Update, April 15: ! My math was a little off, but it's still a doozy, with around 16,753 words backing up the ream of updates to Larian's triumphant RPG. Original story follows.
Patch 8 of Baldur's Gate 3 releases tomorrow, April 15. And while I'm already scheming to build my gang of build-broken nightmare people to tackle Honour Mode with for a second time, I'm also wondering how I'm going to break it to my friends, family, [[link]] and loved [[link]] ones that they will not see me for the next two weeks.
Maybe three, actually, since Larian boss after that Patch 8 of Baldur's Gate 3 has, uh, a lot of notes to get through. Vincke writes on X: "I just read the 48 pages of patch notes on this. If there were a Michelin guide to patches, I’d give this one 3 stars."
48 pages is a lot. However, if you go on any of the patch notes on the Larian website, you'll notice that they aren't actually divided up into pages. So how big is Patch 8, [[link]] really? Well, I spent a not-insignificant amount of my work day copying and pasting patch notes into google docs to craft a rough guestimate.
In 11-point Arial text on an A4 document with Google doc's default of 2.54 cm margins, Larian's average patch notes are around 500 words a page. This is when I've pasted them completely unformatted, stripped of bullet points and sundry that would likely take up more space, so let's shave down that number to a conservative estimate of 400 words.
I hence predict that Baldur's Gate 3's Patch 8 notes will have a rough, approximate, kitchen-nap length word count of around 19,000 to 20,000. Give or take.
Out of curiosity, I decided to go ahead and share my word-count findings from the other patch notes for comparison's sake. Keep in mind, some of these patches have lengthy pre-ambles explaining certain features or giving status updates, while others don't:
- Patch 1: 16,542 words.
- Patch 2: 4,016 words.
- Patch 3: 23,576(!) words.
- Patch 4: 19,473 words.
- Patch 5: 6,731 words.
- Patch 6: 18,548 words.
- Patch 7: 18,153 words.
If my calculations are accurate, this could potentially make Patch 8 the second biggest (based on raw word count) patch the game's received, which… entirely tracks, if I'm being honest. While other patches have added major new features, Patch 8 will be giving us 12 entirely new subclasses, and that'll need a lot of explaining.
Mind, given the patch itself is coming out after Larian decided hey, , just for good luck? I wouldn't be shocked if Father Vincke has stuffed some extra presents into our stockings with a twinkle in his eye.