The colony-cum-misery simulator has enjoyed nothing less than fantastic review throughout its Early Access life, finally pushed to a final release on October 18 of 2018. Since then, players around the world have been busy watching their favorite colonists get eaten alive by man-hunting rabbits, perishing in cave-ins, and the occasional event of being burned alive by an errant Molotov. On the back of RimWorld’s recent surprise announcement of DLC called RimWorld Royalty that arrived at a $20 price point with the long-awaited 1.1 update, comes yet another announcement.
RimWorld is coming to GOG in a DRM-free version of the popular title on March 3rd. Not that RimWorld had any specifically intrusive DRM packages that came along with the executable aside from Steam’s standard wrapper, but the inclusion on GOG does mean that there is a clean version of the game with no dependencies, for posterity. Yet along with this announcement comes an issue that other developers have had to surmount.
RimWorld uses the Steam Workshop to host an impressive litany of mods, roughly 13,000 total. These mods can shake the game up drastically, adding new mechanics and UI, and keep the content in RimWorld fresh well beyond what the base game offers (which is quite a lot, to be fair). As mods tend to, these creative community constructs craft creative content consistently capable of changes from difficulty to accessibility, and everything in between.
In the recent 1.1 patch, Ludeon Studios spent a fair amount of time working on mods being a bit less of a hassle for players to experiment with, allowing them to tailor the game to their preferences, whatever that may entail.
That effort does not mark the end of Ludeon Studios efforts to support mods, however, as Tynan Sylvester has taken to Twitter outlining what he’s looking for in terms of a third-party mod support system. The requests aren’t necessarily simple, either.
Granted, it seems a bit of a reach beyond what many mod platforms currently offer, but it would take even a further degree of finagling mods away from players, where the mod system could identify what version was being run and deploy the necessary package appropriately, all in real-time.
It’s likely that Tynan is merely writing out his wishlist in regards to how mods will interact with the GOG version, as without mod support the consumers using the platform will likely experience a version of the title with less content than is ideal.
However, it shows the studio is rather well-grounded in regards to what the community views as a large facet of the title, and looking to support mods to add even more content to RimWorld bodes well for players that may be interested in picking it up on GOG.
