Larian Studios has revealed that they are trying to make modding happen for Baldur’s Gate 3 – and they want to include consoles.
As reported by IGN, Larian Studios director of publishing Michael Douse revealed this all of a sudden on a recent tweet about the latest published hotfix. Douse said:
“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.
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 :)”
Douse also told fans to follow Larian on Discord for more information, and they did have more to share there. Larian senior community strategist WombatMedic has a dedicated post with this message regarding the upcoming feature:
“We are working on official mod support, and have been for a while. 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. As this is no small task, we hope to introduce the initial stages of modding support in our next big patch, which is still several months away. Frustrated as you might be now, we’re keen to work with you on this – and have plans to reach out to popular mod authors to talk further and work together to avoid issues in the future.”
Modding used to not be possible on consoles, and only available on PCs, because of the unique infrastructure consoles have. While consoles are, of course, ultimately, customized PCs, the large degree of differentiation made on these custom PCs, from their operating systems to developer environments, make them essentially completely different, in the same way that a smartphone is a different kind of computer from a desktop PC.
In this ninth generation of consoles, consoles are still very different from consumer PCs, but they are more alike to PCs than ever before. That has made porting games across platforms much easier, and is also what makes porting on consoles possible.
So we can absolutely believe that this is not only possible, but that Larian is already well underway working on it. The only real questions we would have about it is when.
