooking.
• The Long Rest camp supply menu is now better at pulling supplies from inside containers in companion inventories. Stop hoarding the cheese, Wyll.
• Group Hide now works on all party members controlled by the player, including followers and summons.
• Made it possible to dismiss party members during camp nights. Also made it possible to recruit hirelings to a full party - they’ll hang around at camp until you need them.
• You can now talk to the circus bard Medrash and get a short but enthusiastic response from him.
• The owlbear cub will no longer gobble up Auntie Ethel’s Hair before you can take advantage of the bonus it grants.
• The Elixir of Hill Giant Strength now applies its effects when thrown.
• Creating harmful surfaces beneath NPCs will now trigger a crime reaction.
• Scratch can no longer equip certain weapons. Like the Everburn Blade.
• Added the option to scale the density of crowds on Xbox.
• As a quality-of-life improvement, the Pact Weapon condition now remains after a Long Rest.

Combat

• The is now a fully-fledged Honour Mode boss,
• with brand new bespoke Legendary Actions and tuned-up abilities. Good luck.
• The drider and Dror Ragzlin have new Legendary Actions in Honour Mode!
• In Tactician Mode, the drider has a special Sanctuary, called Spindleweb Sanctuary, that erupts in a psychic explosion when the status condition ends. In addition, his Spindleweb Fanaticism aura will now debuff his enemies.
• In Tactician Mode, Dror Ragzlin’s Leadership Aura will now also debuff his enemies.
• Jaheira could be in bad shape by the time she arrived at Moonrise Towers since she already had to fight. Now she’s smart enough to heal up before she goes there, which we’re hoping lets her last at least an additional second in combat.
• The Frightened condition applied by Ketheric’s Dreadful Aspect will now correctly end if the combat with Ketheric ends before the condition does. (This will also fix other similar cases.)
• Improved combat AI pathfinding through dangerous surfaces and through steep terrain.

Flow and Scripting

• Increased the number of valid methods of knocking Minthara out to recruit her.
• Halsin no longer blames the goblins for his death in his Speak with Dead dialogue if he managed to get killed much later on.
• Fixed a case where the lanceboard scene between Raphael and Mol would never trigger because of the script being too defensive when checking Raphael’s current in-game state.
• You can finally tell Halsin that you found that letter that was sent to
• Wyll will react accordingly if you fail to save Ravengard from when the pact with Mizora is broken.
• Fixed an issue preventing you from talking to Mayrina after the fight with the hag.
• Fixed an issue that could lead to the game being stuck on Flind’s turn if another player entered combat with her while her dialogue was ongoing

UI

• The trade interface got a graphic overhaul, clarifying which character is bartering for the party, what their Persuasion score is, and how much of a discount they’re getting for the trade. The feedback when bartering has also been improved to indicate the status of the offer.
• The whole party’s inventory is now present in the trade interface, which doesn’t require you to switch characters to sell their items from their inventories anymore.
• You can now change the size of text in books and other legible items in the Interface Options.
• Updated the interface visuals for the Options and Difficulty menus.
• Renamed the ‘Class Passives’ panel for sorcerers on level up to ‘Metamagic’ and added a description for it. This was to make the naming more precise, given that all the class passives for sorcerers are Metamagic and the main level up window already tells you that they’re passives.
• Renamed the ‘Camp Companions’ button to ‘Camp Inventories’ to more clearly indicate what it does.
• Added the Custom Mode settings to the Lobby UI, giving you time to create your personalised experience while waiting for your friends. (And also giving you time to argue amongst yourselves while coming to a compromise.)
• Camp chests are now integrated into the Camp Inventories UI.
• Fixed incorrect button prompts and mappings showing for Switch Pro Controller on PC.
• Reverse-pickpocketing (planting things into others’ inventories) should now work correctly on controller.
• Improved how the combat log indicates XP gain. Now, if everyone in the party gains XP from several different sources at the same time - like when you Fireball a bunch of rats - you’ll get one entry in the combat log with the calculated total XP gained, rather than separate entries for each XP, clogging up the whole log.
• Added sub-sorting to throwable items on the Hotbar so the most recently picked-up items will appear first.

Writing

• When faced with certain choices after the is defeated, you can now tell Lae’zel to
• Added additional Avatar Karlach and Avatar Astarion reactivity within dialogues in the epilogue, allowing them to request a cure for their conditions.
• Added some new lines to Minthara’s epilogue dialogue to account for different paths where the player character has partnered up with her.
• Added some extra Narrator lines for the Dark Urge when interacting with Gortash in his office.
• Added new dialogues and reactivity for Lae’zel regarding the githyanki egg from Crèche Y’llek.
• If Gale is in the endgame when , she will now
• Rephrased some journal entries to account for NPCs being knocked out instead of killed.
• If you’re romancing Shadowheart in Act II, she’ll have more banter as you’re walking around.

Cinematics

• You can now give Shadowheart a hug when she’s crying after
• This scene was also improved with a new intro and outro.
• Added a new version of the kissing scene with Astarion after

Sound

• Fixed Gortash’s Speak with Dead dialogue missing its VO.
• Fixed the Main Menu audio not starting for several seconds on Xbox, and sometimes playing in the game.
• Fixed the Character Creation music not triggering until the tutorial.
• Fixed dice roll sounds playing if you have the ‘Hide Failed Perception Rolls’ setting enabled while exploring. We asked the narrator to quieten down when rolling the dice for your immersion.

Updated: 2/16/24, 9:35 a.m. ET: With the patch’s release, this post was updated to include the full patch notes and to reflect that the patch had arrived.