Technologies
Baldur’s Gate 3’s Final Patch Adds Cross-Play, 12 New Subclasses and Photo Mode
Larian Studios’ final big update includes major gameplay elements and new screen capture tools, plus fun surprises to send off the game in style.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is closing out its development with a massive final patch, and it’s a gift to fans who’ve stuck with one of our best PC games since launch.
Larian Studios’ Patch 8 is officially the last major content update for the role-playing game, but it’s much more than just bug fixes. This latest patch introduces cross-platform multiplayer, an all-new photo mode and a full set of new subclasses that shake up how every class plays. In short, it’s a major update, and one that cements the game’s legacy as the studio prepares to move on.
Whether you’re just getting your sea legs with a brand-new game of Baldur’s Gate or you’re a seasoned player ready to see it through to the end, here’s everything that’s packed into this epic send-off.
Cross-play means no more walls between platforms
The biggest feature in Patch 8 is full cross-play across PC, Mac, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. You can now jump into multiplayer sessions with friends on any supported platform, with cross-save support also letting you carry your progress between devices if you’re using a linked Larian account.
Getting started is simple: Connect your game to your Larian profile, enable cross-play in the gameplay settings, and add friends using their Larian usernames. After that, you’re free to join or host multiplayer sessions no matter what system you or your friends are playing on.
Mod support is also part of the mix, but with some caveats. Everyone in a cross-play session needs the exact same mod setup, and console users are capped at 100 mods. Mods must be installed via Larian’s in-game manager (not through third-party tools), so keep that in mind when you’re looking for a new favorite to try out.
A dozen new subclasses refresh every class
Each of the game’s 12 core classes now has a brand-new subclass option, expanding the possibilities for players who want to try something different in their next campaign. Whether you’re into arcane sniping, necrotic magic or charming enemies into submission, there’s a new flavor for everyone.
Some highlights include the Swashbuckler for Rogues, bringing fast, flashy melee combat; the Circle of Stars for Druids, which draws on celestial energy; and the Hexblade for Warlocks, who forge pacts with sentient weapons.
These subclasses aren’t just cosmetic changes — they include unique mechanics, new spells and custom animations that meaningfully change how each character plays. Here’s the complete list of new subclasses you can now choose from:
- Path of the Giant Barbarian
- College of Glamour Bard
- Death Domain Cleric
- Circle of Stars Druid
- Arcane Archer Fighter
- Way of the Drunken Master Monk
- Oath of the Crown Paladin
- Swarmkeeper Ranger
- Swashbuckler Rogue
- Shadow Magic Sorcerer
- Hexblade Warlock
- Bladesinging Wizard
You can unlock each new subclass after you reach each required level, which will change depending on your class. For instance, a Cleric, Sorcerer, Paladin or Warlock can choose a new subclass at Level 1, but a Druid and Wizard must wait until Level 2. A Barbarian, Bard, Fighter, Monk, Ranger or Rogue must wait until Level 3.
Photo mode is a game changer for creators
If you’ve ever wanted to freeze the action and line up the perfect screenshot (or just fawn over Astarion in the moonlight), now’s your chance. Patch 8 for Baldur’s Gate 3 introduces an official photo mode, and it’s more than just a camera tool. Players can adjust lighting, add filters, change facial expressions, shift character poses and more — all in real time.
Photo mode can be activated by pressing F9 on PC or clicking both thumbsticks on a controller. You can use it during combat or exploration, though it won’t be available during dialogue or prerendered scenes. Once snapped, images are saved directly to your system, whether you’re on a PC, a Mac or a console.
Steam cards, modding tools and a farewell short
Patch 8 for Baldur’s Gate 3 gives PC players something extra to look forward to: Steam Trading Cards are now live. Collecting them lets you craft profile badges and unlock exclusive emotes and backgrounds tied to Baldur’s Gate 3.
The patch also brings improvements to Larian’s official modding tools. Creators now have more freedom to add NPCs, create interactive environments and build new experiences within the existing world — though editing fixed terrain is still off-limits for now.
