Baldur’s Gate 3’s Changes Since Launch Have Created a Ship of Theseus

With so many great games released in 2025, it’s hard to think that former recipients of Game Award accolades are still in the running. Yet, the 2023 Game of the Year recipient is still causing waves. Baldur’s Gate 3 has remained a fixture in the public eye long after its 2023 launch, and its recent nomination for 2025’s Best Community Support feels like the natural culmination of a live-service cadence that technically never declared itself one.

Larian maintained a rhythm of patches that added content, repaired long-standing nuisances, added subclasses, and polished story routes many studios would treat as sealed. The result now is a game that not only earned its acclaim but continues to reshape itself in ways few major RPGs have attempted. Still, as Baldur’s Gate 3 enters its third holiday season on the market, the sheer volume of revisions raises an unavoidable observation: Baldur’s Gate 3 may be a Ship of Theseus.

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What is the Ship of Theseus, and How Does it Apply to Baldur’s Gate 3?

The Ship of Theseus thought experiment asks whether an object that has had all its components replaced is still the same. When every plank of Theseus’s ship is swapped out over time, there is a question of whether it is still the same ship functionally, philosophically, or spiritually. Baldur’s Gate 3 easily inches toward its own version of this paradox.

The State of Baldur’s Gate 3 at Launch vs. Now

It launched with celebration and instability, with many critics specifically citing Act 3 of Baldur’s Gate 3 as a major pain point. Performance issues and scripting bugs created friction in an otherwise extraordinary narrative. By contrast, the 2025 version plays with a level of stability and polish that would have been unthinkable during its first months. The content is largely the same: no new regions, no new story arcs beyond the sprawling Patch 4 epilogue, and no BG3 DLC will be making its way to players. However, the quality of this experience has evolved substantially.

BG3‘s Patch 8 introduced a surge of subclasses and long-requested origin adjustments, the epilogue fundamentally reshaped emotional closure, and almost every update added substantial bug fixes, performance improvements, or balancing realignments. BG3 in 2025 is not a different game, but it is undeniably a transformed one. Below is a broad comparison of Baldur’s Gate 3 at launch and the current 2025 iteration.

The core story of Baldur’s Gate 3 remains intact, but the layers surrounding it have shifted. Its presentation, pacing, agency, balance, and endings have undergone meaningful changes, with character tweaks also existing across the board. BG3 now plays like its best self, even if reaching that point required reconstructing many of its planks.

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How Baldur’s Gate 3’s Changes Affect Moment-to-Moment Gameplay

These cumulative changes have subtly reshaped the feel of Baldur’s Gate 3 without rewriting its identity. Some are almost invisible, especially to players who did not pick up the game at launch. Tighter pathfinding, better companion responsiveness, and quality-of-life changes may be overlooked, but together they produce a smoother rhythm. Dialogue scenes fire correctly, AI behavior is more reliable, and dreaded game-ending bugs are fewer and less frequent with each BG3 hotfix.

Quality-of-life improvements in BG3 are the most transformative on a practical level. Inventory management no longer feels like a constant chore. Class updates and new subclasses broaden and build diversity dramatically, changing how players approach encounters. Even the restored or added scenes create new emotional textures in replays, altering how certain moments land without replacing the original story.

Have Some Updates Worsened the Baldur’s Gate 3 Experience?

The patches that “worsened” the game are rarely more than temporary gremlins introduced by massive updates, like a broken animation here or a bugged dialogue flag there. These hitches can matter, especially for new players, but they are generally resolved quickly. BG3’s trajectory continues to trend upward.

Baldur’s Gate 3: More Than Its Nautiloid Ships

The sum of these adjustments poses the central Ship of Theseus question: is Baldur’s Gate 3 in 2025 still the same game that launched in 2023, or has it quietly become something new?

In truth, it is both. The game’s bones remain the same, but its musculature has been reworked, its sinew tightened, BG3‘s emotional heart more clearly articulated. What players praise today is inseparable from the game BG3 has become, not merely the game it was, but none of these changes discards the spirit of the original presentation. They simply refine it.

image via Larian Studios

If anything, Baldur’s Gate 3 doesn’t challenge the Ship of Theseus paradox. It resolves it. The game endures precisely because the parts can be improved, replaced, and expanded without compromising the soul that anchored it from the beginning.

Baldur’s Gate 3

9/10

Released

August 3, 2023

ESRB

M for Mature: Blood and Gore, Partial Nudity, Sexual Content, Strong Language, Violence