We are working on official mod support [...] which includes establishing a pipeline that lets mod authors release their mods across different platforms.
Together with the platform holders, we are working on making this a reality, and are forming a team to support mod curation. We�re aiming to offer modding support for things like classes, UI, customisation, spells, and certain assets and game mechanics.
As this is no small task, we hope to introduce the initial stages of modding support in our next big patch, which is still several months away.
So probably (?) no story/level editor, but stable, cross platform mod releases.
When I asked about custom environment support they responded with.
The team is currently working on the mod support and we'll be announcing more of its features as soon as we know!
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.
classes, UI, customisation, spells, and certain assets and game mechanics
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"
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.
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.
