Open Letter to Larian Studios from the Modding Community
As the situation has exploded over the last few days, we wanted to come together to clearly outline the whats, whys, and perceptions of Larian’s communication with the modding community.
Over the past few years, and especially most recently, the lack of communication from Larian caused a wave of dissatisfaction and concerns amongst some of its largest and most active modders. In response, many modders gathered together, sat down, and had a long discussion about the root causes and what must change. The responses in the last few days are great, but in the mod community's perspective, these announcements appease mod users and give nothing to mod authors. There was also nothing new regarding what we already knew and even repeats of what has been said in the past. Modders have been trying to engage in dialogue with Larian in good faith for many months. We acknowledge Larian has made some statement but we are looking forward to a better mutually beneficial future for Larian, Players and Modders.
Modders want more meaningful communication between Larian and the modding community. We want a better future between Larian and the mod maker community. See the last section for concrete, actionable points to that effect. This is important for the modding community's morale.
Modders are not paid employees. Modders are not paid consultants. Modders are passionate community members who work to create mods for their favorite games, expecting nothing back from the studio. We use our own time, resources, and energy to fuel the passion we have into mods for the community.
And this is why we are writing this letter. We love this game, we love this studio, and we love this community. Combined amongst modders, easily 1000s of hours have gone into creating mods for the games we love. It is why we are so concerned about the state of communication.
Below are some of the modders who have signed this letter; more can be found at the end.
“Modders are mad because Larian breaks their mods!”
No. We modders do not expect Larian devs to check in on every mod that exists for the game to make sure updates do not break mods. Modders understand very well that updates/hotfixes can and will break mods. It's unreasonable to expect Larian to push updates that do not break mods, and it's not what we are asking.
As of the writing of this letter, there are no official channels the modding community can use to communicate directly with Larian on any issue. Any information about modding from Larian comes in the form of Discord announcements, interviews, speeches, and tweets. Larian does privately speak with only 1 or 2 actual modders of the game but no one else.
The origins of this lack of communication started far before Baldur's Gate 3 was released. Issues and miscommunication go back as far as Divinity Original Sin 2.
Throughout the years of Early Access (October 6th, 2020 to August 3rd, 2023) and even after release, there was no communication regarding modding support until we finally heard something about it in this interview, which mentioned that mod support is "going to improve dramatically" once the PS5 release is out of the way.
On September 6, 2023, a little less than a month later, BG3 was released on PS5. However, there was a lack of further communication or insight into modding support until February 22nd, 2024, when they finally presented a fairly vague “we’re working on it.”
Post-release, they continued to leave out Osiris scripting raw story files, which resulted in the game-breaking if a single mod was present. The lack of these files prevents scripting, which makes more complex modding features impossible without external community support (i.e., the Script Extender). The community had to continue to work around this (as many know it to be called Mod Fixer).
Going back to Divinity: Original Sin 2 for a moment, a portion of the tools were 3rd party licensed, such as Granny2 and Wwise, and Larian did not get approval to release them, leaving out significant tools such as model import/export or audio. BG3 uses even more third-party tools this time (Graphine for textures, Noesis for GUI, and many more), which are also licensed and require approval. This situation means that we don't know if any of these will be included, but it's highly likely that if they didn't get permission for the D:OS2 mod tools, they won't get it for the BG3 tools either.
Two years before the last significant update of D:OS2 after the release of the 2nd Gift Bag, the modding tools stopped getting updated, which meant that modders could no longer edit any maps without crashing the editor as the necessary map data wasn’t present (and these tools have not been updated to this day).
Additionally, a significant amount of information that helped mod D:OS2 came through informal channels, as there was nothing officially in place for communication with Larian for mod-related topics. However, by the time BG3 was released, we lost even the few communication channels we had.
All the mod tooling, modding, mod support, and mod knowledge for BG3 have been provided solely by passionate community volunteers. Larian has provided no official mod guidance. The existing page here is extremely lacking when it comes to assisting mod users and provides no useful information for mod makers.
The Larian Studios discord initially started as a fan-made community to support the studio and became a “gift” to Larian from the community. While many people who play BG3 may not be in this discord, it is a core center of the modding community for sharing knowledge, mods, and support amongst each other. This is where most people not only go to learn how to mod this game but also get support for their modded games.
Many modders have already abandoned the Larian server for various community-run servers, as it has become painfully clear that Larian is not using their discord to communicate with or assist mod makers.
The important part of this is that we are perfectly fine with volunteering our time to create and support mods for the game. Especially considering that there isn’t official mod support in the game, we understand that modding the game leads to it being, as one could say, volatile and prone to break on official game updates. However, when things do break - including problems that are not mod-related, there is an influx of players coming into the modding community, asking for help, complaining, and even outright harassing mod creators in and out of the community discord. Our community spends time addressing the concerns of these players while fixing our mods and tools to work for the new updates. Some of the updates required, especially for modding tools, can range from a few minutes to multiple days, and sometimes, they can even be so breaking that the mod will not work anymore.
Communication between Larian and the modding community has been non-existent since the loss of the informal channels we had in D:OS2, and there has been no support from Larian’s side to users on both modded and unmodded save games. Only after the drama related to discord moderation and the quitting of our support volunteers did Larian finally communicate with us… with ambiguous promises and a lack of address to the most important issues.
It’s important to provide a reminder that we are not here to hate on Larian. We love Larian's games; that’s why we have a bustling modding community. It is for this reason that we are writing this letter to improve the modding community, the longevity of this game, and the enjoyment of everyone who plays it. The one and only thing we are asking for is improved communication. We, of course, want official modding support, but that is not why we came together to write this letter. With that, we wanted to provide some suggestions to improve the situation:
Clarity of expectations regarding official modding support
Support a moderation team with proper guidelines on how to handle situations
Mention of issues related to patches/hotfixes
An investment in and maintaining of a presence in the community that doesn’t amount to marketing or social media
Larian, we love your work and the passion you put into your games. Some of us have been modding or making tools for your games for years, through multiple games, through thick and through thin. We do this because we care, and we want to see the community improve. All we ask is that if you do “love [us]," then please talk to us.
We do not condone contacting/harassing mod authors who did not sign. Please respect their choice.
We do not condone harassing signers.
If you are a mod author wanting to add their name to this list, please contact Eralyne on Discord.