Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - General Why has modding bombed for D:OS ?

Disclaimer: this is not a troll post.

Hello all.

I cannot help myself but wonder just why has the modding bombed so badly for D:OS ?

There is a total of 37 entries on Steam Workshop and there's a total of 44 files hosted on D:OS Nexus...
Most of them are minor gameplay alterations, a few joke mods but no scripting frameworks or other types of foundations for bigger and more varied things to be built.

In comparison, ShadowrunReturns has ten times that amount on their workshop! And that game didn't advertise its editor as one of their main selling points, in fact it wasn't decided to include the editor until much later in development, whereas Larian had advertised and shown their toolkit during their kickstarter streams, before the funding even finished!

It was the main reason why I backed it! I was a long-time modder for NeverWinter Nights 2, having helped build several persistent worlds during my university years. I hoped that D:OS would be the new NWN, reigniting the creative juices of the rpg players worldwide and serving as a new conduit for sharing stories and vision. Some of my most memorable gaming moments had come from modules on NWN vault and they then had in turn inspired me to take up the toolset.


So, what's the problem with D:OS modding?
Is it the lack of documentation? (I personally don't believe it seeing as how S:R modding community scraped most editor's FAQ's by themselves before official guides rolled out)
Is it the lack of polish?

Or does the problem lie deeper? (general mechanics being unappealing? I dunno, I liked the gameplay personally)

All in all, I don't believe that a game with such vast playerbase has so little to offer in terms of custom content...


P.S.: these are the official forums but I have yet to see developers posting outside of announcements,stickies and locked threads... Not much in terms of interaction with community as far as I can tell. Hope to be proven wrong.

Until recently it was not possible to import or export 3D models, so that excluded cosmetic mods.

The game continued being updated with features and content after release, which was good for the game, but not necessarily for mods. Presumably after the next update (news about that next week) it should be feature complete (so no more breaks in compatibility) and more resources can be put into the editor (which has continued to be updated).

You can not easily have multiple mods enabled, or update/change mods after starting a game.


That said, there are at least a couple stand alone mods nearing completion.

So, Larian just dropped the ball on this one... kinda odd to be honest since modding benefits the developers so much (extending life span of the game, attracting new traffic in some cases, forming a core of loyal followers, etc)

Yes, but to be fair, they're a small group of developers, and their highest priority has been the game itself, rather than the modding tools. Now that things are slowing down on D:OS, as Raze pointed out, we'll hopefully see more mods appear.

It is hardly 'dropping the ball' to focus more on updating the game.

I am someone whose Kickstarter support was driven in a significant way by the prospect of using the toolset. I dove in as soon as it was ready and was eager to put my dreams into reality. It became clear, however, that Larian simply don't have the time right now with other issues taking priority. It simply looks too risky to sink my time into it just to have major issues go unresolved or get broken in future patches. I felt that pain in Dragon Age and I'm not interested in reliving it again.

That said, while I am rather disappointed, I hold no ill feelings toward Larian. I have full confidence that Swen is prioritizing things that are in the best long term interest for the health of Larian, and that is more important to me in the end of the day. The optimistic side of me is hopeful that with the new teams Larian are setting up, we will get a double benefit. Namely, Larian will have to clean up the toolset to make it work better for off site teams with better integration of multiple adventures, and we'll get a steady flow of games from Larian themselves. Here's hoping...

The modding scene didn't happen for the simple reason that the Divinity Toolkit is a professional development tool, and the vast majority of modders are amateurs. The Toolkit has a huge learning curve hampered by various unintuitive aspects (like items/resources not being labeled properly) which means it takes a lot of time to work out simple things.

1. Initial editor instability (AI grid crashes, terrain malfunctions, other edit-breaking bugs) frustrated and scared a lot of people off.

2. The learning curve for absolutely everything is really high. Terraining, texturing, placing objects, all the visual stuff uses highly malleable brushes, not simple preset tiles. Scripting, editing simple stats, dialog, all of it's pretty tough to get used to and unintuitive, and a lot of quality of life stuff is absent, so you have to open and close things all the time. When making a standalone mod, none of the systems are included (like marking stolen items or waypoint code), so you had to make it yourself or look for it in the main game code. A lot more intimidating than a checkmark or something to mark and item as owned by X. No in-editor help and very few tooltips means you have to search through the forum on how to do basic things.

3. As Raze said, content updates are bad for mods because people don't want their mod to become useless or broken from a patch. I started working on a treasure edit mod back in December thinking the big patch would come out in January, boy was I wrong. Now I don't want to work any more on it because Larian will certainly be making at least some changes to the loot system, which means I'd basically lose all my edits to the item stats text file. Also, a bunch of programmers have probably been tied up working on the Linux so they haven't been able to work as much on improving the editor, but maybe those are different teams.

