this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2025
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Baldur’s Gate 3’s biggest mod team now has hundreds of devs working on its huge custom campaign in an impressively professional production (www.videogamer.com)
submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 100 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Modding something that already exists is way easier than making a game, and when it comes to huge mod teams most people contribute in small ways in their free time. People also come and go to the modding scene whenever they feel like it as opposed to actually requiring to work in a timely manner.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Yeah, well, that's why game engines are a thing. I didn't pick The Witcher at random, that was built on top of Neverwinter Nights tech.

Maybe I'm too stuck in the 90s, but I never quite got the point of doing all those total conversions for Quake games when you could just as well use the exact same tools by licensing the engine and just ship the thing as a game.

Well, no, I'm lying. The point of those total conversions was very often that people wanted to use a bunch of licensed characters they didn't own, which I guess is the point here as well, so maybe I've answered my own question.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 month ago

As far as I know you also can't just buy the Larian engine. It's proprietary.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Pre-existing models/art is something that is a huge work effort. Not to be undervalued. If one can get those for free, it can be the reason some game exists.

Take Auto Chess for example. I can imagine programming that DOTA 2 mod was an effort one or few programmers did as a hobby at first. If they would have had to either pay or network with artists to create the art and other people to do marketing, it would have been a lot more than a hobby.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

"One or few programmers" is the key part of that, though. I'm not saying every modder should get into game development out of the gate. Modding is a great way to dip your toes into gamedev without having to do all the teambuilding and groundwork of putting together every piece of a game.

But some mods get so big they do have a full-on dev team. Nothing wrong with spending some time getting proof of concept that the team can do the job, but if you're spending years with a full team completely overhauling a game... I mean, get paid, man. You're doing a whole ass job at that point.