For this to even make sense, they would need to also add support for creating/adding cutscenes and voice acting.
Adding voice acting
was a feature in DOS2. Assuming they created an editor for adding cutscenes they could just let us use it. It's unlikely Larian licensed a custom editor just for cutscenes it's much more likely they upgraded DOS2's toolset to include a cutscene editor. It's also not unprecedented for a developer to let people use their own cutscene editor. The editors for The Witcher 1 and Dragon Age Origins came with robust cutscene editors. Dragon Age Origins was so robust it led to a highly impressive machinima being produced called
Warden's Fall.
Having now dungeons filled only with monsters, where the story is solely told by dialogues and/or lorebooks would be jarring.
I strongly disagree. One thing you're not considering is that this would actually be more appealing for coop play. Since players would actually prefer a more hack and slash approach to dungeon design in this respect. One member on this forum mentioned a flaw Baldur's Gate 3 has is because it's such a long game the vast majority of coop playthroughs never make it out of Act 1. So having custom dungeons would be extremely appealing to players who prefer to play in coop. Additionally, Neverwinter Nights had hundreds of modules akin to this.
The problem is, that even if they do this, there is no modder or group of modders who will have resources to pull off cinematics and voiceovers on the level of original BG3.
You're making a lot of assumptions. Namely that
A) there wouldn't be a group dedicated enough to create cinematics or voice overs. Which is inaccurate. There are extremely notable high profile examples recently. A great example is there's a mod in development right now called Fallout London which even got Astarion's voice actor to contribute to it.
B) that because someone might make a cutscene you personally don't like, that the developer shouldn't work towards it. Just because people might make art that isn't visually appealing doesn't mean it shouldn't be allowed. There's incredible value in modding for it's ability to inspire developers to then get jobs in the industry or grow their skills and start companies based upon it. Killing Floor's developer Tripwire admitted in an interview their company wouldn't exist had it not been for a modding contest Nvidia setup for Unreal Tournament 2004. Which brought the team together to produce the mod Killing Floor.
That's why I think this mod support will be focused on gameplay features and/or UI, not on adding now story content.
The only reason I can see Larian neutering the SDK in comparison to DOS2 wouldn't be because of any of the things you listed. It would be because they use licensed components in the engine. A good example is they use Granny for models, Noesis for GUI and so forth. However none of these are insurmountable on Larian's part and they've already announced being able to make custom GUIs. It would be extremely disappointing if they prevented us from making custom environments as it would lead to the modding community not being anywhere close to reaching its full potential. However Swen has said in an interview back in July that custom environment support was one of the things they're looking into so I'm very hopeful they don't abandon it.
Seems like they were perfectly content with the status quo of being non-comunicative about mods until the community forced their hand.
I'm unfortunately inclined to agree. As everyone has pointed out previously Larian has remained conspicuously mum about what they're working on. And it's only recently due to the recent Hotfix that it's started to cause issues.
And I keep seeing this awful comparison, which publishers stop all updates as soon as the game is released?
The previously used example, Volition with Saints Row, kept updating it for another 6 months before they went under a few months later. Even Redfall and Gollum got updates.
I also agree with this. It's actually more in-line with a practice developers have started doing recently where they ship a very unfinished game, then patch it later. No Man's Sky is one of the best examples of this where the 1.0 release of the game was barely finished and didn't feature promised features like multiplayer. And after years of patches it is finally what the developer initially promised. With Baldur's Gate 3 in general it feels like its first year is just another unadvertised Early Access period and it's likely the eventual Definitive Edition of the game will be the true finished product.