To mark the arrival of the final Baldur’s Gate 3 update, Larian released a lighthearted animated short featuring the game’s main cast and a cameo from studio founder Swen Vincke. It’s a charming little tribute that reminds players just how much personality the team brought to this RPG. If you haven’t played it yet, you’re probably going to want to after this.
No DLC coming, but support continues
Larian has confirmed that Patch 8 is the final major update for Baldur’s Gate 3. There are no expansions or sequels in the pipeline, and the team is officially moving on to new projects. However, that doesn’t mean the game is being left behind entirely. Bug fixes, quality-of-life tweaks and backend improvements will continue for the foreseeable future.
In the meantime, this final patch is a powerful way to wrap up this epic role-playing game. It smooths out rough edges, adds meaningful content and gives players new tools to enjoy the game in even more creative ways. Whether you’re rolling a new character, testing out a subclass or finally convincing your Xbox friend to join your campaign, Patch 8 makes Baldur’s Gate 3 feel new again, just in time to say goodbye.
You can read the full patch notes here.
Technologies
Rideable Horse Robot Viral Video: The Real Story Behind It
Kawasaki’s Corleo robot horse is just a concept right now, but a thrilling hype video makes it look like a blast to ride.
If you’ve ever watched a video featuring a Boston Dynamics Spot robot dog and wanted to saddle it up and ride it, then Kawasaki has a concept robot that’ll make your heart flutter — and it’s part horse, part leopard, part robot and all wild. Too bad you can’t actually buy one.
The Kawasaki Corleo is a four-legged rideable robot, the answer to the question: «What if we put legs on an all-terrain vehicle instead of wheels?» Kawasaki released a video showing what the concept would look like if it were fully realized.
The trippy video features the Corleo and riders galloping through a forest, running across a field, leaping over rocky terrain and trotting across a snowy landscape. The video appears to be primarily computer generated with Lord of the Rings-worthy scenery.
Kawasaki is known for its motorcycles and ATVs, but the international company has its hands in everything from railcars to industrial equipment and robotics.
Kawasaki unveiled the forward-thinking Corleo for the Osaka Expo 2025 in Japan. It’s a 2050 concept model for a future mode of transportation. The expo’s theme is «designing future society for our lives.» The event officially opens on April 13.
Corleo incorporates some nifty design ideas, including independent legs, a hydrogen engine and steering through weight shifting.
«While preserving the joy of riding, the vehicle continually monitors the rider’s movements to achieve a reassuring sense of unity between human and machine,» Kawasaki said.
Kawasaki didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on its plans for Corleo.
For now, Corleo is just a model capable of limited movement, so your sci-fi dreams of riding across rugged mountains on a kick-butt robo-steed will have to be put on hold. Perhaps 2050 will bring us a world full of leggy, rideable robots. Somehow, that feels more achievable than a bunch of flying cars.
Technologies
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Technologies
Marvel Rivals Season 2: The 6 Best Heroes to Start Learning Now
Every balance patch shakes up a hero shooter’s meta compositions. These are the best heroes you can learn to be flexible in your matches.
Everyone’s favorite heroes are attending the Hellfire Gala in Marvel Rivals Season 2. As Ultron attacks Krakoa, the sentient island and sanctuary for all mutants, it’s time to take up arms and leave the dancing for the afterparty.
But not every hero is built the same way. As a competitive live service game, Marvel Rivals’ seasonal patches change how heroes function, shifting stats around health pools, damage output and ability cooldowns. Some heroes lose abilities and other heroes gain more, fundamentally changing their base kits — which could shift the balance through the whole season, empowering some characters and limiting others.
Any character is viable in the right hands and the most important variable for success in a hero shooter is the ability to play around your team. If you make character picks that synergize with your teammates and work together, you can even overcome players with more mechanical skill than you.
If you’re serious about ranking up, it’s important to find a character or two that fits your playstyle in each role so that you can remain flexible enough to fill in your team’s needs. While certain characters have undeniably gained key strengths in the Season 2 patch, you should play who you feel comfortable with.
