Baldur's Gate 3 patch 7 is out and holy kapowzers it's a whopper, featuring *deep breath* bug fixes and gameplay tweaks and new and improved evil and Dark Urge endings and a built-in mod manager and toolkit. But with great power comes great responsibility or something like that, and so Larian is also ensuring that players who don't want to upgrade to the new patch don't have to.
Why wouldn't you want to update to the latest and greatest take on Baldur's Gate 3, you wonder? There are a few possible reasons, foremost among them being mods. Big patches can be big trouble for mods in games—Fallout 4's big "next gen" update earlier this year caused all sorts of headaches on that front—and Baldur's Gate 3 is no exception: Patch 6, released in February, was "a smidge on fire" when it went live (and not in the good way) and a subsequent hotfix ended up breaking a whole mess of mods.
Patch 7 also isn't expected to be out on consoles and Mac until sometime in October, due to their requisite technical requirements and certification processes: That means cross-saves made on the updated PC version of the game won't work on consoles, and PC and Mac editions won't work together for multiplayer.
Whatever your reason for wanting to stick with the tried-and-true, Larian is being more careful this time about ensuring you can.
"Not ready to play Patch 7 just yet?" the studio tweeted. "We’ve made a Patch 6 beta branch available for those who want to allow more time for mod authors to update their mods, continue to play on multiplayer with Mac, or keep console cross-saves working."
To stick with the Patch 6 version of Baldur's Gate 3, right-click on the game in your Steam library, then select "Properties," and the "Betas" tab. From the "Beta Participation" dropdown, select "release_patch6_hf9," and that's it—the game will update as necessary and you can continue on your way.
It's a small thing, relatively speaking, but there's a lot of gratitude for the move on social media—no doubt fuelled in part by the seemingly endless reservoir of goodwill Larian enjoys after cleaning up every GOTY award under the sun.
Of course this only applies to the Steam version of Baldur's Gate 3. GOG users can roll back to the previous version of the game through the Galaxy launcher—click on the "Options" menu, hover over "Manage Installation," select "Configure," uncheck automatic updates, then select which version you want to install, and here's a handy Reddit thread that breaks it down in better detail, pictures and all—or disable automatic updates before starting the game in order to dodge the patch completely.
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