Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Mods

This imo is the modding we haven't seen with DOS's, the content adding stuff. Mechanics is where we saw most of the work. Attributed to the tool not being friendly enough and if I recall they didn't want us messing with the main game locked out, which I felt was a mistake as Bethesda sits back and makes millions as other devs fight the wrong fight.

I don't think there was a deliberate decision to lock stuff out, it was more an oversight and/or lack of resources. I don't know for certain but that's my take on it.

Bethsoft benefited from a long period of high-profile games where modding tools were created and adapted. Conversely, the modding scene has taken a bit of a hit in recent years with Bethsoft's lack of output, the likes of formerly modder-friendly Bioware going full-EA and the prevalence of online gaming locking modders out completely. But it's not a lost cause, it's just gone through a bit of a lull. In the case of BG3, we've already seen a bit of the old Bethsoft scene with Norbyte's utilities having already been adapted and having undergone a couple of revisions: while not everything is done (it's been a week!) it's now possible to make some changes even at this early stage.

I don't fully agree that the modding scene has taken a hit. Skywind, Skyblivion and beyond skyrim are going to be some of the biggest total conversion mods in history. We'll see whether or not Microsoft will continue to allow OpenMW to progress in reverse engineering the entire construction set and engine.
I think that Larian has nothing to lose in proving all the tools they can provide without infringing upon someone elses IP.

There's so much to remember in life, but I'm pretty sure they locked us out of adding content to the main game.

It'll be interesting to see how far they'll get (or have got, for that matter). I'm aware of several attempts to do this already but they tend to either end up being shut down because the lawyers get trigger-happy or the scope is simply way too ambitious to ever fully realise. btdt, even on a very much smaller scale...

I am aware of one total conversion for Oblivion whose name I forget offhand, largely as I never quite got around to playing it, but that was all original content and an awful lot of it. It was quite highly rated as I recall.

The main problem I have ascertaining how active a modding scene is comes down to everything being completely spammed to death by endless reshade packages; it can be quite hard to factor them out of the equation in order to see how many actual mods exist. It used to be bad retexes that were the problem but the plague of reshades is much worse!

i agree with vometia in regards to the decline in the modding scene, i mean dont get me wrong there are still plenty of project and people modding however original content has been rather lack luster of late, multiple of the larger modding communites i was apart of have seen their activeness as well as general members decline. i think also the factor with the toxicity of the bethesda modding community on nexus also plays a large part too.

It is hard to say what will happen now that Bethesda is part of Microsoft but Bethesda explicitly approved the reverse engineering as long as they do not actively advertise the possibility to use it to run their games on mobile devices.
Are you thinking of Nehrim? It was made by the (mostly) german modders of SureAI, just like the skyrim total conversion Enderal and earlier Arktwend and Myar Aranath for Morrowind. They have been pouring lots of resources into this for a long time now. The Morrowind and Oblivion remakes for Skyrim are coming along nicely, give the development videos on Youtube a try (Skywind and Skyblivion), they have also hired some of the original voice-actors.
Thinking back 3D packages and motion capture were really expensive 15 years ago. Now everything needed to create high quality content is somewhat affordable or even free (Like the giant leap of Blender to Version 2.8).
BG3 with its fully animated dialogues does produce quite a lot of effort for a bit of dialogue but it is nothing the modders cannot handle... provided enough access to the game. I hope that Larian take a look at the very positive experiences of Bethesda or THQ Nordic (Gothic 3 only became a good and stable game due to mods) in opening their games for mods.

I'd argue that the thinning of the modding scene is largely dependent on the increasing complexity of tools and difficulty of creating content, when it's not to incredibly idiotic decisions like Bioware and the Dragon Age toolset.
However, games like Stellaris, Sins of a Solar empire and others have massive mod communities. Not even gonna mention Skyrim because y'know already.

Oh, yeah, that could be fun sometimes. I remember getting death threats once for highlighting someone's plagiarism. To their credit, the Nexus staff did a lot to try to get that stuff under control with Dark0ne also wading in to tell some other forums they needed to get a grip on it.

One thing that has hit the mod scene is you can now use well developed tools to create your own game, along with tools to easily publish. So why use someone else's game and total conversion from that for free, when you can make a game you've dreamed of and have a chance at making some money?

I've never created my own mods. I just don't have the necessary knowledge and don't have the time to get it. But given the fact that I love games, I've used a lot of mods. Installing and playing with mods is quite fun.

Sometimes it gets to absurdity, like the mod for year-old Steve in Minecraft. And sometimes mods can give you some peculiarly interesting, and more importantly, new gameplay, giving a second life to a long boring game. I get all the mods from https://guidedhacking.com . This is an insanely huge site where you can find almost any information about hacking games, and mods are among it.

...Did you just answer to your own reply?

My father allways said:
Its ok to talk to yourself.
Its ok to answer yourself.
What is not ok, is when you need to repeat yourself, bcs you didnt listen first time.

Nah it’s always ok to repeat yourself (per my grandmother). It’s when you start to disagree with yourself and argue over who is right is when the problems begin

Deep thoughts:

Have you ever considered the possibility that every thought that you have is spoken by one part of you and heard by another? Each person is actually made up of three separate entities that all speak to each other:

1. The Self-Centered part of you - The Flesh or Id
2. The Other-Centered part of you - The Spirit or Ego
3. The Mediator/Judge/Chief Executive - The Soul or Superego (I tend to confuse the ego and superego so forgive if not totally accurate)

So, when you think, you are always talking to your collective self, and when your selfish self wants something but your selfless self suggests you shouldn't, the Mediator has to intervene in the argument or your whole self is paralyzed.

How did we get on this topic again?

Id: Emotional/impulsive.
Superego: Logical/reserved.
Ego: The balance (merger) between the Id and the Superego.

Ah, see? I knew it.

My studies indicate that we are like computers. We have an Arithmetic/Logic Unit, an ALU. We have a Control Unit. Then we have all the rest of the PC.

The Control Unit is like the Spirit. It receives and executes the commands of the ALU, and it brings the ALU input from the PC.

The ALU is like the Soul. It's the boss.

The PC is like the Flesh ,very responsive and all about what's happening to it, constantly giving feedback and "opinions" to the CPU.

All 3 conversing, all the time.

We're all computers. We're all apart of the BG3 world. 😵

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality

I had a Greek teacher told us that one theory for why people in ancient times heard God and had prophets etc. was this still developing mode of cognition.


Comparing us to computers reminds me of something else https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modularity_of_mind

I'm not sure if this is what I'm looking for, but I learned of something like it when I described Disco Elysium's skill system to a computer engineer friend of mine. Basically it's that consciousness exists as a collection of autonomous mechanisms. I can't remember what it was anymore, but this sounds like it.