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

techradar.com:

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!”

We're aiming to release Patch 5 this week, which fixes the eternally-active acts of thefts & violence causing slowdowns, introduced in the previous patch. It also fixes Astarion's little kisses, and more! pic.twitter.com/APRAPdSouNNovember 27, 2023

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