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.
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.
