As Larian’s Baldur’s Gate 3 currently sits as one of the most modded games on Nexus Mods, the game’s biggest fans are constantly hard at work on creating new experiences for players to enjoy. While there are plenty of extensive mods out there, there’s no mod as big as the upcoming custom campaign. Path to Menzoberranzan.
Headed up by project lead Gregory ‘Lotrich’ Barak, the extensive fan project aims to take players back to Baldur’s Gate 2’s Athkatla in a brand-new game-sized story with its own cast of companions. It’s a huge project, and there are hundreds of volunteers, but as the team works on delivering the game’s first playable alpha later this year, it’s clear that a lot of work has been done on organisation to make sure this mod project doesn’t crumble away and disappear.
Over the years, we’ve seen a lot of mod projects fall apart, and the Path to Menzoberranzan team have seen this, also. Last year, the team took a significant break to fully plan the custom campaign and improve its organisation to make sure that this project can be seen to fruition with an efficient dev cycle that doesn’t ask too much of its volunteer workers.
“Since our last conversation, our production basically shifted to much higher gear,” Lotrich explained. “We’re so much better at documentation, at keeping things tracked, not just by using Discord, but by using other tools like mirrorboards”. The goal with PtM isn’t just to deliver a campaign, but deliver one efficiently, and the team runs a more organised shift than some official studios I’ve visited.
“[Development is] much faster, much cleaner, [there’s] much more clarity in the team now,” the project lead continued. “And this is actually what motivates people the most to work because when you know what you need to do, what are the tasks, and who you can talk to when you have have understanding of what’s happening, it’s so much easier to contribute”.
“We started out pretty small; we didn’t have all those structures in place.”
Path to Menzoberranzan PR director Gwen Wark
Community manager Andrew Simone explained that the team is now “a lot more efficient” now than it was last year. While there was a lot of passion going into the project, it was a scrappy startup with a lot of fans looking to make something. Now, it’s still a lot of fans looking to create, but that vision is now more prepared with stages to work through. “We were just kind of creating stuff, but we didn’t have a real good basis and understanding of what that would actually turn into,” they continued. “Now, we’ve got a lot of processes in place to make sure that we form Point A to Point B without any kind of meandering in the way”.
Path to Menzoberranzan PR director Gwen Wark explained that the “big pause” was “frustrating on a lot of levels”, but now development is moving smoother than ever before. With a lot of modding projects, there’s a lot of waste, which leads to dev times that take over a decade. As fans come up with new ideas, the scope creeps, old assets become outdated and need replacing, and some of those old ideas get left to the wayside. For the developers working on this custom campaign, eliminating waste and properly planning everything out is the only way to really make the project work.
“The thing about the project is we identified its scale already,” Lotrich said. “We know how it should end, we know when it will end, and we are not planning to always say, ‘Hey, let’s do this and that, let’s do this, let’s add this. We have one specific goal and we go towards it, and until we reach this specific goal, we’re not gonna add something more to it.”
Wark explains that the project already hit “scope creep” early on, and it’s what caused the team to take a big pause and re-evaluate how they bring this mod to life. While the team is always looking for new volunteers for specific roles, it’s no use having volunteers if they don’t know what to do. “It keeps everybody’s energies directed in the right areas,” they said.
Now, volunteers on Path to Menzoberranzan aren’t creating without purpose. If a writer designs a quest that requires a specific asset then that asset is scoped out, worked on in concept art, then modelled, then implemented. “Concept art really informs almost every single aspect of what our visual design ends up as,” Simone said. “So, the concept art is a really big portion of what we do; we’ve got a whole workflow in place… the concept art and our design team work hand in hand, and it’s a very necessary step.”
As the biggest Baldur’s Gate 3 mod currently in the works, there is a lot of pressure to deliver, and that’s why eliminating waste and properly planning the project from start to finish is so important. There are hundreds of developers—from writers to artists to designers—all working on the game, and getting everyone on the same page is essential to actually bring this mod to release.
Since the project’s announcement, there have been many that have immediately looked at the scope of the mod and the size of the team and assumed it simply will not happen. Those comments have not gone unnoticed. “Looking back on what we were, I would have said maybe it seems aa bit lofty that we attain all these goals,” Wark said. “Because, you know, we started out pretty small; we didn’t have all those structures in place. But now, I think, as we have a lot of , I don’t want to say necessarily ‘industry standard’ but we have a lot of processes and a lot of systems in place based upon what real studios do that I think are going to enable us to deliver on our promise, put the mod together, and attain those goals that we set out”.
The Path to Menzoberranzan team is developing an Alpha release that will launch later this year which will give players their first look at what the Baldur’s Gate 3 mod will be like. As the team continues development, they will be looking for feedback from players, attempting to follow the same style of early access development as the Larian game they’re working within.
Additionally, the mod developers are keeping watch of other custom campaigns in the Baldur’s Gate 3 modding community, including the in-development Mad Mage’s Domain. As the mod community works together, continuing to find new ways to expand Larian’s adventure, every project is another inspiration and a sign to continue pushing forward with an incredibly ambitious project.
