Shadows of Doubt gets Steam Workshop support

I say it every time we cover ColePowered Games and Fireshine Games’ Shadows of Doubt, but it is one of the most interesting and ambitious concepts in gaming, without a shadow of a doubt. However, some have taken to criticize it or its developer for the rapid early access to full release status, and “lack” of immersion they themselves as players want to see. To a degree, I get it. I wasn’t the nicest with the early access preview either. However, mods changed my tune around the time of the full release, and I got heavily invested in my detective’s story.

Well, hopefully, that story can continue with the latest news this week. That news is the addition of Steam Workshop support. Not a massive update, but one that is brilliant if you’re a fan of making Shadows of Doubt more immersive, even as a rat detective or with those other modifiers from last year. The news post on Steam notes:

“Stretch your creative muscles as well as your detective ones with new modding tools and full Steam Workshop support. These new workshop tools allow you to create your own citizen conversations, v-mails[,] and newspaper articles. Change certain in-game item properties like weapons, books[,] and consumables. The Dialogue & Player Interactions system functionality has been expanded to enable players to create new citizen interactions, enabling the creation of side quests and similar new objectives. All of your mods can then be uploaded directly to the Steam Workshop and managed by the in-game mod menu.”

However, it is not just Steam Workshop-supported mods you can mess around with; Shadows of Doubt also supports the mods from Mod.io natively, too. That is a fantastic thing simply because there are between eff-and-all mods there at the time of writing. A grand total of 8 mods populate the Workshop. That said, I hope those mods on Mod.io migrate over simply for ease of use for players, but also because I can’t remember what mods I did and didn’t use before. Most of them were about immersion.

I will say this (and this will be a pun this time) without a shadow of a doubt, Shadows of Doubt is still buggy, and the majority of mods could do more “damage” to that stability. Don’t get me wrong, I do love modding, but the procedurally generated nature and level of ambition in Shadows of Doubt sometimes go hand-in-hand with mods to skip off into the sunset of soft-locking saves or silly little bugs. So be warned when that or even crashes happen.