@terzaerian - Oh, and people mod MMOs too. You have private servers, and addons.
Actually, I was trying to say that they need to do more QA, you know, so we don't run into game breaking bugs after they say "Oh, we're done. We're moving on to a different game." I mean, look at Dragon Age 2, and Skyrim. Dragon Age 2 is still a buggy pile of crap, and there isn't any mods to fix those issues, like with Sebastian's quests. Meanwhile, with Skyrim, we have the unofficial fixpacks, and they don't fix all the game breaking bugs. In fact, on an opposite note, Beamdog is doing this long beta/QA for patch 1.3, so then they don't have regressions and game breaking bugs.
Sorry, it kind of gets annoying to hear people whine and cry about a lack of toolset. In fact, there are several games out there that are modded without a toolset. For instance, Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, Planescape: Torment, Final Fantasy 7 and 8 for PC, Jade Empire, Dragon Age 2, Kingdoms of Amalur, and Mass Effect. Some of these barely have any mods, and some of these have a crap load of them.
Yes, a toolset would make things easier, but is it absolutely necessary to mod? Not really. Yes, I've heard that Unity isn't very mod friendly, but someone is going to find out how to mod it, and maybe we'll have a modding revolution of Baldur's Gate sized proportions, or it'll have little mods like Planescape: Torment. Only time will tell.
@terzaerian - Oh, and people mod MMOs too. You have private servers, and addons.
Also true; however, private servers are not sanctioned by the developers. Blizzard in particular hasn't been shy about cracking down legally on private servers that collect donations or fees to play them. I vaguely recall someone who sanctioned private servers using their client though I forget who it was.
As for interface addons, I wouldn't call it modding per-se. Yes, it requires a great deal of technical skill to make but its impact on gameplay is marginal - much like the mods released for games like Mass Effect, for example. WoW in particular has had the utility of its addons shrink as Blizzard reduced the amount of automation possible in an addon.
All that said, the MMOs persist not because of the modding - they generate their own communities through communal gameplay mechanisms (guilds, raiding, group quests, etc.). POE isn't going to have this, and without modding either, it's not left with much to sustain long-term interest past for the first few playthroughs.
Actually, I was trying to say that they need to do more QA, you know, so we don't run into game breaking bugs after they say "Oh, we're done. We're moving on to a different game." I mean, look at Dragon Age 2, and Skyrim. Dragon Age 2 is still a buggy pile of crap, and there isn't any mods to fix those issues, like with Sebastian's quests. Meanwhile, with Skyrim, we have the unofficial fixpacks, and they don't fix all the game breaking bugs. In fact, on an opposite note, Beamdog is doing this long beta/QA for patch 1.3, so then they don't have regressions and game breaking bugs.
Sorry, it kind of gets annoying to hear people whine and cry about a lack of toolset. In fact, there are several games out there that are modded without a toolset. For instance, Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, Planescape: Torment, Final Fantasy 7 and 8 for PC, Jade Empire, Dragon Age 2, Kingdoms of Amalur, and Mass Effect. Some of these barely have any mods, and some of these have a crap load of them.
Yes, a toolset would make things easier, but is it absolutely necessary to mod? Not really. Yes, I've heard that Unity isn't very mod friendly, but someone is going to find out how to mod it, and maybe we'll have a modding revolution of Baldur's Gate sized proportions, or it'll have little mods like Planescape: Torment. Only time will tell.
Again, there is only so much QA which Obsidian is going to be willing to do on POE - probably far less than they otherwise would, in fact, seeing as they don't have a publisher supporting them. Which gets back to its inception in the first place - it seems like a gross oversight to go to the gaming community to fund your game, but then keep it completely self-contained thereafter.
Honestly, it's no skin off my nose, in the end, whether or not POE gets modded. Other games already clearly support it. But the fact that they don't even seem motivated to try or look into it is disappointing, and the entire reason I'm in this thread is because there seems to be a lot of prejudice and misconceptions about modding which confuse and irritate me.
@SapphireIce101 A toolset as defined by NwN or the Elder Scrolls games is impossible with Pillars of Eternity. Anyone that asks for something like that for PoE, have really no idea what they're talking about.
You cannot have such a toolset in a 2D game like Baldur's Gate/Icewind Dale/Planescape Torment/Pillars of Eternity etc.
The areas are prerendered. Prerendered means that they already made the areas with a 3D program and turned them into images, then added some 3D effects over them like moving waterfalls etc.
With TES/NwN you are creating the areas youself as they are 3D models and you can shape the landscape. They are not 2D images.