4. Lack of ability to import custom models until recent, and the scene was basically dead by that point so essentially no one has done anything with that yet.

5. Inability to activate more than one mod barring manually combining the files is a HUGE roadblock to people using mods for the main game since most people don't want to bother with that hassle just to get unlimited lockpicks and all skillbooks available at stores mods and run+speed increase working together. If this issue isn't dealt with, the modding scene will never be very good because the user experience will suck.

Like Windemere, I'm disappointed but I don't blame Larian (at least, anymore :P). They clearly have a lot on their plate with the huge D:OS patch, linux version, and two new games. Maybe once D:OS reaches a polished, stable state, and especially if they providing modding life on both the users and makers sides, the mod scene will be reinvigorated. But I honestly don't have the highest hopes. Maybe their next games will fare better since the systems will be more stable.

By the way, when I expressed some disappointment on Swen's blog that Larian didn't put a lot of effort into cultivating a modding community, he did answer with, "We know, but we're going to get better at it, promised." Granted that was five months ago but I still have faith that it's on his radar and he's just had a lot to do with getting Linux done, setting up the new teams, etc.

I think a lot of modders are also waiting for the big patch.

To have modders you also need to have active players so the big patch might change things for the better, but I wouldn't count on that doing a huge dent into active modding numbers Critical phase for modding is the first month after release.

Either way, Baardvark already summed it up. The "Export Tool" came too late, only 1 mod at a time also makes visual and gimmick mods nay impossible to garner any popularity and the learning curve for certain things (Adding new armor, weapons) is a learning cliff.. not even particularly the editor itself, although the scripting language is special ,p , but just flat out basic things like importing texture or a mesh. If you actually wanted to replace character meshes and add custom animations you'd have to have modding abilities that rival uber geek level game devs, as in without RadGameTool license and tools, you literally could not do that until the Export Tool was out (meshes, anyway).

Now it is possible to add new armor and weapons, but nobody is experimenting with it apparently. Probably because of that point 5 in Baardvarks post

It's not the game mechanics but the setting. Shadowrun lends itself easily to conspiracies, corporate wars, syndicates, dragons and magic. Just thinking about that makes your fingers itch and you want to make your own campaign To create a cool spin off campaign in Divinity you need an interesting story/conflict, which the "source" stuff in my humble opinion simply isn't. In my humble opinion larian could raise much more interest in the game and especially the cool mechanics of magic they implemented if they would take, for example, "Avatar" as an inspiration and tell a tale about a conflict between the magic elements. For example, there could be a "fire nation" that wants to conquer the "earth nation" etc. and a small village caught in the conflict.

Making full featured AND user friendly tools is hard work. I hope Larian isn't discouraged, and keeps investing in it for the long term. It might actually be a sort of a must have for their plans of expansion.

I think if you want immediate impact on the modding scene, you have to make it open to make changes to the main game in many different ways. My understanding was you weren't able to change the main game, like add new NPC, baddies, landmarks etc. That is where Bethesda does it right, that is why you have mods day 1 and 100's in weeks. They aren't standalone mods, they are mods to the main game.

Well you can add new NPCs and objects and such, but you can't edit existing ones except their stat files. But you couldn't make them part of another quest or add loot tables to an existing NPC because the original data supersedes the mod data. Somewhat annoying and that'd be a nice fix to be able to edit existing content, but it doesn't interfere with adding new content.

The modding tools aren't by any means "bad" now. The Divinity Engine is one of the better ones I've worked with, in my opinion.

Sure, it was frustrating to learn and to set up properly, but once you get it going, it's not bad.

I have a member of this forum test playing my mod and taking extensive notes. He's busy, I'm busy, so progress is slow. Once he gives me his notes on his playthrough, I'll complete my mod. I really wanted to have it out in May, but it's looking more realistically like June.

It should take the average player somewhere between 4-8 hours by my estimation.

As others have said, Larian has been committed to improving the game and has not had the resources to put into fostering a thriving modding community AND the toolset (at least when I looked at it a number of mos. back) did not give a good first impression. Lots of crash bugs, steep learning curve... I compare that to the first time I pulled up the Neverwinter toolset... completely different experience.

The good news is - since they intend to keep this engine for a while - once they have an opportunity to refine the toolkit, it should improve the modding scene significantly.

I agree with the feedback people have been giving - the learning curve is quite steep. When I found out about the editor I got all excited, thinking about delving in and making mod versions of the worlds that I day-dream about day in and day out. My first attempts have been pretty discouraging, but of course that has to do with the fact that I'm totally new to modding (save for command block/world building on Minecraft servers and making maps and units for games like Age of Wonders/Warlords III). I'll come back to it after the new edition, as I'm sure there will be improvements made to make the editor more amateur friendly.

I also hope the editor become more amateur friendly.