Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian Studios has called on the game’s community to cease what it called “threats and toxicity” over mod support, insisting conversations around new features “take time”.
Ever since Baldur’s Gate 3 came out in August 2023, players who use mods have been frustrated with having to uninstall, reinstall, update, and re-juggle their mods every time a new patch is released. So last week’s announcement that official mod support is on its way was seen as a positive. However, it seems a vocal minority within the community has taken things too far.
In a series of tweets, Larian director of publishing Michael Douse said, in order for the developer to continue its healthy relationship with its community, the threats need to stop.
“We’ll be talking in depth about what our mod support will look like soon,” Douse said. “Been working on it since launch. As always, we’ll discuss it in our way with our community. Threats and toxicity against our devs and community teams will only harm the conversation. Please stop that.
“This is a game that went from around two million players to way over 10 in a very short space of time, so it’s natural the conversation becomes muddier and complex. But in order to maintain the same level of dialogue, we need people to understand that these conversations take time.
“We can’t do it at all without the dedicated community teams that work to untangle a giant web of noise into something we can work with for the benefit of everyone. If you truly want to know things about the game, please don’t chip away at the people who connect us all.
“99.9% of our community are the absolute best and it’s because of them, thankfully, that my community team persevere. But I suppose it was inevitable that when you have a city, a few bad eggs will start a fire.
“Until then, BG3 does not yet have mod support. Don’t get angry at mod authors, support teams, community, or developers. Our focus is to patch the game while working on future mod support. I understand why it’s frustrating, so what we all need to do is focus on that future.
“Next week I’ll have a discussion about community moderation with our comms teams and restate our desire for continued closeness with our communities and updates based on when and what we can say. But we are working too hard for this to proliferate.
“To finish, again, we can only be close if we can work close. If we cannot do that, and we have to draw distance, it’ll really suck for everyone, especially us and definitely you. Please help us to work for the greater good of the millions of people who are involved and chill.”
Toxicity is unfortunately of serious concern to the development community. In January, the developer of Palworld said it had received death threats amid the game’s Pokémon rip-off claims. Last year, a new survey from the Game Developers Conference revealed a majority of game developers see harassment from players as a major problem for the industry. Of the 2,300 developers surveyed, 91% said player harassment and toxicity towards developers was an issue. 42% said it was a “very serious” issue.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
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