Also, PoE does have a publisher, its Paradox Interactive. It's just that all the money that Obsidian got from the kickstarter is going to game development, and therefore, content. I also hope they're using it for QA too, because this is Obsidian, and they seemed to have picked up Troika's habits on bugs. There's one thing that I can say about Obsidian and Troika. They write very good stories, but they seem to suck at catching bugs.
Also, I think Obsidian was motivated to try to find a way to mod PoE, but maybe they decided it wasn't economically feasible. Also, people prefer that their money go to something good, and for most people that is game content. Since, as it was said earlier in the thread, that people would rather have content than modding tools because modders are, sadly, a minority in most gaming communities.
it'll have little mods like Planescape: Torment. Only time will tell.
The reason because PS:T does not have any mods besides UB, the Fixpack, Ghosdog's UI mod and some Armor Packs is because it didn't left holes to fill with a mod (besides bugs and bad combat, which aren't any mods for, I'm planning on make one myself, but I can't promise anything).
@SapphireIce101 Actually Obsidian changed their "philosophy" on the matter of bugs. Feargus Urquhart said in an interview "we are not making buggy games anymore" and that they developed a special bug-tracking program that makes everything easier. That happened after Fallout New Vegas I think.
Dungeon Siege 3 and South Park: The Stick of Truth are proof of that. They were really bug free and I had no problems with those.
And since there's no publisher pushing them for an early release like NwN2 or KOTOR 2, I have a lot of faith in them for Pillars of Eternity.
They're doing what they have been doing since the 90s, they have a really strong team, they have released bug-free games and there's no publisher pushing. Pretty much, everything is in their favor with PoE.
@terzaerian It's actually a tiny bit offensive to say if a developer doesn't include modding tools then they're not dedicated to making the game the best it can be. Properly including modding is expensive, and is much more complicated than just allowing people to override files.
Of COURSE we want our games to be the best they can be. From a business perspective, particularly. Better games sell more copies.
Re: Their philosophy on bugs, yeah, it was pretty crazy even when I was there. They spend a lot of time and money on it to ensure they don't make the mistakes they have in the past. It's something we at Beamdog are also trying to do, though we don't quite have their budgets.
@terzaerian It's actually a tiny bit offensive to say if a developer doesn't include modding tools then they're not dedicated to making the game the best it can be. Properly including modding is expensive, and is much more complicated than just allowing people to override files.
With all due respect, that may be, but it doesn't change my opinion. A developer's ability to weed out bugs and add content is necessarily limited by constraints of time, budget, and the necessarily limited size of any testing pool - modders do not have that restriction. A developer unwilling to invest in putting the least handhold into their game for modders to latch on to is not, in my mind, doing their utmost for the game.
Perhaps for POE this is because of the Unity engine - it's spilled milk now, regrettably, but I guess they should have considered that beforehand and the impact picking Unity would have on either being able or unable to allow for modding. Hopefully if the game is a commercial success then it would be possible to rework it - especially the PC edition - into a framework that would allow modding. It is still going to put a significant damper on the community, stalling the organization of any modders, but it still might help.
And again, I am sure they would have put modding capabilities there if they could have, but like @Archaos already pointed out, among many others, they simply couldn't.
Not without making the game a first person 3D trainwreck like Skyrim or Dragon Age, anyway, and I'm pretty sure that would've caused an infinitely worse poop-storm. Not to mention have more bugs and less content and be otherwise all sorts of terrible.
@terzaerian It's actually a tiny bit offensive to say if a developer doesn't include modding tools then they're not dedicated to making the game the best it can be. Properly including modding is expensive, and is much more complicated than just allowing people to override files.
@LiamEsler, overriding files would be more than enough for me. Quoting myself from the first post of this discussion:
You probably can't say...but can't blame a guy for asking. Will there at least be the equivalent of an override folder programmed in? (so that at worst all you have to do is create this folder and then this folder can be used to override existing game files).
@elminster Given that it's a Unity game, no, I don't believe there will be.
So yes, IMO they're not dedicated to making the game the best it can be and not because they are not providing modding tools, but because they are not even allowing people to override files.
Please correct me if I've misinterpreted your words.
@Archaos - Thank you for correcting me. I haven't gotten either of those games, though, Stick of Truth does look somewhat promising, and I'm not a fan of South Park. Hah.
The fact of the matter is, Obsidian is trying to make PoE the best it can be, and that is using their funds for what the majority of people want, not what the minority wants, and like it was said, modders are a minority group. However, there are certain things that the majority has wanted that Obsidian has said no to.
