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Community Expansion Pack

_Q__Q_ Member Posts: 48
edited September 2012 in Archive (Feature Requests)
It's not easy to play the original Baldur's Gate with a lot of mods. Not only do you have to spend time tracking down quality mods, you have to do a lot of research to find out if the mods are compatible with one another and what order they need to be installed in. This can take hours or even days. Then you need to install all the mods separately, following different sets of directions for each one. Then you have to pray that you haven't broken the game (and if you have broken the game, you might not know about it until you've been playing for hours) and if you have broken the game, you need to do more research to find out what went wrong.

I've been thinking about how Neverwinter Nights had the Player Resource Consortium and Community Expansion Pack. These were both "expansions" that were developed by the NWN modding community and added tons of new content to the game. If I remember correctly, they both received official acknowledgement from Bioware and may have even had some contributions from people who worked on commercial NWN releases.

Personally, I'd love to see something like this for BGEE. It would be awesome if players could simply download a single installation file, choose from a number of stable, high quality mods, and install the ones they wanted without any hassle or worries that they're breaking the game.

An expansion like this could include high quality fan-made portraits and voice sets, new quests, optional convenience tweaks and rule changes, and whatever else the modding community manages to come up with. It would also be a semi-official way for BGEE to include some requested features that Overhaul could not include due to contractual limitations like content restorations, banters for old party members, etc.

Something like this could potentially be handled completely by members of the modding community, but I put this topic in the Feature Requests forum because I think it would be preferable if this was an official or semi-official release that had at least some oversight/input from Overhaul to help ensure that the quality was very high. Maybe there could even be some type of contest to give the modding community even more incentive to develop new content for BGEE.

Comments

  • DeeDee Member Posts: 10,447
    I would love, at the very least, a mod manager and a set of guidelines for modders to follow to ensure that their mods are compatible. In other words, something so that a player can choose two mods that do something that they like, and be able to instantly know whether those two mods can work together.

    I'd be in favor of this being a part of the game's software, although if the community could create something similar I'd be all for that as well.
  • KithrixxKithrixx Member Posts: 215
    Hey, Warcraft III is still very much alive because of the massive support and ease of access that Blizzard granted to modders. It's free content that will keep the game going and keep people interested in possible expansions and DLC, so I'd love to see it happen. I'm sure if everything gets externalized it'll be even easier to mod for these games, leading to great things happening for essentially everyone involved.
  • HeinrichHeinrich Member Posts: 188
    yes.Yes.YES!

    I am loving the idea of either a semi-official expansions made of mods or at least an easy way to add and remove mods like how Fallout 3 or Civilization 5 does.

    Baldur's Gate has become one of those games I simply cannot play without mods and is a pain in the arse to get all the mods downloaded and correctly integrated into it. Since the team is fixing all the known bugs and externalizing many hardcoded features it's only going to get easier to mod the game as well as spark new interest in the franchise and maybe even a bigger modding community from on then.

    I'm keeping my fingers crossed for these features though I'm sure they're going to require a bit of negotiating with both modders and the legal owners of BG.

  • DougieDougie Member Posts: 34
    I think this is a great idea.
  • JarlJarl Member, Translator (NDA) Posts: 101
    edited September 2012
    You're wrong, installing a couple of mods has never been so easy. Just use Dabus' Big World Setup.

    http://kerzenburg.baldurs-gate.eu/downloads.php?id=2

    - It kills all incompatibilities and installs mods automatically in the right order.
    - It offers you preselections of high-quality-mods so you don't have to plod through all the 400+ mods.
    - you can easily add mods for your individual selection

    Atm it works only with Baldur's Gate Trilogy, but i suppose there will be a version for BGEE too soon.

    Jarl
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