How relevant will mods be post release?

Ward

I'm wondering if development and support of current mods will end if BGEE is mod-friendly and overall, just, better.

I bet there'll be some decline in the modding community, atleast for existing content. Either a lot of it will be incorporated into BGEE, or be converted to work in BGEE, some of it will be abandoned completely.

But how different is this release going to be? Will past mods be useful or require re-coding from scratch?

Tanthalas

Eh, I wouldn't worry about the mod community declining because of BGEE (if it declines its because BG1&2 are 10 years old already).

Even more important, BGEE will also not make the BG1&2 mods obsolete. None of the NPC/original quests mods are being incorporated into BGEE. The BG1NPC pack is an incredible mod (that I hope will be compatible with BGEE because its fantastic). And its an unknown how many of the mods that screw around with the rules (like those that approximate the rules to PnP) will be integrated into BGEE (I want my multi-class Fighters to get Grand Mastery!).

Now the current mods being compatible with BGEE is a concern. The Overhaul guys don't want to break them, but we need to see how this works out after BGEE is released. Some of the older mods are no longer supported so there's no one to update them if they don't work with BGEE out of the box.

Drugar

Details are still fairly sketchy, but from what I gather from Trent and others' posts is that the EE will be very mod friendly, as much as they can make it. Possibly, a few mods will require a special EE version to work with the EE and it will depend on the activity of the mod's owner if that will happen or not.
Other mods, mostly fixpacks and tweaks, will either become mostly obsolete or will also have to make some adjustments. Those too will probably require a seperate version, the likelyhood of that depending on the author.

Whether those mods will be abandoned is something else; Most fixpacks I know haven't seen a worthwhile update in a fair bit, having them 'abandoned' wouldn't make a difference.
Personally, I think the mod community will get a boost. Some ex-modders might come back to the new game and fix their old mod, getting into new things while they're at it, and new people might be inspired to start a mod of their own (I for one have been gathering my old design documents again).

In short; I wouldn't worry about it too much.

NWN_babaYaga

Some of the nwn guys I know could be interested too. We´re a pretty cool and innovative cc community but all that depends on how fast we can work/implement our ideas in BGEE.

geselle

I hope Mods/Modders will be more relevant than ever after release. They released so much awesome content, and now they were given some appreciation and maybe they will receive some more support from beamdog's developers.

PhillipDaigle

We want to provide ongoing support to modders for as long as we can, so even if we move on in the future the mod community is left in a far superior position than when we arrived.

Flauschig

I normaly use about 8 mods for BG1 and 17 mods for BG2, the devs won't implement all of them and i so i will furthermore help myself.

Toggboy

I do hope they look at the mod community and start implementing the more notable ones. Kelsey was a great one as well as Amber, but I feel they won't. Too much licensing that would get in the way of that. I wonder how hard it would be to change the coding of the previous mods into the new and improved engine that BGEE will have?

cmorgan

The folks here have certainly made it clear, in both action and word, that they intend to support the modding community, so I would expect that many mods will be able to join in the fun. Plus, BG2 content has an astounding number of mods, wheras BG has very few in comparison - almost all are for BGT and EasyTutu, both attempts to move BG content into the far-more-easy-to-work-with BG2 engine.

So, long and short, I suspect we will see more NPCs and Quest mods being developed for BG:EE. And I suspect most of the older ones will be able to participate, too.