Heck, when the 18th comes around, there are probably going to be people trying to mod it.
Yep, too bad they are going in the wrong direction ;-)
What you think is the wrong direction is, in fact, the right direction for most of them, including the developers themselves.
If they went to what you considered the right direction, they would have to change the engine and basically the entire game style, make it something that a lot more people than you would be extremely upset about, not to mention betray their own principles by not ending up with the game they wanted to develop.
A somewhat more tricky modding grounds is more than worth making the spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate that everyone wanted to see, rather than the spiritual successor to Skyrim. Who needs a spiritual successor to Skyrim anyway? That game's less than three years old and it's going to have like a dozen sequels regardless.
A somewhat more tricky modding grounds is more than worth making the spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate that everyone wanted to see, rather than the spiritual successor to Skyrim. Who needs a spiritual successor to Skyrim anyway? That game's less than three years old and it's going to have like a dozen sequels regardless.
@Chow, you keep twisting my words. It is really annoying. Quoting myself again:
PoE will never be the spiritual successor of BG, because the latter can be modded unlike the former. Skyrim has nothing to do with that.
How do you even know it can't be modded? It's not even out yet, and just because the developers aren't supporting it much doesn't mean the players and modders won't find a way around it. As has been brought up several times in this thread, this is far more likely than you'd think, the lack of override folder be damned.
To be honest, I feel like PoE is going to be more spiritual successor to Icewind Dale, rather than Baldur's Gate, and I don't mind that. Besides, Dragon Age took spiritual successor of Baldur's Gate anyway, too bad Bioware screwed that one up with DA2. I'm starting to love Icewind Dale a lot more than Baldur's Gate anyway.
However, saying that there won't be mods for PoE just because there is no easy way to do it is asinine. There are several games out in the world where it was said that they couldn't be modded. Jade Empire is a good example. They said it would never ever be modded, and guess what, someone figured out how to do it, and now there are Jade Empire mods.
To be honest, I feel like PoE is going to be more spiritual successor to Icewind Dale, rather than Baldur's Gate, and I don't mind that. Besides, Dragon Age took spiritual successor of Baldur's Gate anyway, too bad Bioware screwed that one up with DA2. I'm starting to love Icewind Dale a lot more than Baldur's Gate anyway.
I wouldn't know about that. It would need a whole lot less plot and more combat to be a spiritual successor to Icewind Dale, even if its graphical style reminds me a whole lot of that rather than BG.
However, saying that there won't be mods for PoE just because there is no easy way to do it is asinine.
As it is saying the game cannot be a spiritual successor to BG because it doesn't have mods. BG doesn't have that many mods either, certainly not enough to be some kind of a central theme to the game.
It'd be like saying Bioshock cannot be a spiritual successor to System Shock because it doesn't have, I dunno, techno music in it?
However, saying that there won't be mods for PoE just because there is no easy way to do it is asinine. There are several games out in the world where it was said that they couldn't be modded. Jade Empire is a good example. They said it would never ever be modded, and guess what, someone figured out how to do it, and now there are Jade Empire mods.
@SapphireIce101, please point me to a mod for Jade Empire that it isn't simply a texture replacement or restoring something in the romance scenes, but adds NPCs, quests and new areas.
I admit I'm not up to date with Jade Empire mods, but they look to me nothing better than what's available for Mass Effect, i.e. not much.
For me this kind of mods are not enough. As I said I'm not really interested in just changing the colour of the shirt of commander Shepard or changing Dawn Stars appearance to that of Wu the Lotus Blossom.
What about Diablo 2? It was never designed to be modded either, and as I hear they got a whole bunch of total conversion mods to it that changed pretty much everything. I never tried any of them, though.
What about Diablo 2? It was never designed to be modded either, and as I hear they got a whole bunch of total conversion mods to it that changed pretty much everything. I never tried any of them, though.
I have no idea as I don't know anything about Diablo 2. In fact, I'm very selective and, since BG, I only play RPGs
Jokes apart, the main point is that some games, like BG, may not have any mods at release, but they have the potential for it. PoE has no potential because of the limitation of the engine and because Obsidian is not doing anything to make things easier to modders. What I find asinine dear @SapphireIce101 and @Chow is failing to realise that.
PoE has no potential because of the limitation of the engine and because Obsidian is not doing anything to make things easier to modders.
