First reported by GamesRadar, one of Baldur’s Gate 3’s most persistent bugs has once again resisted Larian’s attempts to squash it, with players on the BG3 subreddit sharing screens of their companions staring flatly into the camera in their portraits.
I don’t know if it was around in early access, but I’ve seen screenshots of the blank-faced stare bug out in the wild since Baldur’s Gate 3 released. Rather than flattering, heroic poses and angles, their icons show them dully regarding the camera like they’re taking a driver’s license photo.
Some companions, like Lae’zel and Shadowheart, will be slightly off to the side or bottom of the frame, like a little kid or someone’s grandparent trying to make a facetime call. I actually only started seeing the bug in my own game after BG3’s monster eighth patch.
But it all came to an end on July 31, or so we thought. Larian deployed a “room temperature hotfix” to fix some lingering glitches, the portrait bug among them. Even at the time, though, the wording of the hotfix implied this unkillable thing might come back to haunt us yet again: “Fixed, probably this time really maybe, the weird character portraits.”
And wouldn’t you know it, we’ve got at least two posts on the Baldur’s Gate 3 subreddit sharing screenshots of the glitch still occurring after the hotfix, from users Equivalent_Lab_2510 and Independent_Lock_864. What is dead may never die.
But maybe I’ve been using the wrong ham-fisted movie metaphor to think about this. Everybody loves the portrait bug. What if it’s less the monster coming back, and more the hero beating all the odds? I make eye contact with the portrait glitch in a Florentine cafe. I smile at it, nod, and it nods in return, a moment of respect and camaraderie that needs no words.