Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Request for a BG3 content mod kit

I’ve always been interested in story-telling, even though my main job is being a manager to a gander of devs who semi-hate their jobs.

I’d love a content-creation kit in the vein of NW2, where we can quickly assemble a story around the available assets in the game, without the need of an army of devs.

I had several stories in mind, and I’d like to share one with you to test whether there is appropriate ‘conflict’ and narrative drama.

So: a slovenly ‘hired-hand’ (you) is sent ‘on the cheap’ to a miserable, unremarkable village that has apparently been ‘cursed’: dejected imps hobble around, muttering incoherently about being ostracised – they feel bullied and dejected, and screech, repetitively, their insipid criticisms about the regular village folk to any and all who will listen.

No one listens.

They’re despised by the other village folk as conniving, vicious creatures, who were once taken in out of pity – but quickly became a menace to villagers: lewd and crass, alien in their horrid thirsts.

Armed with their oily cunning, the imps nonetheless secured the ear of a local baron, who, seeking to capitalise on the imps ‘plight’, took sympathy with the monsters, and said to them ‘I will be your shield and your light among those who call you vile and wrong – and henceforth, one whole fortnight of each year shall be known as ‘imp fortnight’, and those who seek to mock you shall have their livelihoods appropriately ruined, for the devils that they are!’

This is only a side-quest, but I would like all narratives to be ‘interlinked’: ultimately, there’s a megalomaniac ‘friend’ of the baron who’s siding with the imps and culling, quietly, any regular villagers who feel the imps are a poisonous presence in the place.

Spoiler: the megalomaniac is merely an evolved imp, who harbours nothing but ill-will towards the human-folk. This creature talks to them as though it were a friend – benign and cordial on the surface, but secretly seething with a feverous loathing of them.

If an imp kills a human woman or child, the megalomaniac always has an ‘alternative’ answer: the bloodthirsty trolls in the mountains, or feverish gnolls by the river. It was never the imps! And the megalomaniac says it all in such a pleasant, articulate manner that who could doubt the thing?

I’ll leave it at that. I want to get away from the ‘big bang’ epic starts to DnD stories and have a more lowkey beginning that’s built on what I believe to be human maliciousness, rather than some god that’s trying to take over the world – and you’re a secret god too etc. who will take them down.

I’d like the party members to be just a ragtag bunch of nobodies who have no ‘epic pasts’ and were, for the most part, losers of the highest order in this world. Even mere imps will give them so much trouble that they’ll barely come out alive – if even. Then I’d like to gradually, gradually ‘scale it’ up – but always leave the MC and his/her party as underdogs who are considered lightweights by the various antagonists around them.

How is this feedback for BG3?

Edit: I get you're requesting a development tool for creating your own campaigns (or something to that effect), but no one really needs to know what story you have planned for it.

BG3 needs an Elder Scrolls type of construction kit.

Agreed, that would be good.

Usually when you request a feature, you back it up with some supporting evidence as to why it would be worthwhile. You seem unusually 'reactive' towards what's just a simple plot synopsis.

Not sure why you're so angry.

I've seen many others here quote their own 'fan fiction', which is in the healthy spirit of 'giving back' to the community. It's called 'suggestions and feedback' - I made a suggestion and was just looking for some feedback on my idea.

Seems pretty simple to me.

Would be a great inclusion in a DLC.

I already asked them before when I made a thread with patch 7.0, they did not reply from what I seen. We are going to have to wait until someone is willing to make one themselves or reverse engineer the DOs2 code then compare it with the current games, and figure out what those additions do. I am new to modding so no clue how to do that.

Devs replying would be a lot easier lol.

Honestly, from a VERY realistic standpoint, I would be very surprised if this game even ends up with a content creator kit anymore. Larian has been avoiding the topic for a reason, the same way they've avoided talking about reactions. The overall scope of the game has evolved so much over the past year to the level where I'm not sure it's even in the game's best interests to allow for such a thing to even exist anymore.

Consider this: With the graphical/cinematic focus of the game being the main priority now, how would the community react to these tools, knowing that nothing they can create has any chance of even touching the same quality as the main campaign? No voiced cutscenes, and map/event design would likely end up greatly limited compared to what we see within the main campaign. Having such tools sounds good on paper, until you think about it further and realize that perhaps very few people will even care enough to engage with anything created through these tools, given the wildly differing priorities of the fanbase that seem to clash with the very concept of user generated content. We already see part of this from DOS:2 - a wildly popular game, but hardly anyone has ever done anything with the content creation tools there. The overall community's treatment of it has never really gone beyond a feature they can add to their checklist of things they can say makes the game great.

The way people in the DOS2 community speak of these tools is largely limited to knowing that they just exist, and because it exists there, it somehow means that BG3 should have it too. That's about it. No meaningful emphasis on what was actually made with those tools. Even looking at the Steam workshop discussions, NO ONE is talking about custom campaigns, they are all always talking about modding in changes to the core gameplay itself, like new races and classes and rebalancing adjustments. The few inquiries I saw for custom content like quest scripting go completely unanswered.

At that point, would it even be worth it to develop and release such tools for BG3 anymore?

