Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Official Mod Tool from Larian

When are we getting it?

I don't think they ever promised anything in that sense, and even if they end up releasing some tools, I wouldn't really expect anything more than the bare minimum in terms of functionalities.

Or to put it in other terms: we aren't going to see a BG3 total conversion anytime soon.

,,I don't think they ever promised anything in that sense"
43:00

Yeah, that sounds like a confirmation of what I said.

"We will support modding, maybe, eventually... somehow" is not exactly the strongest commitment to deliver anything specific (or particularly versatile).

Totally no promise.

What do you people think that "supporting modding" means, exactly?

Don't know about anyone else, but, from Larian, I expect it to mean "Do nothing directly to inhibit or block mods, and occasionally talk about the cool things modders are doing, sometimes.", and not a hair or finger lifted more.

That would be my take on it too. Big on the talk but not so much on the delivery.

Nailed it, Niara. That was my point from the beginning and this is more or less the extent I'm expecting from their "support for modding".

Maybe release a couple of "gift bags" including some of the most popular mods sometime down the line, like they did with DOS 2, and little more on top of it.

And to be clear, I'm not even trying to shit on Larian here, it's just the way things usually go when a dev goes for a non-committal statement like "We plan to support modding... someday, somehow".

From a dev point of view providing official modding tools is a bit of a nightmare. When you provide official tools you add a whole other layer of needed support and the game design is actually more complicated as you need to leave various hooks open for that modding support.

By allowing modding to exist they give the community the options but even this creates headaches. You see on forums, players begging devs to make mod A work, or why does Mod B not work.

Now if they wanted to do an adventure creator, THAT would excite me, allowing the players to create more real content. Even that however can be a nightmare from the dev side and lets not forget the whole mess of they have to license this crap from Hasbro.

And this may be the biggest "screw you" of all of BG3 for me.

It's not even just about the tool itself.
Flexible and powerful modding tools (and I mean stuff that allows you for far more than "Move these character around a bit and add few items") inherently need detailed documentation, which is a lot more work on top of it.

Sure they would have to offer some level of support for the actual modding tool but once they have it up and running and bug-free (I know - Larian) that is as far as support has to go. Even documentation doesn't have to be encyclopaedic - look at Bethesda and the CK for Skyrim.

I think your wish for an adventure creature might be more of a runner - something like the Solasta games maybe.

Yeah, great idea – but so many barriers as others have mentioned…

I never used the NWN ‘adventure creator’, but apparently the content it produced was very successful – and people even still make use of it to this date – is it a million miles from the suggested idea, in other words?

While not the same genre, I did give The Binding of Isaac ‘mod tools API’ a go, and it’s very well-written.

Of course that’s pure code, and what you really want here is some kind of UI that lets non-devs build out the ‘adventures’.

I’d be surprised if Larian hasn’t already created something like this already. The Death Thrash devs do a good job of updating everyone on progress. They mentioned building their own tools had a huge productivity boost – they’re only 2 devs (from what I gather)…

Anyway, the licence issue is probably the biggest hurdle here.

WOTSC do seem pretty militant about what can be done with their material etc.

Have very low confidence in this ever materialising, but it would be very entertaining…

Maybe worth quoting Salo's post from yesterday here:


So probably (?) no story/level editor, but stable, cross platform mod releases.

I don't know about you, but after years of silence I can't handle this level of transparent communication from Larian, haha.

See a Level/story/campaign creation tool would get me REAL excited as it would give the game incredible replay ability. Just "modding" can maybe give it some but no where near the impact of new content.

For my part, I remember modding added years to my playing Skyrim.
I like what I see, so far.

When I asked about custom environment support they responded with.
Which is unfortunately very vague but it indicates things haven't been fully nailed down.

I have a theory that what Salo was talking about wasn't what the tools will allow us to do. But rather what they will offer with the cross platform modding support. It's mentioned right there with "Together with platform holders". The reason I think this is because one major issue with cross platform mod support is platform holders have different rules around it. Sony infamously requires that any mods not feature custom assets. Which is an immediate limitation you'll notice if you play Skyrim on PS4/PS5 and check what mods are available and compare it to the Xbox version.

Salo's message is also very carefully worded. They say.
Those are all theoretically things that wouldn't violate Sony's policy. Mentioning "certain assets" implies that they're going to be very rigid with what will be allowed and not allowed. This would also obviously exclude custom environments as that would rely on custom assets. They also don't mention much more basic things like custom armor, weapons and races which we can do right now without tools. It goes without saying that the cross platform mod curation wouldn't apply to the PC platform and Valves Steam Workshop which has no limitations.

I fully believe that they will release an environment editor I just wish they'd give us peace of mind finally and say "yep. It's coming"
I fully agree with this. If they don't allow for the creation of custom environments it will cause the modding community to stagnate and never reach it's full potential. The only reason I could see them do this is because of licensing issues. Since they use some licensed tech in the engine. (Graphene for textures, Wwise for sound/audio, Granny for models, Noesis for GUI and so forth). However considering they mentioned custom GUIs will be supported that implies that they will reverse engineer those components for the SDK (or replace them outright). They also used Granny for DOS2 and that didn't stop them from releasing their Maya plugin and a tutorial for importing models. Considering they were willing to massively delay the official tools by almost a year I somewhat doubt they'd release them in a half implemented state. It would be genuinely disappointing if they did and it would make the community completely lose trust in Larian. Especially considering they promised it would be coming back in September.

Looking at Solasta again, seems on that side of things the modding is pretty healthy?

Checking on nexus mods the top Solasta mods, most are new content , quests, and adventures. Lots of campaigns being made.

BG3 is light years behind for these kind of mods. Most mods right now are either cheats/easy mode xxx, more pants (or less...) or more items.

Thanks for adding the quote here as well!

I will pass along your questions so when we communicate more later on we can be sure to answer as many as possible