I believe it's already been established several times why making it easier to modders would be a terrible idea and not worth it. The engine is the same as with Baldur's Gate, and the lack of an override folder is almost certainly not any kind of a deciding factor: any accomplished modder could probably just add one in themselves.
Baldur's Gate had the exact same potential for mods as PoE does. The latter may perhaps have even more, considering there will be many more players with greater technological savvy, thanks to modding having become an actually relevant thing in the last decade and a half, and a much larger sub-community with a great deal of importance in the minds of many - case in point in your fanaticism. In BG's time there was no such focus.
It didn't allow Obsidian to encourage them much, but I'm pretty sure no one will be stopped by this setback.
Edit: In fact, if Black Isle had released a similar press conference back in the day, they really would've said largely the same thing - "Yeah this isn't going to support mods all too much. There's an override folder that we used to do some stuff but I'm pretty sure you can't do squat with it."
I think what @Erg is referring to is mods that add content, not just change items.
In Baldur's Gate, you can change items, spells, and creatures with the override folder--but if you want to add or change dialogue, you need access to the dialog.tlk file. So if a game gives modders access to the game's text, then by @Erg's standards it's "moddable".
By most standards, though, changing items, creatures, and textures is what most modding is all about; it's about modifying the game to suit your playstyle.
Adding content and changing dialogue is a different type of modding, requiring different skills and access to different files.
Not to say that one is better than the other, but I see some tempers flaring and more than a few personal attacks being levied (which is against site rules, I must remind everyone), and I imagine a clarification of terms would be helpful.
@Chow - I prefer calling it spiritual successor to Icewind Dale because I just like Icewind Dale more, and feel that it has a better story than Baldur's Gate. Also, if you look at the skills during the gameplay demos, they're clearly using IWD2 skill art, which I like. However, I won't stop you from calling it the Spiritual Successor to Baldur's Gate.
Oh, and I agree, Baldur's Gate doesn't have many mods to it. In fact, I used to play chocolate Baldur's Gate a lot as a child. Didn't even know about Tutu or BGT until about 5-6 years ago.
Let's look at two other examples mentioned recently - Baldur's Gate and Diablo II - with the standards @Erg had brought up: whether the engine supports modding, and whether they're encouraged by the developers.
In Baldur's Gate's case, the answer to both of those is pretty much a no. There was certainly an override folder, but its entire function was a completely different one from letting the players to mod stuff, and it was mostly left there because no one bothered to remove it: that the modders ended up doing stuff with it anyway speaks more of them rather than the developers.
As for Diablo II, I don't think the developers ever brought up the very possibility of modding, and yet it got a whole bunch of mods that you would, by all your standards, count as such: they changed much more than colors and stuff. I wouldn't know if the engine had supported that sort of stuff any better. There was no override folder there either, I think.
Pillars of Eternity has a bit of both, I think: Baldur's Gate's engine, Diablo II's complete lack of override folder and encouragement. I don't think it's going to stop anyone.
I prefer calling it spiritual successor to Icewind Dale because I just like Icewind Dale more, and feel that it has a better story than Baldur's Gate. Also, if you look at the skills during the gameplay demos, they're clearly using IWD2 skill art, which I like. However, I won't stop you from calling it the Spiritual Successor to Baldur's Gate.
Let's compromise and say there's a bit of both. I think the truth is it's mostly a spiritual successor to the entirety of Infinity Engine, but don't quote me on that.
They're probably taking the skill art from Icewind Dale less because they're trying to spiritually succeed it, and more because the skill art there is just way better than in Baldur's Gate.
@Chow - I'll agree with that compromise, besides, I'm secretly hoping for a trifecta.
Also, I figured that Baldur's Gate wasn't really easy to mod until Wes Weimer created WeiDu. At least from making your own NPC standpoint anyway. I just can't imagine trying to make a NPC mod via override mod.
Also, I figured that Baldur's Gate wasn't really easy to mod until Wes Weimer created WeiDu. At least from making your own NPC standpoint anyway. I just can't imagine trying to make a NPC mod via override mod.
That's pretty much my point. I'm not a modder, but I'm fairly certain it wasn't exactly easy even after WeiDu.
Comments
Actually, I was trying to say that they need to do more QA, you know, so we don't run into game breaking bugs after they say "Oh, we're done. We're moving on to a different game." I mean, look at Dragon Age 2, and Skyrim. Dragon Age 2 is still a buggy pile of crap, and there isn't any mods to fix those issues, like with Sebastian's quests. Meanwhile, with Skyrim, we have the unofficial fixpacks, and they don't fix all the game breaking bugs. In fact, on an opposite note, Beamdog is doing this long beta/QA for patch 1.3, so then they don't have regressions and game breaking bugs.