It works for Solasta because the fanbase there is far more willing to handwave shortcomings away, the fanbase there prioritizes gameplay over literally everything else to an almost fanatical degree, and there isn't very much difference between the official campaigns and the user generated campaigns in terms of presentation. You literally can't step into the Solasta circles without tripping over discussion of some of the more prolific campaign maker designers that have created close to a dozen campaigns already, with people seriously arguing that many of the user campaigns are close to or above the main campaigns in quality.

But here in regards to what is already observed within the DOS2 community and now BG3? The difference is now guaranteed to be as wide as the main campaign and the user generated campaigns essentially being viewed as entirely separate games. For the most part, the interest in user generated content seems to begin and end at new character customization options, which can be done with or without toolset support. And I wouldn't hold it against Larian at all if they were to suddenly announce that they weren't going to pursue this any longer.

As someone that has an original piece of music that was used in a NWN module, what? I played NWN for years, but I wasn't playing the campaign, I was playing, and developing my own player made modules. People are still playing some of those modules today. Some of these content creators have left their modules running on the "Vanilla" game, and some have updated to the EE by Beamdog, but they're still available to play. You have to actually go find them now, because the hosting service that was initially used is closed down, but that involves finding out the address for the privately hosted server and connecting in game to that address.

I'm currently goofing off with Fallout 4, but if I wasn't playing with a lot of mods, I doubt that I'd be doing that. I imagine the same is true with Skyrim for a lot of players, if they weren't playing it heavily modded, they'd be doing something else. All but one of the companion mods I use in Fallout 4 have fully voiced characters with VAs, not ripping assets from the game for voices, and some of the ones available do that too, ripping assets from the game to make companions voiced. There's at least one mod that strips the voice from the main character too. I don't use it, I don't mind a voiced protagonist, but it's there. It depends on how involved the tools are, whether they'll really take off though. NWN was accessible to the nth degree, just about anyone could whip something up. I banged my head on the wall for a month or so with the Dragon Age Origins toolset, and finally just gave up.

NWN had a tool included to make cutscenes. It was infinitely easier with no voices, but if the tools are there to add cutscenes and voices, it's not going to be as big an obstacle as you seem to believe. Bethesda's tools evidently allow for it, lots of content on the Nexus that has fully voiced content, including stuff from the main character. Whether or not it competes with the main game is irrelevant, in order to play those mods, one would have to have the base game, at least, to play them. So those mods can still generate sales, if they take the internet by storm, and people want to play them. They can also sell expansions, for the same reason, if content creators are wanting to use assets from any expansions in their mods. A quick scroll through the Nexus on FO 4 can show how many mods require all of the expansions, or don't, or require some of them, but not all. 2 of my companion mods were updated this year to add content for the expansions, for example. Anyone wanting to experience the content those creators added will have to have the expansions, and so, they'll have to buy them.

NWN famously outright lives out of user generated content, and as you've said, it was super accessible. I'm basically saying that DOS2 was not despite that game's content creator supposedly being a big sticking point for the game. Yet with the amount of sales that game had, you'd think it would have a much larger modding community, right? Yet the way the community acts around it, it's just something that exists just to say that it's there.

Given Larian's history, such tools don't appear to be anywhere near as big of a focus for them, nor do their games really seem to attract that much of a modding community as a consequence. And it's clear at this point that the scope of BG3 has gone beyond what they initially expected when they first began the project, and their avoidance on this topic means I wouldn't be surprised if this is something they'll quietly cut from the game or push off to a definitive edition or something.

Sometimes it's not the tools, but the setting. This thread was opened by someone that wants to create FR content for the game, and I'd argue that the appeal, initially, for the tools in NWN was also the setting. DOS 2 was a good game, I didn't play it until I learned that Larian was doing this one. Having played it, I can't think of anything I'd like to add to that world. This may be a contributing factor to how few actual campaigns came out of those tools. This IP doesn't have that problem. In fact, the owners of it are still making new stuff, isn't 6th edition in the works currently?

I can't say that it would be great, or that it would be widely used, but I can say that I'd at least "look under the hood" to see what it's about. I like experimenting with tools, when they're available. I'm pretty sure I know a couple of people, at least, that would give this toolset a try, if for no other reason than to try to recreate what they did in NWN in this engine. Is it a gamble? I'm not sure, because I'm not sure what risk there is to including a toolset with the game. If it's like NWN, however, and is just the tools the dev use, it's not like it's going to have a large cost associated with it.

I'm inclined to agree, the interest for creating custom campaigns/adventures may be great enough here simply due to the fact that BG3 is a D&D product. It's also likely people would want to build adventures for other D&D settings, such as Ravenloft, Greyhawk or Dragonlance (or even for Mystara or Birthright).

However, a modkit/toolset also needs to be accessible enough to not scare people away. And there's difficulty... they'd need it to be accessible, yet powerful enough to build some interesting adventures.

Like the NWN 2 tools? They had a learning curve, but once you got it, it was great to use. The biggest "downfall" to that one was, I think, the lack of native MP support, which this game won't have an issue with, since it's built in.

