Baldur’s Gate 3 is one of the most modded games on Nexus Mods, outside of Bethesda games. In the years since release, we’ve seen everything from Wither’s Big Naturals to Halo’s Master Chief make their way into Larian’s RPG, but the modding community surrounding the game is now bigger than ever.
Alongside the usual influx of mods, Baldur’s Gate 3 fans are even developing custom campaigns. Built on cracked versions of Larian’s modding tools, fans have started making game-sized stories for the game, and none are bigger than the upcoming Path to Menzoberranzan.
With its alpha shaping up the be the size of the released game’s Nautiloid section, Path to Menzoberranzan has hundreds of fans all working together to deliver an exciting new story with its own quests, companions, and central narrative. However, this project is only possible because of the continued community effort of modders to share what they know.
“I can say, at the start, [scripting custom quests] wasn’t really intuitive because there was no documentation on the toolkit,” explained project lead Gregory ‘Lotrich’ Barak. Since the project’s start almost two years ago, the community has worked together to figure out how to introduce new music into the game, add brand-new animations, and expand how everyone can create within the core of Baldur’s Gate 3.
“As we go, we always evolve and we make more tutorials, more documentation,” Lotrich continued. “We have seniors people helping other people like seniors helping the new guys. So it’s really, the more we evolve as a project, the easier it [is] for newcomers to learn it.”
The Path to Menzoberranzan team are making their own discoveries and are creating documentation to help not just themselves, but other modders working on their own projects. Essentially, as a community, BG3 modders are sharing the love.
“The wider modding community is definitely a consideration when it comes to putting that documentation together,” added PR director Gwen Wark. “Because we have leaned so hard on the things that have come before us outside of PTM, you know? We’re looking at some of these tools and we are definitely not the only ones who are looking at these and putting documentation together. So, where we can, we have definitely shared that knowledge.”
As a completely volunteer group, albeit with some financial support via Patreon, many Path to Menzoberranzan workers are involved in other projects. Modders are constantly discovering new ways to create within the existing toolkit, or even designing their own tools to push the boundaries of what they can do, and the vast majority of this knowledge is shared with others.
Wark explained that “this is how we solved… a particular thing about the fur shader”. As the Path to Menzoberranzan team ran into issues with furred characters and creatures, the wider modding community jumped in to help. “That did get documented and sent out into the wider community,” they explained, “that knowledge share is incredibly important to us and it’s important to the rest of the community because what we take and what we build, we send it out into the community and it pings off of other people and it just comes back to us”.
As the biggest modding project around, Wark explains that PTM has “a lot of concentrated resources” for the Baldur’s Gate 3 modding community, and the team wants to use its position “to make it easier for everybody to exercise that creativity”.
“As part of the BG3 modding community, we have a responsibility [to share our knowledge],” added community manager Andrew Simone. “I don’t think it’s necessarily about size, not to be cliched, but we’re all in this together so any knowledge that we have about, you know, any documentation, any knowledge we have figured out, we want to give back to the community because they’re supporting us in such a massive way. Everyone that’s working on mods for Baldur’s Gate 3, we’re all doing this because we have the same passion for this game and for the development of these mods.”
Wark explains that it’s also “impossible to ring-fence this knowledge” even if, for some reason, they wanted to. “We’re not a studio, we’re here for the love of it, not a paycheck, so we don’t make that demand… I do know that there are some teams that function like that, and I think that’s not the same as the BG3 modding team, they’re definitely very different in feel.”
There have been multiple cases in the past of modders gatekeeping discoveries or self-made tools from their peers, but the Baldur’s Gate 3 community has not resorted to that yet. Right now, there are many hundreds of fans still working on their own projects, and many still figuring out new ways to enable their creativity as Larian itself moves onto pastures new.
