Baldur's Gate 3 players collectively hallucinate a Valentine's Day release for Patch 6, despite Larian's chaotic Pingu posting

Patch 6 of Baldur's Gate 3 is releasing sometime this week—though if you asked the community around 24-48 hours ago, they'd say it's slated for Valentine's Day. Those of you with an eye on your calendar may notice that date is long-gone, with nary a patch note to be spied.

That's because Larian Studios never actually confirmed the date. Instead, the community simply hallucinated one based on what I can only describe as vibes. Now in fairness, the Baldur's Gate 3 Twitter account did tease us with the phrase "love is in the air in Faerûn", but still.

The great wheel of conspiracy was grinding a full day before that, however, when one dyingome on Twitter made a bold prediction that Patch 6 would hit on February 14. Larian Studios would later reply with a well-placed picture of beloved children's television mascot (and meme icon) Pingu the Penguin.

Pingu's second appearance occurs in a reply to SergeantDaynes, with Larian making use of a gif of the penguin staring dead-eyed towards the reader like a threat. Fittingly, the gif's origin comes from a video by Telepurte set to Mozart's Lacrimosa, which Google tells me is Latin for "weeping".

Larian did some pot-stirring itself over the course of the week, posting some previews of Patch 6's updated smooching animations. These included a slightly awkward pecking of the shoulder blades from Shadowheart (she has amnesia, it's not her fault) and an Astarion scene that's so chemically engineered towards a certain kind of person that it's weapons-grade. Not that I'd know anything about that.

At the end of a long day of waiting, and as a coup de grâce to the whole affair, the Larian Studios' Twitter account dropped a gif of Pingu shuffling into bed with a smug (disturbingly toothed) smile on his nightmarish face. Captioned: "sweet dreams". People's responses were normal in air-quotes so large I can't format them for our website.

The game's official subreddit hasn't fared much better. One player even artistically superimposed Gale's outfit over Pingu in an act of desperation, as one commenter coined the event "patchgate".

Spending Valentines Day waiting for Patch 6 from r/BaldursGate3

While I want to credit Larian for the masterful act of fey-level mischief—I also feel like this isn't squarely on the studio. We were warned a good handful of times that it probably wasn't coming on Valentine's Day, and yet we still stood on the corner with a fistful of red balloons and a heart-shaped box of chocolates, love-struck hopefuls waiting for Patch 6 to finally show. But isn't it better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all?