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Remember the Daggerfall Unity GOG Cut? Odds are you don’t. It was, in essence, a pre-modded version of The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall, in the excellent fan-made Daggerfall Unity engine reimplementation. The idea was that if you wanted to play Daggerfall but didn’t want to go through the rigamarole of modding it into modernity, you could just download the GOG Cut and be on your way.

But there were issues. It quickly became outdated as the mods it included got new updates that GOG didn’t wrap into the GOG Cut, and even if it had kept everything on its latest version, some of the included mods just didn’t quite mesh. It wasn’t the best way to play Daggerfall in the 2020s, and ended up delisted from GOG’s storefront earlier this year after languishing there since 2022.

But GOG is taking another crack at modding with its one-click mods program, which will let you install stuff like Skyblivion, HoMM 3: Horn of the Abyss, and other meaty mod projects much like you install any other game on the platform. As it begins to flex its fan-content muscles, it says its learnt a lot from the DF GOG Cut experience.

“In this case, usually, for the mods it will be on them [to keep mods up-to-date],” says GOG’s Rudy de Marco. “They will have more access than previously, because at the end of the day it will be easier for everyone to trust them to actually update their stuff whenever they want, right? So that’s how we plan to go.”

(Image credit: Bethesda Softworks)

So, presuming mod authors keep on top of their updates, we shouldn’t run into yet another scenario where mods on GOG end up woefully outdated compared to their counterparts on sites like Nexus Mods. It’s not a free-for-all, though: GOG of course has to approve which mods it hosts on its service, and de Marco tells me that the store does “give heads up” to studios whose games are being modded on the platform. “It’s for us, but for the mod creators as well, right? There are stories in the past where mods could have been shut down completely for a specific franchise, and it’s not something where we want to put anyone at risk… We are kind of a middleman to make sure that everything’s okay.”

I get the impression that GOG’s come quite a way from the first days of the DF GOG Cut. Which, you know, you’d certainly hope is the case. In our chat, de Marco told me that assembling the DF GOG Cut was so ramshackle that “Our main person in charge of [the GOG Cut] did not have a premium account on Nexus, so he could send one message a day to people that weren’t his friend.” Kind of made securing all the necessary permissions for mod authors a bit hard.

I’m interested to see where GOG goes with modding. The whole scene has hit interesting times in the wake of the departure of the 24-year head of Nexus Mods, with some users fearing the site’s new owners might put the stalwart platform on a path to enshittification. Perhaps we’re due a shake-up in the mod-hosting scene. Perhaps GOG is well-placed to take advantage of it. It probably has a premium account by this point.

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After providing a go-to place for very big and very buggy Fallout 4 mod Fallout: London last year, GOG have just announced that they’re expanding their efforts to be a go-to place of you want to easily play high-profile or must-have mods for certain games.

The old and also new game merchants have revealed a new initiative aimed at offering “seamless mod integration”, as well as announcing that they’ll be hosting Skyblivion – the modding project remaking Oblivion in Skyrim’s engine that currently targeting a release this year – when it arrives.

Dubbing this integration push GOG One-click Mods, the retailers have tapped a selection of mods that either provide new stuff to do or key tweaks deemed can’t miss. The goal is to let you avoid the perils of time-consuming mod installation when you fire up the affected games.

The initial group of “handpicked” mods includes the aforementioned Fallout: London, Doom 3’s Phobos mod, Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines’ Unofficial Patch, and Heroes of Might and Magic 3’s Horn of the Abyss mod. Skyblivion’s set to join that gang once it comes out.

We asked GOG what went into selecting those specific mods as the starter group, wondering if factors like established relationships with certain modding teams or a desire to host mods for games that sell well on the store had played into it. “It was a mix of all those things, frankly,” a GOG spokesperson responded, “from the mods’ popularity and our existing relations to the quality, the quantity and the type of content they offer.

“Cultural impact also played a big role. Horn of the Abyss, for instance, is now an absolute must-have for anyone who loves Heroes of Might and Magic 3; once you have it, you cannot imagine playing without it. On top of that, some of our team members have deep ties with the modding scene, offering – completely unbiased, of course – insights on which mods we should prioritise. In some cases, it made the outreach process and contact with creators much easier – simply because there are mods we know and love, and communities we’re already part of.”

GOG claim this initiative “definitely takes things to another level entirely” compared to what’s gone before. “While we are actively working to expand it further, community response to these initial titles will be a key factor in shaping what comes next,” the spokesperson added.

It’ll be interesting to see what affect this initiative has going forwards. Right now, it only affects a few mod for a few games, so I can see myself using it to have an easier time when jumping into Skyblivion for the first time and giving Fallout: London another go. However, it’ll have a long way to go to factor into the largely Steam and Nexus Mods-based nature of the majority of the modding I do when I’m not grabbing one of these big, once-in-a-blue-moon total conversions.

It’s not going to be possible to seamlessly integrate every little mod, and if certain key mods for certain games end up as part of the inititive and others don’t, that could potentially cause some headaches. We’ll just have to see how things go.

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GOG says it won’t repeat its ill-fated Daggerfall GOG Cut with its new one-click modding program, not least because it can send more than one message a day to modders now

GOG announce a new new one-click system aiming to “take things to another level entirely” for fuss-free modding