Summary
- A custom campaign has been available on Baldur’s Gate 3’s official modding platform since November, despite restrictions against these types of mods.
- If someone at Larian approved this mod, it was probably a mistake.
- There’s a slim chance that we’ll see custom campaigns come to consoles in the future, but it’s unlikely.
When Baldur’s Gate 3‘s official modding toolkit released with Patch 7, a lot of players were disappointed the program didn’t include a map editor or tools for editing the game’s scripting. Larian said it couldn’t officially support these types of mods because Baldur’s Gate 3 is a licensed product, and also because of potential cross-platform instability. However, modders were quickly able to jailbreak this toolkit to enable the editing of the very aspects that Larian said wouldn’t be included. Many suspect that Larian intentionally made this process easy, to enable the creation of these mods while maintaining plausible deniability because of licensing restrictions.
Although custom campaigns are beginning to pop up all over Nexus Mods – they aren’t supported by Baldur’s Gate 3’s official modlist on Mods.io. To be featured on this list, Larian needs to quality control a mod to ensure it doesn’t break anything. Many of these mods later become available on consoles, but not necessarily all of them. Strangely, despite restrictions that suggest it shouldn’t appear on the list, there is a campaign overhaul mod currently featured on Mods.io that has heavy scripting changes and map editing (nice spot, Videogamer).
Custom Campaigns Aren’t Officially Supported
Features from DnD 5e Spelljammer by bib-qwerty-san has been live on Mods.io since November, not long after the modding platform launched. It adds elements of the Spelljammer campaign setting from Dungeons & Dragons into Baldur’s Gate 3. The mod adds a new map featuring a Spelljammer Galleon, a fantastical spaceship. There are new backgrounds, spells and more ported from the original setting. It’s a cool mod, but not one Larian would normally allow on its official platform. Its appearance on Mods.io suggests that someone from Larian approved its inclusion, perhaps erroneously.
The mod isn’t currently available on consoles, which is the main thing that Larian is trying to avoid with its curated modlist. There’s a higher chance of something going wrong with console mods, given how focused the hardware is. As mentioned previously, no other custom campaigns are available on the platform for the aforementioned reasons. The mod creator admits that you’re probably better off downloading the mod on Nexus since the mod manager occasionally breaks the installation. However, if there’s a chance this isn’t an oversight by Larian and the studio is sporadically approving custom campaigns, then there’s a slim possibility that more substantial Baldur’s Gate 3 mods could come to console one day.
While it doesn’t seem likely, Larian has consistently surprised the Baldur’s Gate 3 fandom with new features in the year and a half since the game’s release.
- Released
-
August 3, 2023
- ESRB
-
M for Mature: Blood and Gore, Partial Nudity, Sexual Content, Strong Language, Violence