Baldur's Gate 3 is over. Officially support on the game has wrapped up and now the team at Larian have slid off towards their next horizon, some early whispers of which paint it as an even bigger project than BG3- which is a frankly insane proposition and I'll believe it when I see it. (Although if it's a Divinity sequel maybe I'll just write it off now. Never really got with that franchise, gameplay was good but the world sucks.) But they left something of an interesting parting gift given the history of Baldur's Gate, Larian and their relationship with UGC. Mod support is what I'm talking about and with the tools provided, the community around the game and the relative disappoint that has been modern day Bethesda- we might be looking at a... how was it Dwayne Johnson put it... 'a change in the hierarchy of (modding) power'. To be largely hyperbolic.
First Divinity. UGC was really not a supported endeavour by Larian until the Original Sin games. Not because they disapproved of it, it's just that none of their games were built to be able to handle it. In fact, the top comment on how to get Divinity 2 working with modern computers (a circus in of itself) is left by a Larian developer- because they know how important their community is. Alongside being able to access purchased games. But with the Original Sin games can an inbuilt mode known as 'Game Master' mode wherein players could build maps using the tiles and assets in the game and share these custom experiences around. It was fine, kind of like a simplified version of what Solasta would bill itself around. But it wasn't really 'mod tools' as one would traditionally know them.
In the lead-up to Baldur's Gate 3 it was actually really up in the air about whether or not the game would receive a successor to the Game Master mode. Nothing existed in the plans to create one and Larian seemed pretty iffy about whether or not they would commit to making one post launch either, whether that is due to the simple size of Baldur's Gate 3 making it difficult to commit investing that kind of extra time towards the development of such tools or simply because they were never all that popular in the community anyway outside of the specifically creatively-inclined circles. All I saw were crossed fingers from people who recognised that these were the most robust DnD tools on the market salivating over what would be possible if Larian took the plunge.
Of course any launch to the size of Baldur's Gate 3's has the tendency to rewrite your plans and ambitions before your very eyes- thus it came as very little shock to me that conversations about development tools were restarted around this time. But the world has moved on a bit since the Original Sin days, ambitions of modders have grown insane over the past few years- would a tailor made asset reshuffling Game Master mode really fit the talents of their new found audience? Pretty immediately the promises arrived not for in-house mess around tools but dedicated Mod Tools, the powers of which were left ambiguous and up to the imagination of the community to fill out- which of course immediately led to vastly bloated visions of Bethesda-style freedom that, even now, seems wildly egregious to propagate but you can't shackle the dreamers, I guess...
Now at the tailend of the official patch and content support for Baldur's Gate 3 has arrived those official modding tools and through them the real second life of this franchise can begin. Not that people weren't already throwing together mods- although those scrappy efforts to rejiggle existing assets into something new pale in the face of what injection software can achieve! Expect to see real creative visual overhauls to character creation, maybe even new models introduced into the base game- the limit really is the passion of the community at this point and with the tailor-made backdoor into the systems they've been given the only thing they can't do is remake the game to their twisted will. Oh wait... it took a couple of weeks but already the tools have been 'unlocked' so they actually can.
Some people seem a bit confused as to why the modding tools had the functionality to straight up remake the Baldur's Gate 3 campaign but that functionality was 'locked', however I think I understand the logic. Putting out the modding tools was basically a measure for providing their players as smooth as a process as possible for building onto their games without accidentally ripping out a core part of the original game and bricking their install as one might home-modding. As such, campaign editing tools- whilst powerful- would certainly open up a big backdoor to all those fiddly core systems that Larian cannot feasibly reinforce against the power of their modding tools. Therefore they officially support the weaker tools whilst leaving the more powerful capabilities there but not liable under their promise of support. At least that's what makes sense in my mind.
But now that those tools have been unlocked- what exactly can we expect going forward from Baldur's Gate and it's modding maniacs? The truth is that we don't know. The best cast scenario is that Baldur's Gate can become a platform for hosting tailor built player campaigns with homebrew set-ups, maybe even a fresh monster here or there and maybe even unique animations. We might see grand adventures within the Baldur's Gate 3 engine to match the scale of lesser Bethesda mods- and maybe even greater to rewrite the very DNA of Baldur's Gate 3 and create a targeted experience that challenges what the base game could even offer like some of the more ambitious Bethesda mods out there. But days are so early we cannot even reliably speculate on the limits- which it what makes this so very exciting.
I would love to see a vibrant modding community spark in the Baldur's Gate 3 wake because honestly- the game feels to big to be done now. Just as how the success of Skyrim sparked the biggest modding community ever who still feed into it come the modern day, does Baldur's Gate 3 feel like a worthy successor to that kind of love. Bethesda's biggest thorn of late has been them trying to play into UGC in a manner of ways that seem to gradually miss the point, and Larian seem hands-off enough to let this world blossom naturally in a manner we all love to engage with. Let mods be mods and game content be content. That is a mantra worth modding for, as far as I'm concerned.
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