That said, you have a whole season to adapt to the current power balance and grow your roster of playable picks. If you’re looking to learn a new hero, these characters are some of the best ones you can invest time into this season.
The biggest winners in Marvel Rivals Season 2
The Marvel Rivals Season 2 patch introduced some critical buffs for struggling characters, making them better all-rounders that bring more utility to the table for their team.
Players who have put in the time to master these characters will benefit the most from their increased competitive viability this season. Ranking up requires just as much flexibility as it does mechanical skill in a hero shooter like Marvel Rivals, so you’d do well to add these characters to your roster this season.
Peni Parker
While Peni Parker has always been a very strong pick on defense for certain maps, she has struggled to find success in other situations. Her slow movement and massive hitbox led her to get shredded by characters like Punisher and Hela, who can keep up constant pressure with hitscan firepower.
Recognizing that Peni could lock down an area but wasn’t great at defending herself, the Marvel Rivals devs gave the character a series of buffs increasing her firepower, mobility and survivability in one patch. Peni is now able to shoot her primary fire Cyber-Web Clusters with a 20% movement penalty, rather than the extremely punishing 40% movement penalty that she shipped with. She also gained a 100 health point increase up to 750 to help her stay in fights longer. This is massive for a character that can generate a small amount of passive healing for themselves.
Perhaps most important, Peni is now able to land critical hits with her primary fire, drastically increasing an accurate player’s damage potential — which will be especially helpful if you’re able to web up one of the flying heroes zooming around. If you want to lock down defensive zones and provide utility for your team, Peni Parker has always been a solid pick — and now her poking capabilities are a whole lot stronger, too.
Scarlet Witch
Wanda was always a decent anti-dive duelist pick but she lacked the firepower to play around enemy strategists and her ultimate ability requires a lot of dedicated support from the team to be truly effective. In Season 2, the Scarlet Witch is able to put out some more consistent damage, making her a more effective all-rounder — and she becomes truly dangerous in her new team up with Doctor Strange.
Scarlet Witch’s primary fire now does 80 damage per second (up from 60), which means she can delete squishy targets in just three seconds if they’re not getting any healing. Her small area-of-effect alternate fire, Chthonian Burst, now does 80 damage on direct impact as well, which means she has a strong burst damage option for beginning and ending engagements. These simple number tweaks go a long way in helping Scarlet Witch players challenge opponents in one-versus-one situations, where they’d previously be forced to retreat from battle.
The real lynchpin of Wanda’s kit this season is her team up ability: Sorcery Surge transforms Chthonian Burst into a field of magic missiles capable of shredding even the bulkiest vanguards and it can be used in tandem with primary fire.
As long as a Doctor Strange player is on the team, I expect to see Scarlet Witch rotating her presence throughout the battlefield much more in Season 2, using Sorcery Surge to shred the frontlines before retreating to peel for the strategist backline in a pinch.
Psylocke
While Psylocke didn’t receive any direct changes to her damage output or cooldowns for this patch, she was part of the first team up ability mix ups. While the mutant assassin definitely benefited from Magik’s stepping discs, she already has impressive survivability from the escape tools in her base kit.
Now Psylocke is part of Emma Frost’s team up, which lets players create an AI-controlled copy of the character that can use her primary fire as well as the Psi-blade Dash and Wing Shuriken abilities when the player activates them.
Unlike a Loki clone, Psylocke’s copy stays mobile, diving on any enemies the player does. This effectively doubles Psylocke’s damage output — and the cloned projection will stay and fight enemies even if players activate Psylocke’s ultimate.
The new team up ability makes Psylocke an even deadlier assassin, and if you believe you can time your assaults from the shadows to catch the enemy team off guard, you’ll be able to make crucial picks before anyone is able to react. There are very few characters that can so quickly skew a fight in their team’s favor, making Psylocke an important duelist to learn in Season 2.
Hawkeye
The Avengers’ crackshot bowman was built with intentional weaknesses to balance out his ability to one-shot enemy duelists and strategists. He moves slowly, charges his primary fire up by aiming at enemies and doesn’t have much mobility. The Season 2 patch removes some of these restraints, letting Hawkeye move slightly quicker while drawing his bow and building his ultimate even faster than before.
