Baldur's Gate 3 patch 5's best change is a long-awaited inventory fix that lets you manage all companions even if they aren't in your party

Baldur's Gate 3's latest patch brings a raft of welcome fixes, though my favorite is that taking and giving from everyone's inventory is finally becoming less of a headache. 

As developer Larian Studios explains, patch 5 comes with improved inventory access, which allows you to manage the inventory of all your companions from one, blessed UI. It doesn't matter if they're back at camp, either - that one UI will still grab something you've left with one of them should it be needed in a pinch. 

Up until now, chopping and changing who has what in your party has been fiddly at best. Putting to one side that I spent the longest time swapping between characters in my current party and simply dropping an item before discovering there's an easier path, you were limited to swapping with those in your immediate party. As such, if you left a cool sword with someone to lighten your load before sending them back to camp, you'd eventually have to go and meet them there to get it back. 

Listen, a new Baldur's Gate 3 epilogue with over 3,600 lines of new dialog set six months after the game sounds exciting - as does a new mode that basically stops you from save-scumming - but this change got the loudest pop out of me. 

Elsewhere in the patch, Larian says performance improvements engineered as a consequence of Baldur's Gate 3's Xbox version will give everyone across PC and PS5 some much-needed performance boosts, especially when it comes to Act 3. The developer previously revealed that patch 4 got us all in a tizzy as the D&D RPG literally made our dirty little crimes unforgettable. Thankfully, though, it now looks like Baldur's Gate 3 is in a more forgiving mood.

Meanwhile, Baldur's Gate 3 patch 5 is so big that it requires more disk space than the entire game.