One of the best things about Baldur's Gate 3 are the mods. Another great thing is Larian's diligent pace of major updates and smaller hotfixes. But they unfortunately sometimes come into conflict: Larian releases a patch, some internal bits and bobs are changed, and suddenly blammo, a whole bunch of mods stop working. But hopefully that will soon be a thing of the past.
Baldur's Gate 3 patch 6—the smoochie one—arrived last week, and better lip-locks notwithstanding, there were problems. Players reported lockups, crashes, and glitches of various sorts, and a lot of mods were apparently left broken, too.
Larian's rolled out a couple hotfixes since then to smooth things out, and with the release of the latest one earlier today, Michael Dowse, the studio's director of publishing, revealed that new and improved mod support is on the way—and it'll be cross-platform, too.
"We generally don’t talk about things til they’re ready, but as you may have read, we’re making an exception," Douse tweeted. "We’ve been working on a robust, cross-platform plan for mod support to be released later in [the] year. We love our modding community and we want to support them. It’s coming.
"We have a system but it needs to be tested and still requires work. We’re excited about it. I understand that it suck’s when the game is updated and mods break. Our community teams will start talking with and looping in modding community. For now, work continues :)"
This is pretty big news on two fronts. No more broken mods would obviously be a welcome change for anyone who uses them: Trouble-shooting problems with games is enough of a headache without having to horse around with the cornucopia of user-made stuff you've got piled on top of it.
But the real excitement in response to Douse's tweet is for the possibility of mod support for the console versions of Baldur's Gate 3. Right now the ability to, say, make Astarion look like a Jonathan Pryce VTube is reserved for PC players, but that won't be the case for long: Douse didn't explicitly state that mod support is coming to consoles, but a Larian representative confirmed with PC Gamer that it is.
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Larian senior community strategist WombatMedic went a little deeper into Larian's ambitions in a message posted on the Larian Discord server. "We are working on official mod support, and have been for a while," she wrote. "We want the very best for you, which includes establishing a pipeline that lets mod authors release their mods across different platforms.
"Together with the platform holders, we are working on making this a reality, and are forming a team to support mod curation. We’re aiming to offer modding support for things like classes, UI, customisation, spells, and certain assets and game mechanics."
WombatMedic said Larian hopes to introduce "the initial stages" of official modding support in the next big Baldur's Gate 3 patch, although she added that's "still several months away." She also said Larian "plans to reach out to popular mod authors to talk further and work together to avoid issues in the future."
Andy Chalk
Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.
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