Sorry, it kind of gets annoying to hear people whine and cry about a lack of toolset. In fact, there are several games out there that are modded without a toolset. For instance, Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, Planescape: Torment, Final Fantasy 7 and 8 for PC, Jade Empire, Dragon Age 2, Kingdoms of Amalur, and Mass Effect. Some of these barely have any mods, and some of these have a crap load of them.
Yes, a toolset would make things easier, but is it absolutely necessary to mod? Not really. Yes, I've heard that Unity isn't very mod friendly, but someone is going to find out how to mod it, and maybe we'll have a modding revolution of Baldur's Gate sized proportions, or it'll have little mods like Planescape: Torment. Only time will tell.
As for interface addons, I wouldn't call it modding per-se. Yes, it requires a great deal of technical skill to make but its impact on gameplay is marginal - much like the mods released for games like Mass Effect, for example. WoW in particular has had the utility of its addons shrink as Blizzard reduced the amount of automation possible in an addon.
All that said, the MMOs persist not because of the modding - they generate their own communities through communal gameplay mechanisms (guilds, raiding, group quests, etc.). POE isn't going to have this, and without modding either, it's not left with much to sustain long-term interest past for the first few playthroughs. Again, there is only so much QA which Obsidian is going to be willing to do on POE - probably far less than they otherwise would, in fact, seeing as they don't have a publisher supporting them. Which gets back to its inception in the first place - it seems like a gross oversight to go to the gaming community to fund your game, but then keep it completely self-contained thereafter.
Honestly, it's no skin off my nose, in the end, whether or not POE gets modded. Other games already clearly support it. But the fact that they don't even seem motivated to try or look into it is disappointing, and the entire reason I'm in this thread is because there seems to be a lot of prejudice and misconceptions about modding which confuse and irritate me.
You cannot have such a toolset in a 2D game like Baldur's Gate/Icewind Dale/Planescape Torment/Pillars of Eternity etc.
The areas are prerendered. Prerendered means that they already made the areas with a 3D program and turned them into images, then added some 3D effects over them like moving waterfalls etc.
With TES/NwN you are creating the areas youself as they are 3D models and you can shape the landscape. They are not 2D images.
Also, PoE does have a publisher, its Paradox Interactive. It's just that all the money that Obsidian got from the kickstarter is going to game development, and therefore, content. I also hope they're using it for QA too, because this is Obsidian, and they seemed to have picked up Troika's habits on bugs. There's one thing that I can say about Obsidian and Troika. They write very good stories, but they seem to suck at catching bugs.
Also, I think Obsidian was motivated to try to find a way to mod PoE, but maybe they decided it wasn't economically feasible. Also, people prefer that their money go to something good, and for most people that is game content. Since, as it was said earlier in the thread, that people would rather have content than modding tools because modders are, sadly, a minority in most gaming communities.
Feargus Urquhart said in an interview "we are not making buggy games anymore" and that they developed a special bug-tracking program that makes everything easier.
That happened after Fallout New Vegas I think.
Dungeon Siege 3 and South Park: The Stick of Truth are proof of that. They were really bug free and I had no problems with those.
And since there's no publisher pushing them for an early release like NwN2 or KOTOR 2, I have a lot of faith in them for Pillars of Eternity.
They're doing what they have been doing since the 90s, they have a really strong team, they have released bug-free games and there's no publisher pushing.
Pretty much, everything is in their favor with PoE.
Of COURSE we want our games to be the best they can be. From a business perspective, particularly. Better games sell more copies.
Re: Their philosophy on bugs, yeah, it was pretty crazy even when I was there. They spend a lot of time and money on it to ensure they don't make the mistakes they have in the past. It's something we at Beamdog are also trying to do, though we don't quite have their budgets.
Perhaps for POE this is because of the Unity engine - it's spilled milk now, regrettably, but I guess they should have considered that beforehand and the impact picking Unity would have on either being able or unable to allow for modding. Hopefully if the game is a commercial success then it would be possible to rework it - especially the PC edition - into a framework that would allow modding. It is still going to put a significant damper on the community, stalling the organization of any modders, but it still might help.
Not without making the game a first person 3D trainwreck like Skyrim or Dragon Age, anyway, and I'm pretty sure that would've caused an infinitely worse poop-storm. Not to mention have more bugs and less content and be otherwise all sorts of terrible.
Please correct me if I've misinterpreted your words.
