After a recent Baldur’s Gate 3 hotfix broke a lot of mods, including a popular tool, Larian Studios announced that it’s working on official mod support.
Larian’s director of publishing Michael Douse took to X (formerly Twitter) to address some concerns from the modding community, stating that the team was working on cross-platform mod support. The update is expected to be released later this year.
We generally don’t talk about things til they’re ready, but as you may have read, we’re making an exception. We’ve been working on a robust, cross-platform plan for mod support to be released later in year. We love our modding community and we want to support them. It’s coming. https://t.co/54GsxNshlQ
— Very AFK (@Cromwelp) February 22, 2024
“We have a system but it needs to be tested and still requires work,” he wrote. “I understand that it suck’s [sic] when the game is updated and mods break. Our community teams will start talking with and looping in modding community. For now, work continues.”
The Baldur’s Gate 3 modding community has been dealing with a lack of support even before the game left early access. It’s tough for modders to constantly have to update or work around the problems that hotfixes and patches can create. For example, hotfix #18 broke Baldur’s Gate 3 Script Extender, which is a popular tool used by modders and people who use mods — and this isn’t the first time the tool has broken, either. There are so many mods for the game, including some that just add quality-of-life features (like increasing or decreasing in-game notifications), along with some that let players customize the characters’ appearances.
According to WombatMedic, a senior community strategist in the official Larian Studios Discord, developers have been working on this for a while. It’ll be a long process, however, with Wombat saying that players should expect it to come with the next big patch, which is “several months away.” (For reference, the last big patch came out last week.)
“We absolutely love that we have such an active modding community across our titles […] We want to continue making sure you’re getting the best possible experience, which is why we frequently patch the game, although this does inevitably mean that each new patch or hotfix has the potential to become incompatible with your favourite mods,” she wrote. “We know this sucks, we know you want to play with mods, and we want to make this right.”
Wombat responded to user concerns in the Discord that the team also needed to do a better job communicating resources and support.
“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,” she wrote.
