So I have a long and rather disastrous relationship with “Baldur’s Gate 3”. I bought the game as soon as it was released for Xbox Series X in December of 2023, and have given it multiple attempts to play through the game since then. Every single attempt has ended in tragedy.
My most recent foray into BG3 came just last week, when I tried to make a new character and start fresh. I tried a Warlock, then when that didn’t go well, a Paladin. The classes weren’t so much the problem, at least not this time. Since I’m a noob who has never beaten the game, I even started them at “Explorer”, the easiest difficulty.
The problem was the mods.
You see, BG3 is a game that is supposedly well supported by a thriving dev community making mods for the game. And indeed, the Mod Manager is chock full of mods for the game, which I found encouraging. You see, my favorite game (Starfield) is also well supported by a mod community, and I play it with literally dozens upon dozens of mods.
Well, I decided – since I don’t give two damns about getting the achievements for the game – I would install a few mods for BG3 before this most recent attempt. At first I tried three popular mods: One modified the look of Eldritch Blast, another doubled your XP received, and a third changed the look of your dice to a diamond style appearance.
The game crashed. Hard.
I tried restarting, it crashed again.
I restarted the console, then started the game, and managed to make it to the main menu so I could test which mods might be the problem. I enabled and disabled them one by one, uninstalled all three mods in turn, with no improvement. With that done, I finally restarted the game again, after I checked if all of the mods were still gone (they were), and tried to play again.
Crash. Then I couldn’t even restart the game at all, no matter what I did.
Uninstalled the game, then reinstalled. Restarted the console, launched into the game, and decided the Warlock was apparently cursed, and thus made the Paladin, instead. But I ran out of time and patience for mods, and don’t plan to use any ever again. Which is a real shame, because they can make a lot of positive additions to a game, to be frank.
Now here’s my issue. I keep being told that “Baldur’s Gate 3” is so much better than “Starfield”, and I’m sure it is in many ways, but when it comes to mods I find BG3 to be extremely underwhelming. If I can’t even get BG3 to play with even just a small handful of mods at most, where I can play SF with upwards of a hundred mods, which is the better game?
I expect most will still claim BG3 is the superior game of the two, but don’t come crying to me that you are tired of the vanilla experience, while I’m playing through new mod content in “Starfield” years from now.
