Baldur's Gate 3's highly anticipated Patch 7 has finally been released, and the player community's response has been overwhelmingly positive, especially with the surge in mods.
BG3 Modding Is “Pretty Big” Says CEO Swen Vincke
Baldur's Gate 3's Patch 7, which rolled out over the past few days, has generated significant excitement within the player community. Following the patch's release on September 5, over one million mods were installed, as announced by Larian Studios' CEO Swen Vincke. "Modding is pretty big - we had more than a million mods installed in less than 24 hours," Vincke shared on Twitter (X). Additionally, Scott Reismanis, founder of ModDB and mod.io, reported that the number of installs had surpassed 3 million and was still growing, stating, "Just ticked over 3m installs and accelerating," in response to Vincke's post.
Patch 7 brought a wealth of new content to the game, including new evil endings, revamped split-screen gameplay, and the much-anticipated release of Larian’s own Mod Manager. This built-in tool enables players to easily browse, install, and manage community-created mods directly within the game.
The current modding tools are available as a separate app via Steam, allowing modders to create their own stories using Larian's in-house scripting language, Osiris. Mod authors can load custom scripts and perform basic debugging, with the option to publish mods directly from the toolkit.
BG3 Cross-Platform Modding in the Works
Furthermore, PC Gamer highlighted a community-made "BG3 Toolkit Unlocked," uploaded by modder Siegfre on Nexus, which includes a full level editor and reactivates previously disabled features in Larian's editor. This development comes despite Larian's initial caution about providing players with full access to all of its development tools. "We are a game development company, we're not a tools company," Vincke previously told PC Gamer, emphasizing that while players have substantial creative freedom, not all tools from the development process would be supported for users.
Vincke also revealed that the studio is working on supporting cross-platform modding, acknowledging the complexity of the task. "It's not the easiest thing in the world because we have to make it work on consoles and on PC," he explained. "We'll start with the PC version. The console version will come a bit later because it has to go through a bunch of submission processes. It also gives us the time to see whatever goes wrong and fix it."
In addition to modding enhancements, BG3's Patch 7 introduced a host of other features, including improved UI elements, new animations, additional dialogue options, and numerous bug fixes and performance optimizations. As Larian Studios continues to update the game, we can anticipate further developments on their plans for cross-platform modding.
