We liked the supernatural immersive sim Weird West quite a bit when it arrived earlier this year, and now it's even better thanks to the addition of mod support in the latest patch. A handful of mods are already available for the game, including one that changes it from an isometric perspective to first person.
The "quirky" first-person mod isn't officially supported by developer WolfEye Studios, but it was created by a Weird West developer: Joe Wintergreen, a systems designer on the game. Wintergreen said in a YouTube video that the project began with a quick first-person perspective mod that was "surprisingly cool but not particularly good," and then got underway in earnest a few months later when WolfEye asked if he'd come back for a week or two to polish it up for release as one of Weird West's first mods.
"I had to do this in as hacky and awful a way as possible because there wasn't much time, any changes I made had to not break the game's existing systems, and I had to touch as few files as possible," Wintergreen said. "So others could identify these changes easily I tagged them all 'Wintergreen mode.' Years earlier I'd pushed through some unrelated changes to the camera which were at the time called 'Joe mode.' So technically Weird West is always in either 'Joe mode' or 'Wintergreen mode.'"
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The full mod release makes a few changes from Wintergreen's initial first-person project, including repositioning the camera, "wacky situation bone offsets" to avoid weird clipping problems, the addition of a temporary third-person camera for actions that look too weird or boring in first person, adding a new sky and map edges, and "a lot of other little forgettable things like that."
"The result is still pretty janky and you'll definitely run into issues, but with any luck they shouldn't stop you from playing through the game," Wintergreen said. "Overall this was a pretty cool and fun thing to get the opportunity to do."
Weird West's mod support works through mod.io to enable browsing and installation from within the game on Steam, GOG, and Epic. People who have Weird West on Game Pass have to put a little more effort into it by downloading the mod separately and then unzipping it into the Weird West install directory. Once that's done, the mod will be automatically activated the next time the game is launched.
The first-person mod is the big one right now, but four other mods are currently available for Weird West as well: Long-Lasting Tools, No Friendly Fire, Undead Animals, and Heroes Gender Swap, which lets players change the appearance (but not the gameplay) of the Bounty Hunter, Pigman, Protector, and Devotee.
The 1.05 patch that added mod support also makes a handful of bug fixes:
- Fixes scenery shadows flickering, which was happening in some locations when rotating the camera on Xbox and Playstation.
- Rebinding the key for USE on PC now also correctly remaps the "drop" key when carrying objects around.
- If a shovel or pickaxe somehow ended up with zero durability when transferred out of the player's inventory, it will regain its full durability upon being retrieved.
- Fixed bounty board sometimes having a child as bounty target, resulting in an impossible-to-kill bounty.
- Fixed rare case during the Protector Journey where the Ravenous attack waves in Olvidado Pueblo were never ending, causing the objective to become stuck.
