Taking home Game of the Year at The Game Awards in 2023, Larian Studio’s Baldur’s Gate 3 blew us all away and held us captive in The Forgotten Realm for hundreds of hours. We don’t know about you, but we’re still trapped. In that time, there were a handful of really great mods available only to PC players, with armed-and-dangerous Astarion being perhaps the most iconic. Well, Michael Douse, director of publishing at Larian, has now revealed that BG3 mods will be coming to PS5 and Xbox in the future. Yes, you read that right.
With hotfix 19 now out in the wild, fixing various bugs and crashes, Douse reveals that Larian is working on “a robust, cross-platform plan for mod support to be released later in [the] year” for Baldur’s Gate 3. “We have a system but it needs to be tested and still requires work.” Packed with countless incredible adventures, BG3 is already one of the best RPG games on PS5 and Xbox – and one of the best games you can play of any genre, in fact.
“We generally don’t talk about things [until] they’re ready, but as you may have read, we’re making an exception”, Douse explains. “We love our modding community and we want to support them.”
This has spurred on efforts to develop more official tools and support for mods, not just on their traditional home on PC, but also bringing BG3 mod support to consoles at long last.
Given the frequent patches to the open-world game, mods on PC need regular updates from their creators to keep functioning: “I understand that it sucks when the game is updated and mods break. Our community teams will start talking with and looping in [the] modding community” going forward to ensure a smoother experience, and all of that knowledge will eventually transfer to console.
As of now, it’s unclear which mods will be available on PS5 and Xbox. While it could be a large selection, it’s equally possible that it’s only a small handful of less game-changing additions. For example, when Bethesda implemented console mods for Fallout 4 and Skyrim, these were generally limited to small tweaks to existing features, rather than overhauls or brand-new additions – especially on PlayStation, though this was at Sony’s behest.
Nevertheless, the arrival of official BG3 console mods will surely be a momentous occasion for many, with the potential for it to feel like a new PS5 game or new Xbox game, depending on how substantial the support is.
For an idea of what you could see, take a look at the best Baldur’s Gate 3 mods currently available on PC, from even more spells to raising the party limit to a staggering 16 members. Of course, there are also the various mods that add firearms, which we hope make the jump to console so we can deck out Astarion with an assault rifle.
Sadly, with only a vague release date of later this year, we’ve got some waiting to do until then. So, if you’re still not entwined in BG3, why not mentally prepare for the new Elden Ring DLC by checking out how Shadow of the Erdtree will give you ten more reasons to break your controller? If that’s not your style, then perhaps medieval knights fighting attack helicopters in Kingmakers is.