Hunter’s Sight, Hawkeye’s ultimate ability, now only takes 3,100 ultimate charge to build up instead of 3,700 charge, and it’s gotten a pretty massive buff this season. The sharpshooter now draws his bow 1.5x as quickly while his ultimate is active, letting him fire additional volleys of high-damage arrows into his enemies and their afterimages.
Hawkeye’s Hypersonic Arrow ability also got buffed: Each hit now does 55 damage. This is another indirect buff for Hawkeye’s ultimate, as the arrow can pierce through enemies and their afterimages to reach crucial KO breakpoints for duelists and strategists alike. Skilled Hawkeye players will once again be able to pluck off members of the enemy team before anyone can react, creating a version of this character that is somewhat reminiscent of the Season 0 balance patch.
Rocket Raccoon
This rascally weapons specialist was a controversial pick in Season 1 — his team up and revive offered some of the best utility to a coordinated team but his lack of burst healing and mediocre ultimate ability compared to other strategist heroes made Rocket a tough pick against certain team compositions. In Season 2, Rocket Raccoon’s healing and ultimate have been completely revamped, making him perhaps the biggest winner of the patch.
The wily trash panda now puts out a whopping 55 burst healing when his healing orbs make initial contact with teammates, and they still provide 50 healing per second afterwards as well. Rocket’s ultimate also received big changes — teammates in the Cosmic Yarn Amplifier’s area of effect will now receive a lessened 25% damage boost but they’ll also gain 100 bonus health points per second while they maintain the link. This is a huge buff that brings Rocket’s ultimate ability more in-line with the healing power of other strategists.
In exchange, the raccoon’s escape ability got nerfed: Each dash takes longer to regenerate and doesn’t take Rocket as far away from the action as it previously did. But Rocket is one of the only strategists with the ability to heal himself. A small constriction of his mobility doesn’t damper his immense survivability, which means this character will have some of the most consistent healing and utility this season.
If you want to support your teammates with healing and utility and never get caught without an escape route, Rocket is one of the best characters you can pick up in Season 2.
Mantis
Rocket isn’t the only member of the Guardians of the Galaxy that got a massive buff this season. Mantis lost 25 base health this season, bringing her down to 250, so she’s squishier than ever before — but her sleep is still an effective anti-dive tool that should allow skilled players to offset this survivability nerf.
What makes Mantis a winner in the Season 2 patch are the changes to her Healing Flower and Allied Inspiration buffs. Casting these abilities on allies gives them 20 health points per second and a powerful 12% damage boost, respectively, for eight seconds. That damage boost is a crucial bit of utility that isn’t usually available outside of Rocket Raccoon and Luna Snow ultimates.
Before Season 2, recasting the ability on the same target would refresh the eight second timer but now Mantis can stack these buffs on her teammates until they have 16 seconds of healing and damage boosts.
If you’re a strategist player who often plays with dive DPS teammates, the change to these boosts helps you enable these players to disrupt the enemy backline and return alive much more frequently. You just might not want to force this character into single or double strategist team compositions — she works much better as a third, flexible strategist.
Heroes who took a hit in Marvel Rivals Season 2
While most of the Season 2 patch notes detailed buffs for characters across the Marvel Rivals roster, some heroes received a mixed bag of adjustments or outright nerfs. These characters aren’t unplayable — in fact, some of them will still be able to outperform the rest of the lobby in a skilled player’s hands — but they won’t be operating in top form like they were in Season 1.
Doctor Strange
The Sorcerer Supreme has been hit with another nerf — and while previous adjustments have focused on decreasing the magician’s health pool, the Season 2 stat changes affect the character’s damage output. Each dagger in Strange’s primary fire now does two less damage, which means the good doctor loses 10 damage total from a full volley. This is a devastating blow to the combo-reliant vanguard, preventing him from reaching elimination breakpoints with his fully-charged Maelstrom of Madness, which could leave enemies alive with very low health where they’d previously be reliably taken down.
