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.
Agreed.
I have held a Bg3 Multiplayer guild for 2.5 years now and I can say we had a much higher completion rate in EA when the game could be finished in 8-15 hours (we just did the 8 hours that 1 time - it was a speed completionism run with highly experienced players) - but we saw a completion rate of about 30-40% with most runs 'failing' in the Underdark.
The current run completion rate is sits around 8%-10% on our Discord - and those take a lot of work to get across the finish line - we have a whole procedure we go through to check in on runs, and each run has a leader, a private text channel and a private voice channel and I audit the active runs once a week, reaching out to the leaders to get a status update if there hasn't been any activity. We have to swap out people who just disappear, or have life events and can't play for a bit - I have a team of admins who help recruit replacements. On the Larian forums the completion rate is probably closer to 1%-2% - with 90% of runs never getting out of Act 1. A full run can take about 50-80 hours.
We also have a Graveyard channel for honor runs that end in a TPK, and a Hall of Fame for honor runs that successfully complete. Runs that are abandoned are unceremoniously deleted.
I agree with everything you said here Owl. Good modding tools are essential to this game - and a core component of my long term strategy. This engine is absolutely brilliant for multiplayer, we just need smaller, less epic and sprawling adventures to run. Ideally, being able to run a 8-10 hour campaign for multiplayer would be a great start. We don't need a lot of cinematic stuff, or really any, it's not what people are primarily interested in on multiplayer runs.
very long term -I would like to run a persistent version of the city of Baldur's Gate that can be joined by scores of people and can be a jumping off point for other adventures. That may be a pipe dream until AI lets us simply program anything ourselves - because the engine would need a major overhaul to allow that to happen.
But holy shit that would be amazing.
