If I could ask but one more boon.
Baldur's Gate 3 has come, conquered and driven itself into many hearts as something of an instant classic destined to raise the bar of AAA RPGs to come. If there are any AAA western RPGs on the horizon after this one, which is actually a doubtful proposition given the recent gutting of Bioware (like everyone predicted) And no, Assassin's Creed RPGs don't count. I sand the game's praises with an honest heart because it has honestly cemented itself as one of my favourite RPGs of all time. Heck, it's the only game of the past 5 years that I immediately started replaying the second I finished it, because I just wanted to go on the adventure one more time. (At least. I'm thinking I might boot up a Monk for a third go around!) But damn it if I can't help but ask for more!
Actually I'm not alone in my lusting for more of Larian's sweetest adventure yet. Already people have dredged through datamining content to fish up the corpse of delete content and present it expectantly at Larian, as though expecting them to put makeup on the cadaver and make it do the griddy. That's not how cut content works and personally I'm quite happy with just about everything presented in the game that we got, and if Larian do decide to make something more I'd personally prefer it if they dedicated that effort to making something new and different with this cast. (like our very own excursion into Avernus- but that's neither here nor there.) What I yearn for isn't quite DLC, and it certainly isn't cut content. It's an ambition that was once broached for Baldur's Gate before being scrapped.
I first started to get the inkling for the idea when exploring the ruins of the Temple to Lanthander at the far edge of act 1, picking through the only location in the game to feature one of the most iconic DND creatures of all time: Kobolds. Indeed, there is but a single room of Kobolds throughout the entirety of Baldur's Gate 3, and I tasked myself for figuring some other use case in which the little buggers could have theoretically been snuck into the story. But nope, at the end of the day the tightness to which the levelling system is designed denotes that low level mobs like Kobolds practically get out-levelled the moment after you meet them. BG3 doesn't work so well with large hoards thanks to it's turn-based nature, and if you buff up the stats of a Kobold without providing a sensible enough excuse you'll just be denigrating the spirit of DND level systems. Still, I felt a bit worlorn.
Bare in mind that this isn't the only example in BG3 of an entire enemy asset, unique in design, animation, and even moves ends up appearing only once. An insane proposition in the game design process that would only be vetoed by a team truly dedicated to making the most cinematic experience that they could without cutting a single errant corner- but wouldn't you love to fight some more Kobolds? Perhaps you could have an entire cave full of them! But in a lower stakes campaign, of course. With lower level characters, unburned by the life-or-death knell hanging over the Tadpole Survivors. Maybe such a thing is beneath the vast talents of the Larian team, as busy as they are... but perhaps... we could make such a thing. In a sort of... custom campaign?
Now of course Larian have already come out and confirmed plans to implement some form of mod support for Baldur's Gate 3 down the line, so all those brute-force mods trying to throw in new classes by overwriting places in the existing engine can finally start creating new slots, and maybe new models can be loaded into the game and... well... it's hard to really guess what else we should be expecting to be honest. I mean, the game already has a folder specifically laid out for mod insertion so... what exactly do they have in mind for 'support'? I'm hoping for something more than the existing folder, but I'm not crazy enough to assume we're going to be getting some sort of custom creation tools like what Bethesda hand out. But even in the best case scenario, are we going to be seeing a whole fresh campaign? Unlikely.
What we need is something akin to 'Game Master Mode' as it existed within Divinity: Original Sin. Essentially a sand-box version of the game that provides an enterprising creator with the tools and assets to create and share custom encounters and stories- an idea that was treated to quite the conceptual expansion by another game: Solasta. Solasta takes it's content building systems so seriously that every single one of it's DLC drops have prioritised adding new classes or monsters or building blocks into the game for creators to play around with, knowing how much more interesting all that stuff is compared to their otherwise meh main story. So while I know what I'm asking for is no small feat, some developers make it their entire game outright!
You see, making a creation engine out of Baldur's Gate 3 is not as simple as it sounds. There is so much of this game that is artistically made specifically for the locations we see them in. The effect of lighting rays cutting over the mountains near the monastery, the gloom of the shadowlands- these aren't just simple filter effects you could slap over anything! What about the in conversation animations, which I think are largely (if not entirely) motion captured to nail character movement, are there any canned animations for modders to play around with at all? The amount of effort that would go in to making Baldur's Gate 3 compatible with some sort of DM mode would probably be comparable to making an entirely fresh game. And still I think there would be no better way to but a final-touch ribbon on the Baldur's Gate 3 package before they move onto something new.
For me Baldur's Gate 3 represents the baseline of what I would want from every CRPG going forward, and being able to build from that body stories of our own, adventures and custom campaigns and challenge maps- that would create something utterly evergreen out of this game allowing it to persist in the ethos for decades to come. I can really see such a system taking off in a way that DOS II's mode or even the entirety of Solasta never had and never will, purely for the love and respect this single title has hard won out of every RPG player out there today. So even though I cross my fingers and pray that Larian have some more actual story content bubbling in the back of their minds, in my heart I wish for something just a little bit more. I pray against prayer for the passing of the proverbial creative torch into the bizarre tormented grasp of the community! (God help us.)
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