Baldur’s Gate 3 Dev Responds To Fan Toxicity: ‘Please Stop That’

Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian Studios has announced it’s working on official mod support for the award-winning RPG for both PC and consoles. This will roll out sometime in 2024, but in the meantime, the studio has responded to fans who have been less than patient, calling out “threats and toxicity” within the community.

On February 25, Larian director of publishing Michael Douse (who recently advocated for a more humane video game industry at the DICE awards), posted on X (formerly Twitter), telling people who have harassed the development team to cut that shit out.

“We’ll be talking in depth about what our mod support will look like soon,” Douse wrote. “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.”

Douse went on to explain that Baldur’s Gate 3’s unexpected growth has made community moderation and communication more challenging, and in order to maintain the dialogue between the players and the team, those conversations “take time.”

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: pic.twitter.com/5xtsNjATiX

— Very AFK (@Cromwelp) February 25, 2024

“99.9% of our community are the absolute best and it’s because of them—thankfully—that my community team persevere,” he continued. “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.”

Douse closed off his thread, saying that if this behavior continues, the community team will have to “draw distance” from fans who have historically been able to communicate with the studio through the game’s Early Access period and since its August 2023 launch.

It sucks that such a statement has to be put out, but when a game grows to be a cultural phenomenon like Baldur’s Gate 3 has, there’s bound to be people lacking in social decorum that seep into a community. Hopefully, Douse’s statements effectively put out the fire, and if they don’t, I hope the developers are allowed to withdraw as needed for their own mental health.