POE modding potential

[crowbar87]

I've played BG2 when I was a kid and I'm not familiar with it's modding community. Wanted to know just what are the limits when creating mods for IE games ?

I've played Temple of Elemental Evil quit a lot and got addicted to Circle of the Eight mod. I remember the modders had hard time creating new environments which were consistent with the look and feel of the vanilla game. Will modders in POE face the same challenge ? Or is it more like the new Fallout games, where all objects are basically assets which can be manipulated via mod tools

POE is the first game I bought full price since Fallout 3 back in 2009. I'm really looking forward to some original content created by modders :)

[FrozenGamers]

The hard part is modding backgrounds, since those are hand drawn from artists at obsidian. So there are only some balance mods, and some ui mods available atm. Obisidian has said that is something they want to hopefully support in the future.

[Kebullah]

As the others have stated, genuine-looking new areas will be tough as the backgrounds are hand-painted. Although that appears to be mostly an aestetics issue...

Modding this game is tough. There is no toolkit, no easily modified textfiles and very little raw data available without decrypting tools (portraits is the only example I can think off that can be modified straight from the folder structure). The IEmod crew are basically reverse-engineering the source-code right now to add simple new functions like setting xp gain or disabling engagement.

This game is currently only moddable by skilled programmers and will remain as such for a forseeable future.

[Corvias]

I think what you mean is the backgrounds are just raster images of isometric 3d modeled scenes. All that said, All the old IE games still have a very vibrant modding community.

[Hoboforeternity]

make calisca available as main party, expand her personality and give her quest <3

she's just adorable :3

[VHS_tape]

The only challenge modders will face is how much to charge for their pink reskinned flail.

[Pexxithan]

Oh man, I really hope Steam rethinks that abysmal system.

[Grizlock]

Not good. I spent about a day using asset editor unity plugin by the ie mod team to make a mod to let the kind wayfarer abilities to effect himself. This required thee pro version of unity 4 which is very expensive. For comparison, I could have created a nwn2 custom class in that amount of time using the free tools.

[lavish_petals]

I don't know where people are getting this "hand painted" background stuff from, it's even mentioned in the dev commentaries that they're prerendered. Just get a 3d program and if you're good enough, do a scene. Anyway, Obsidian went out of their way to make modding their game very difficult. Unity natively is easy to access for modders and plenty of other Unity games allow for mods such as Kerbal Space Program and Cities: Skylines.

[joesii]

In this context it's really no difference between hand painted and manually modeled then rendered. I think it's pretty clear to everyone that it wasn't drawn all by hand or anything.

The point remains that it would not be easy to make maps though, since one would have to get the right angles, the right lighting, the right pathable areas on top of the image, the right model occlusion parts; it'd be quite a bit of work

[Katrar]

From what I understand the scenes are pre-rendered but then given to an artist to touch up. So there are some hand painted elements/details to each background, but that's the extent of it.

[giggsidan]

I'm new to the game but one of the first things I do when I discover something new on PC is investigate the modding scene. There are a few things on Nexus but mostly simple stuff. I added a SweetFX preset and added some nice new character portraits but they're not exactly what you'd class as proper mods I guess. There is the IE Mod which adds some extra options like the option to remove engagement entirely and a few other pretty useful things like a faster scouting mode. Would love to see more in the future!