While it’s no surprise that another toxic community has sprung up for a video game, it’s a shame it happened to this one.
Baldur’s Gate 3 developers are getting a lot of abuse from their fans, and someone at Larian has had enough.
As reported by Video Game Chronicles, Larian director of publishing Michael Douse made a lengthy post about how the studio was suddenly inundated by abuse from their fans, because of their promise to introduce modding into the game.
We don’t think there is any train of thought that can justify any abuse being sent towards game developers, no matter how bad a game is. In this case, of course, we are talking about a multiple time GOTY winner, winning several times over The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. So the issue is something else.
Why would Baldur’s Gate 3 players care so much about modding? We think the explanation lies in what Larian Games said about Baldur’s Gate 3 DLC. Essentially, they stopped themselves from making more DLC on the title, because they had pushed the game far enough that the characters maxed out their potential.
As you may remember, Larian’s explanation is that they were following the Dungeons and Dragons source material that Baldur’s Gate 3 was based on to the letter. So, if other games might have had more content added in, Larian went for fidelity.
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So the high interest in modding is really about fans wanting to continue playing the game, by making new content for themselves and others to play. Given that Larian promised official mod support for Baldur’s Gate 3 would include consoles, that would immediately trump what modders are already doing on PC, because it’s only available on PC.
To paraphrase Douse, he said quite clearly that ”threats & toxicity against our devs & community teams will only harm the conversation.” Douse also explained that Larian is currently talking to the community to get their feedback, and ultimately roll it in to what Larian themselves were making when it comes to mod support. Douse also revealed an interesting tidbit: Larian was working on mod support from the first day of development.
Unfortunately, it really isn’t surprising at all that another video game has acquired a toxic community. It’s certainly disappointing that it happened to Baldur’s Gate 3, because the title was on Early Access for two years. The community helped make this title into the biggest game of 2023, and now they’re this close to ruining all of that. If you’re a part of this community, you need to make sure you’re part of the side helping Larian, and not the side that’s harming them.
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You can read Douse’s full statement from Twitter below.
“We’ll be talking in depth about what our mod support will look like soon. Been working on it since launch. As always, we’ll discuss it in our way with our community. Threats & toxicity against our devs & community teams will only harm the conversation. Please stop that.
This is a game that went from ~2 mil 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.
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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 & 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 & definitely you. Please help us to work for the greater good of the millions of people who are involved & chill.”
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