Doctor Strange was also removed from Hulk’s Gamma Charge team up, which means the Gamma Maelstrom ability no longer exists. Strange’s dark magic is still a real threat but the extra damage that this team up afforded him helped him hit important breakpoints to eliminate key enemy threats, especially when paired with his group stun ultimate ability, the Eye of Agamotto. There’s also no way to negate Doctor Strange’s self-imposed anti-heal now, which means players will need to remain ever mindful of dark magic accumulation.
As one of the only main tanks in the game, Doctor Strange will still be incredibly useful to pick up and learn in Season 2 — in fact, Groot, Magneto and Strange are all pretty evergreen picks in different Marvel Rivals metas. But if you’re used to playing this mystical vanguard, you’ll probably find you have less individual agency when it comes to securing key eliminations this season.
Bucky
Bucky got hit with a one-two punch at the beginning of Season 2, receiving a handful of direct nerfs to his most powerful abilities and losing his infinite ammo team up with Rocket Raccoon. The Winter Soldier is still capable of some very scary burst damage but he won’t be able to take as much space this season.
The Bionic Hook cooldown has been increased to 12 seconds so vanguards won’t have to worry about getting yanked into the middle of Bucky’s team as often. The Winter Soldier’s Kraken Impact ability also does less damage this season, and now players will have to drop enemies to 15% of their health pool to instantly eliminate them after they’ve been hit with the ultimate.
Bucky gained a new team up that allows him to leap toward Captain America to slam his shield to attack nearby enemies, dealing 80 damage to and slowing enemies in a 10 meter radius while temporarily giving Bucky 30 bonus health points. I can’t imagine this will be useful outside of niche situations, as Winter Soldier just doesn’t have the dive capabilities that Cap does, and this ability could get players into a dire situation very quickly
The previous iteration of the infinite ammo team up was much more useful for Winter Soldier players, but the character is by no means terrible in Season 2 — he has just gone from being absurdly strong to being more in line with other duelists.
Namor
There’s no doubt in my mind that Namor will still see play this season. He might even remain one of the best characters in the duelist roster. But the king of the sea still lost one of his most important abilities as his team up anchor moved from Luna Snow to the Hulk, marking him out as one of the losers in this patch.
While Namor’s new Gamma Monstro team up ability is incredibly strong if you can keep an enemy pinned down, it takes five seconds of continuous fire for the damage to ramp up. The 20 meter range on the gamma beam is useful but a good diver will play around the ability before it can really start taking a substantial chunk out of their health pool.
The Ice Monstros that Namor lost this season were the easiest way to shut down divers in Marvel Rivals, functioning as auto-aim turrets that slowed down the escape of some of the most movement-dependent characters in the game.
Namor’s stats and base kit were left untouched, though, so he’s one of the characters that got hurt the least by an unfavorable change to his team up. This character will still be one of the most important picks against a dive team composition — and one of the most important bans for any Spider-Man, Black Panther, Psylocke or Magik mains looking to prey on strategists in the backline.
Adam Warlock
The golden boy is rolling with the punches this season. Adam Warlock got a small buff to his ultimate ability — he’ll now resurrect teammates with 30% of their maximum health pool, which should stop Winter Soldier players from clip farming their ultimate ability on poor strategist mains. But that’s all the good news there is for players in pursuit of embodying the perfect human.
With no real mobility options, Adam Warlock depends on careful cooldown management to be consistently effective during battle. The Season 2 patch introduces a 10 second increase on the cooldown of his health-sharing and heal-over-time ability Soul Bond, raising it up to 40 seconds, interrupting the flow of this character’s resource management. Dive team compositions will have a much easier time jumping on and eliminating Adam Warlock in this balance patch.
Players with impeccable aim and careful positioning will still be able to wring a lot of value out of an Adam Warlock pick, especially if they’re able to consistently land the entire Cosmic Cluster charged volley (his secondary fire). It’s just going to be much harder — and far more resource intensive — to stay alive against certain teams.
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