The fact of the matter is, Obsidian is trying to make PoE the best it can be, and that is using their funds for what the majority of people want, not what the minority wants, and like it was said, modders are a minority group. However, there are certain things that the majority has wanted that Obsidian has said no to.
Heck, when the 18th comes around, there are probably going to be people trying to mod it.
If they went to what you considered the right direction, they would have to change the engine and basically the entire game style, make it something that a lot more people than you would be extremely upset about, not to mention betray their own principles by not ending up with the game they wanted to develop.
A somewhat more tricky modding grounds is more than worth making the spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate that everyone wanted to see, rather than the spiritual successor to Skyrim. Who needs a spiritual successor to Skyrim anyway? That game's less than three years old and it's going to have like a dozen sequels regardless.
But I'm sure you would've been delighted by that.
However, saying that there won't be mods for PoE just because there is no easy way to do it is asinine. There are several games out in the world where it was said that they couldn't be modded. Jade Empire is a good example. They said it would never ever be modded, and guess what, someone figured out how to do it, and now there are Jade Empire mods.
It'd be like saying Bioshock cannot be a spiritual successor to System Shock because it doesn't have, I dunno, techno music in it?
I admit I'm not up to date with Jade Empire mods, but they look to me nothing better than what's available for Mass Effect, i.e. not much.
For me this kind of mods are not enough. As I said I'm not really interested in just changing the colour of the shirt of commander Shepard or changing Dawn Stars appearance to that of Wu the Lotus Blossom.
Jokes apart, the main point is that some games, like BG, may not have any mods at release, but they have the potential for it. PoE has no potential because of the limitation of the engine and because Obsidian is not doing anything to make things easier to modders. What I find asinine dear @SapphireIce101 and @Chow is failing to realise that.
Baldur's Gate had the exact same potential for mods as PoE does. The latter may perhaps have even more, considering there will be many more players with greater technological savvy, thanks to modding having become an actually relevant thing in the last decade and a half, and a much larger sub-community with a great deal of importance in the minds of many - case in point in your fanaticism. In BG's time there was no such focus.
It didn't allow Obsidian to encourage them much, but I'm pretty sure no one will be stopped by this setback.
Edit: In fact, if Black Isle had released a similar press conference back in the day, they really would've said largely the same thing - "Yeah this isn't going to support mods all too much. There's an override folder that we used to do some stuff but I'm pretty sure you can't do squat with it."
In Baldur's Gate, you can change items, spells, and creatures with the override folder--but if you want to add or change dialogue, you need access to the dialog.tlk file. So if a game gives modders access to the game's text, then by @Erg's standards it's "moddable".
By most standards, though, changing items, creatures, and textures is what most modding is all about; it's about modifying the game to suit your playstyle.
Adding content and changing dialogue is a different type of modding, requiring different skills and access to different files.
Not to say that one is better than the other, but I see some tempers flaring and more than a few personal attacks being levied (which is against site rules, I must remind everyone), and I imagine a clarification of terms would be helpful.
Oh, and I agree, Baldur's Gate doesn't have many mods to it. In fact, I used to play chocolate Baldur's Gate a lot as a child. Didn't even know about Tutu or BGT until about 5-6 years ago.
@Erg - http://www.shsforums.net/topic/33420-jade-empire-pc-modlist/
The question is though, how many of those links are going to work.
In Baldur's Gate's case, the answer to both of those is pretty much a no. There was certainly an override folder, but its entire function was a completely different one from letting the players to mod stuff, and it was mostly left there because no one bothered to remove it: that the modders ended up doing stuff with it anyway speaks more of them rather than the developers.
As for Diablo II, I don't think the developers ever brought up the very possibility of modding, and yet it got a whole bunch of mods that you would, by all your standards, count as such: they changed much more than colors and stuff. I wouldn't know if the engine had supported that sort of stuff any better. There was no override folder there either, I think.
Pillars of Eternity has a bit of both, I think: Baldur's Gate's engine, Diablo II's complete lack of override folder and encouragement. I don't think it's going to stop anyone. Let's compromise and say there's a bit of both. I think the truth is it's mostly a spiritual successor to the entirety of Infinity Engine, but don't quote me on that.
They're probably taking the skill art from Icewind Dale less because they're trying to spiritually succeed it, and more because the skill art there is just way better than in Baldur's Gate.
Also, I figured that Baldur's Gate wasn't really easy to mod until Wes Weimer created WeiDu. At least from making your own NPC standpoint anyway. I just can't imagine trying to make a NPC mod via override mod.