Paradox Mods is a new initiative from Paradox Interactive to bring PC style mods to console games. PC mods are coming to Surviving Mars on Xbox One first through the new service.
Paradox and Microsoft announced the new service today, and it is available now. Paradox Mods is a one-stop shop for PC mod creators to publish their mods on multiple platforms at once and allows for more kinds of mods to come to console titles. Surviving Mars has 100 mods available at the time of this writing, all available on Xbox One.
Paradox has been developing Paradox Mods for around a year, according to an interview with Anders Törlind. Törlind is the product owner of Paradox Mods, and he says he believes getting mods to console players is integral.
“As we started to distribute our own games, and as we started to move into the console space, we realized that, in order to serve all of our customers with mods—and we think mods are a very important part of the gaming experience—there would be a segment of our players that couldn’t enjoy modding; neither the act of modding the game, nor using mods. […] We investigated various solutions, but we came up with the conclusion that in order to be able to serve every operating system—be it console or PC—and every distribution platform out there, we needed to have a system that was completely agnostic from both,” he said.
Paradox Mods is that system, and it allows modders to get their mods into the hands of players on any system supported. The company is still testing the system — and working with platform holders to allow its more open modding system — but a partnership with Microsoft has resulted in the service coming to Xbox One.
Paradox games like Stellaris and Cities Skylines also support the Paradox Mods service but don’t have Xbox One support yet. The publisher would also like to expand its mod support to PS4 but has nothing to say on that front. Bethesda released mods for Fallout 4 on PS4 and Xbox One, but they were severely scaled back from PC mods. PS4 mods were also hampered by restrictions.
