What It Takes To Make A Mod

Wireframe #002: How I Found Myself Entangled In The Baldur's Gate 3 Modkit

A Type Of Game I Just Can’t Enjoy

I do not play video game RPGs. While I can revel in the rich lore, beautiful scenery, and unique storytelling, I just can’t stay attached to a game that expects me to unfurl it’s story of my own volition. Especially if it’s an RPG that is known to contain a vast, expansive world filled to the brim with hidden gems and meaningful moments, I just can’t do it.

That’s not to say I haven’t tried to like RPGs. My Steam library is fairly well rounded, but if you sort by playtime you’ll find a staggering number of highly esteemed titles that I haven’t played at all. The ones that I do get around to only get the initial three or four hours of playtime on their first launch. Beyond that, I can’t guarantee anything. So colour me surprised then, when the one RPG that I do fall in love with isn’t an Elder Scrolls title, or a CDProjekt Red title, or even an indie gem that no one else has played.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is the only exception I’ve found to my incompatibility with RPGs. While I won’t go into detail about why I love BG3 so much, I think I can summarize it as being the fact that at its core its just Dungeons and Dragons. Nothing more, nothing less.

I’ve played in and ran various D&D campaigns over the past five years, and over those years I’ve managed to incorporate my 3D skills at various points. My players loved and appreciated that I would spend the time to create 3D battlemaps that really let them visualize what I was putting in front of them. For my part, I enjoyed the somewhat strenuous process of figuring out how to fit entire battlemaps within Tabletop Simulator’s strict custom model rules. I will never take for granted the hard work that goes into making 3D games not only look as good as they do, but also run as well as they can.

The point of me bringing this up is because after a whirlwind of a launch year, Larian Studios finally released it’s officially supported modkit for Baldur’s Gate 3 a couple months ago. Apart from some minor bugs, the modkit allows anyone to create, style, and share any custom content made with Baldur’s Gate 3 as the base. I nearly missed the whole thing as I was busy working on other ventures, but when I did realize what was about to be released, I needed to do something with it.

The question was though, what would that something be?

Firmly In the Unknown

Dungeons and Dragons has seen it’s fair share of beloved settings and adventures. Curse of Strahd is universally acclaimed, Waterdeep Dragon Heist is a great introductory experience for novice players, and many, many more adventures all offer their own experiences to explore and enjoy. Baldur’s Gate 3 itself could even be seen as an extension of these stories as the city of Baldur’s Gate is a staple of the Forgotten Realms setting where most of the other adventures take place in.

Which begs the question; if Baldur’s Gate and its stories can be turned into a playable video game experience, why can’t the other adventures?

Legally, the answer is because Wizard’s of the Coast owns the IP for all of these adventures, but in reality it’s because no one has had a platform to convert these adventures. But if an AAA studio spent seven years creating the ultimate platform to translate the TTRPG experience into a video game, and then that same AAA studio went above and beyond to create a modding toolkit that is *virtually* limitless? Then we might be able to do something.

To cut the hypotheticals, once the Baldur’s Gate 3 modkit was made available on September 5 everything was suddenly possible. There had already been mods that existed before, but the real potential lay in what hadn’t been created yet. With nearly unlimited access to an entire game engine, what happened next should have been obvious: everyone wanted to recreate their favourite TTRPG modules in BG3.

I was one of these folks, however I didn’t have the ambition to get things going. Instead, I just wanted to chip in where I could and find a project to help out with. My initial options weren’t that vast unfortunately. While more projects have since sprung up, at the beginning there were only one or two projects publicly available (and they weren’t well advertised). However the most prominent project was an effort to recreate Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage. Admittedly, I am not familiar with this particular adventure, but it was an open project looking for artists and so I figured “what’s the harm?”

Riding Solo

Well dear reader, the harm is that I was the first artist to join the project. And as of writing this two months later, I am one of only two artists on the project. Which, in and of itself, isn’t a bad thing. I’m not exactly expecting an entire team to apparate out of nowhere and get this project completed in 3 months. Instead, the issues that I am facing are in the sheer amount of organization and research that is needing to be completed. Who would’ve thought that AAA game development is hard?

Yet, I am not deterred. In fact, I’ve spent the last month finding and preparing all of the resources I believe I’ll need to undertake this task, and I’ve started making actual progress. I won’t bore you with details, but it’s safe to say that most of the work up front has simply been spent inside of documentation and spreadsheets, creating, categorizing, and collecting one massive asset list. And I’m not even through the first level (the first of twenty three levels, mind you). The upside is that as I pour over the module documentation, I’ve found that there is ample opportunity to reuse assets throughout the rest of the adventure. We’ll even be able to use assets from the base game to further lighten our load.

At the end of the day though, it’s simply going to come down to putting in the work. Like I’ve outlined before, no amount of prepping and planning can replace the drive to create. I think I’ve found that drive with this project in some very unexpected places. I never fancied myself a creature artist, but something about looking at reference art and technical breakdowns of creatures in other games is getting me (dare I say it) excited. And while I am dreading filling out spreadsheets and keeping an entire section of the project organized, I’m also strangely into it? Maybe it’s the ADHD shining through in keeping everything tidy, but as long as I take my time, everything is looking promising.

An Unexpected Opportunity

All of this is to say that I hadn’t planned on effectively taking a leading role in this project. However it seems to be the situation I find myself in. Am I woefully under-qualified? Most definitely. Will I shy away? Absolutely not.

I just can’t ignore a golden opportunity like this. In the wasteland that is the game development industry in 2024, all kinds of experiences are valuable. So at least while I feel that I can still meaningfully contribute, I’ll give it my best shot at making something that I can feel proud of. After that? Only time will tell.

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