Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Game Master GM Mode Feedback - active mod lists by campaign

So here's a hypothetical scenario:

I am playing a modded solo game with myself, and my friend Matt invites me to play a D&D adventure.

In order to join Matt's game, I would have to de-activate all of my mods every time I wanted to play, then turn them back on to play solo.

This is a huge barrier to modding. It all but guarantees GM'd campaigns won't really be able to use mods, and strongly discourages people from modding the single player game if they also want to play modded campaigns.

My game client should receive a list of mods when starting a campaign or joining one, and if I have them available, they are activated and loaded.

Stretch-goal: even more ideal would be a system that streamlines downloading new mods so there's no setup. But hey, not even NWN did that. : )

The problem gets even worse if you imagine multiple campaigns and custom arenas! Imagine having to swap mods on and off inside steam just to play. That would not be fun.

Well with steam workshop downloading mods is very streamlined. What would be awesome is if you had some mods installed, and you were hosting a D&D game, anybody who joined your game would be prompted to automatically download and activate mods you have from steam workshop (or even more awesomely, they could connect to Nexus and download them automatically, but that's a lot to ask).

But something basic like automatically activating/deactivating your mods when joining a game would be a good start.

I really hope that Larian realizes how important something like this is going to be. If I'm creating a campaign with custom maps and custom content, I don't want to force all the players to download something I've uploaded to the steam workshop just to play with me. The game should be able to recognize any external assets needed for the campaign to function, and automatically download them from the host.

This is extremely important for modding and custom campaign creation!!

I have the opposite oppinion.
I want players to be ready when they join the campaign and have all the mods preloaded so we can start playing right away.
They have to download them to begin with anyway, so I fail to see the problem with a bit of player-side preparation.

An "autoload" feature would be convinient when playing with "randoms", but I doubt that will happen a lot.

There's a case to be made for player responsibility and preparation actually leading to a better experience, but if you have a bunch of mods installed and especially with any sort of personal tweaking it could be tedious for players to install them, especially for the less tech-savvy. Being able to transfer mods directly from the host to other players would smooth out the experience a lot.

I figure have the players prepare their character backstories and whatnot, not updating their files.

I tend to forget not everybody will play this through steam and will have to do a bit more than just click the subscribe button.

Indeed.
For non steam users some form of autoload for mods will be extremely convenient.

I remember the hassle with hak packs for NwN.
Even when I gave my players a direct link to the files and talked them through the process of installing them some always managed to do it wrong

I think this is a pretty killer feature for GM mode / Arena mode in general.

But it's also relevant to single-player mod too...

Single-player campaigns will also have mod conflicts. i.e, if two mods change the same thing about something (such as modifying a player class or a terrain set) you'd need to log into steam to manually disable and enable each mod just to change campaigns...

Not if mods can be enabled/disabled through the ingame menu like D:OS 1

Yes, but you'd still have to manually click a dozen buttons every time you want to change campaigns or mods.

A by-campaign list of required mods is pretty important to make mods accessible and easy to use for players, rather than a PITA.

They could? How?

By clicking on the mods tab in the main menu and then selecting (or de-selecting) the relevant mods.

Do we have any word on whether this is taken care of yet?