I’ll admit I never used the NWN toolset – I just know it was considered accessible, and generated a lot of popular content. I’ll also admit I never played that content, but I have read up on the subject.

I’m not a game dev either, but as far as I’m aware, every ‘engine’ – in fact, every modern tech tool worth its salt – has some kind of kind of GUI. How long ago was the NWN toolkit? Surely these things have become more streamlined rather than more convoluted. Strip away the fancier modern graphics of BG3, and you have the same formula: writing, narrative triggers and ‘click and place’ assets, with various configurations.

I’m sure some scripting-savvy helps with some of the more esoteric narrative concoctions – but then again, wasn’t Hollow Knight made by just two people: an animator and a designer? Larian’s in-house toolkit almost certainly isn’t on the same level as Unity, but it has to be at least close – because why else continue with it, if it’s inaccessible to the non-techies on the team who are more design/narrative-orientated? It wouldn’t make any monetary sense.

The GUIs we use in work for ‘regular dev’ rapidly evolve, almost every few months. There’s no doubt Larian’s in-house tools have seen a few upgrades since DOS2, since you’re talking years here.

It would simply be a matter of exposing some ‘open source’ version of this for the layman designer.

It’s been well-established by now that cinematics don’t maketh the game. Aren’t most people ridiculing the BG3 effort? And voice acting was never a requirement for good writing – books don’t have it, and I’m happy enough to still get my main narrative food from pure text.

The success of a ‘story’ is primarily its words: you can gloss it up in pretty picture, fancy voices, bombastic music and fancy cinematics. But a turd is still a turd.
There seems to be some assumption that the content must be a ‘commercial success’ to be any kind of success at all – when that’s not what I’m aiming for. User-created content would be a hobbyist endeavour – you put it out for free, then see where things go after that. If there’s no interest from ‘the public’, there’s interest enough in trying to create game-content to justify giving it a shot.

That’s really all that’s being asked for. And I don’t believe it would cost an arm and a leg for them to expose a GUI they already surely use on a daily basis. If there’s a learning curve to go with it – no big deal. Better than nothing. And it can always be improved upon over time with some feedback. Can’t give feedback on something no one ever sees.

Yeah, basically like the NWN2 editor. It was easy enough to use, especially if you had previous experience with the toolset in NWN1, yet complex enough to build really good and interesting modules. And even without prior knowledge it was still comparatively easy to learn.
The TES construction kit is in a similiar vein, although a bit more complicated and less user-friendly in general. But you could still learn to do much of the basic stuff relatively quick, the more advanced stuff requires some dedication though. The learning curve for the TES CK is definitely a lot steeper than it was for NWN 1 & 2.


NWN turned 20 years old last month, the first iteration of the toolset was released with the base game.
It was (and still is) really accessible, though it certainly helps if you can at least script to some degree. If the somewhat dated graphics, especially for creatures, don't scare you away, I'd highly recommend getting a copy of NWN EE on Steam during a sale.

This tool was a godsend when I was first learning scripting. By paying attention to what it did, and being sure to credit the editor whenever I used it for scripts in whatever I was doing, I got fairly decent at scripting. My two favorites were both in NWN, one in my own module, where I made a cave opening require a "key" to access it, and in a friend's module, where they made a key to the next level of the dungeon that was supposed to be bound to whomever looted it, but wound up bound to the mob that dropped it, and I made and posted a script to fix that on his forum.

https://neverwintervault.org/project/nwn1/other/tool/lilac-souls-nwn-script-generator-v23

NWScript wiki definition: ‘It is based on the C programming language’. Yeah, that doesn’t surprise me considering it’s ancient. ‘Simplified C’ and all… I write code for a living, but everything I know is Node/Express/TypeScript. Apparently all of JS is ‘heavily inspired’ by C/C++, but I’ve never known anyone that uses C-type languages – so no comment.

I’d just be very intrigued to know what Larian use – because I’m assuming it would be pseudo-code these days for game scripting that’s transpiled into the ‘real thing’. But that’s me talking from a different dev world – ie React Native ‘magically’ becomes Java and Xcode.

No way would I call myself a dev guru – but I am a lead in my area. All code is not the same, though, unfortunately – and even the apparently accessible Python is double Dutch to me.

I believe the Hollow Knight animator/designer duo learned some basic scripting too to get by – but still didn’t need a degree in it. The game was, IMO, a masterpiece of originality.

Thing is, they made a shit-tonne of original assets for that game – and then designed a shit-tonne of original mechanics and animations to go with them. All primarily through a UI, from what I saw from their dev video.

The request here is to reuse the assets. And build a story around them. And assets are the biggest time-sink by a long shot.

There are some characters I have in mind for my ‘tale’ that would require a unique asset, such as a chimera-like bounty hunter, reluctantly tasked with ‘sleeping’ the low-life PC – but you could always just use a knoll asset and narrative description to define the other two heads, who, I imagined, are there to ensure he completes his tasks – even if he doesn’t quite agree with them, to put it mildly.

So many auld scéals that could be told in this universe. The assets are excellent. Gameplay mechanics mostly on point.

All we need is a wee GUI…