Baldur's Gate 3's director has said the upcoming mod support will truly be the end of development for the RPG, as Larian hands the reigns over to its players.
Earlier this month, Larian announced that Baldur's Gate 3 patch seven would be out in September and would boast full modding tools for PC users. PS5 and Xbox Series X/S users aren't being left out in the cold - they'll be able to download certain mods created by PC users that pass a series of checks by Larian to make sure they're eligible for release.
Talking about that further at a BAFTA talk attended by 12DOVE, game director and Larian CEO Swen Vincke says the team is "really" working towards giving players the ability to mod and make their own things. "I think that will be the point where we're going to say 'ok, now it's yours fully,'" he adds.
Despite this, Larian has yet to finish developing Baldur's Gate 3's modding tools, and it's been "hard trying to make that work," according to Vincke. When asked if the release of the modding tools would mark a "final handover moment" from the developer to its player base, Vincke quickly answered with a "yes."
That said, patch seven, with its modding support and "final handover moment," won't entirely mark the end of work on Baldur's Gate 3. "You will see the level of support diminished to really critical bug fixes," Vincke says of Baldur's Gate 3's future after September's patch, but for now at least, the developer is "still working as if the game was just out."
It's pretty clear that the bulk of Larian will move onto its "two very ambitious RPGs" after Baldur's Gate 3's patch seven arrives. We still don't know too much about the new games, because they're obviously still very early on in the development process, but for whatever it's worth, we know one them is codenamed "Excalibur."
Elsewhere from the talk, we found out that Shadowheart from Baldur's Gate 3 was originally "more sassy" and had to be "heavily dialed down" after one of the devs said "I really don't like" the character.
Baldur's Gate 3 is doing even better in 2024 than it did in 2023, with daily users up 20%, and Larian thinks it knows why: "Mods are very good"
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