In terms of updates, Baldur’s Gate 3 is—for the most part—starting to wind down, with the latest patch released in February of this year and Larian shifting gears to work on its new RPGs. That’s only normal (the Sword Coast doesn’t need battle passes), but there’s still one more patch left in the oven: Patch 7.
The update, which is scheduled to release September of this year, intends to add “evil endings, plus a whole bunch of fixes, quality of life improvements, and more”—but that’s not the marquee feature. The juicier, more long-term-impact of Patch 7 is that Baldur’s Gate 3 will be finally getting fully-fledged mod support.
Announced back in February, Larian’s new suite of features should be the game’s equivalent to something like the Skyrim creation kit—a batch of tools that’ll make modding the studio’s groundbreaking CRPG easier for everybody involved.
While there’ve already been plenty of mods, they’re otherwise unsupported—requiring players to use third-party tools which, obviously, aren’t typically an option on consoles. Patch 7 should change that through two means, as announced on a Steam community post released today.
First up, full integration with mod.io, which the studio says will help it “bring modding support to all platforms, and [provide] the necessary infrastructure to … manage uploaded mods, host guides, and provide a level of content moderation to keep the community safe”.
In terms of actual mechanical benefits, mod.io will provide “a hosting and distribution solution for your mods, which you will be able to access through mod.io, or through our website. You’ll also be able to subscribe or unsubscribe from mods in-game with our mod browser … You’ll need a mod.io account to manage and create your mods, where you’ll be able to upload, tag them, as well as add screenshots, descriptions, and other stuff.”
Those of you wielding the power of code to make Astarion caked-up beyond belief, or to give Gale glorious v-necks that expose his bountiful chest might be wondering—hey, content moderation, that sounds like the NSFW narcs are gonna come for my sexy mods!
Fortunately, Larian isn’t cracking down on mods with explicit content or themes—it just can’t officially support them: “Baldur’s Gate 3, as a Dungeons & Dragons game licensed by our partners, has certain guidelines in place to ensure the integrity of the game’s universe.”
However, “those mods can still be downloaded manually, and the game’s browser will still recognise them and allow you to manage them in the mod load order of the game … because they would be local and alter unsupported systems, there will not be embedded support for checking for updates and syncing to others in a multiplayer session. Additionally, we will not be able to provide full technical support in case of crashes.”
Essentially, you can get as smutty as you’d like, you just won’t be getting the full suite of benefits from the mod.io software—which seems like a fair compromise, and that’s still an additive layer of convenience compared to what was there before.
Speaking of being additive—modders will have an entirely new set of toys to experiment with. As the post reads, the toolkit will let players create their own mods inside it, upload them to the mod.io servers, download/manage mods directly in Baldur’s Gate 3, and tweak multiplay and save game files through “a verification UI”. There’s a few more technical goodies as well, such as:
- Loading “levels read-only to look at all the local entities, as well as the setup, and test your mods in-game while creating them.”
- “Access to our internal editors for supported asset types such as textures and visual models, allowing you to override them directly in your mod through the developer interface.”
- “Mod UIs through file editing,” alongside documentation from Larian itself on how its “internals are set up.”
Larian has already begun a closed alpha test, and will be offering a closed beta in July “capped at roughly 1,000 players, that anyone on PC can go ahead and sign up for—and we want you to test the mods created during the alpha!”
While that’s a long time to wait for players completely uninterested in mods, it’s still all in all pretty huge for the game’s lifespan—and I’m excited to see what the modding community manages to cook up with their new tools (as long as it’s not Thomas the Tank Engine again. Please don’t do this to me).