Baldur's Gate 3's Patch 8 is among its biggest, holding 48 pages (approx. 19,000-20,000 words) of patch notes in its vast and bountiful form

Goodbye, free time. I hardly knew ye.

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, and loved ones that they will not see me for the next two weeks.

Maybe three, actually, since Larian boss Swen Vincke’s assertion after the announcement last week 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, 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, what’s one more major update, 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.