Modding has proved to be a vital aspect of PC games, as it has helped keep many titles alive for far longer than they would have realistically lasted on their own merits. When it comes to “Dragon Age”, the franchise has been traditionally un-moddable, and BioWare have been pretty firm on that stance. There have been rumors about modding potentially coming to previous installments, but these have always turned out to be false. And now, with the release of “Dragon Age: Inquisition”, this situation is likely going to change.
This was confirmed by a post at Nexus Mods, a popular modding community, which discussed the future of the game’s modding tools. According to the post, the current goal of the developers is to design a toolkit like the Creating Kit used in “Skyrim”, a Bethesda title, allowing players to easily create and share content with each other. So far, the tools haven’t come that far along though, as they only support viewing and exporting assets, without the possibility to actually import anything into the game.
The developers are now reportedly working on a tool that will be used to replace textures and even meshes, and they’ve released a beta for it a couple of years ago, although this was a closed test only meant for modders with an established presence on the scene and proved experience.
Response to the news has been strongly positive, and modders seem to already be working hard to create exciting new content for the game, and the possibilities for what the future could bring are practically endless.
Many industry experts have commented that this is a very good move by BioWare, as it will ensure that the new “Dragon Age” remains alive for far longer than its predecessors. Of course, this also requires a proper initial release, but BioWare already handled that well enough when they brought “Inquisition” to the market. The game has been received mostly positively by the community as well as critics, and now it’s expected that it will see a lot of activity in its modding scene.
There are numerous examples of games that have managed to remain significant for a long time thanks precisely to their modding capabilities, and “Skyrim” is a good recent one. There are also more extreme examples, like “DOTA” which was originally a mod for “Warcraft 3” and eventually evolved into its own game, similarly to “Counter-Strike”. While it seems like the modding tools for the new “Dragon Age” aren’t going to include any programming capabilities, making such extensive mods impossible, they should still give gamers plenty of new content to play around with for a long time in the future.
The comment above – ” When it comes to “Dragon Age”, the franchise has been traditionally un-moddable, and BioWare have been pretty firm on that stance.” is incorrect.
Bioware actually released a downloadable modding toolkit for Dragon Age Origins.
I played Dragon Age Origins for many years with a large amount of community generated mods. They totally transformed the game for me. If not for the mods, I would have stopped playing DAO after a few month As it is, I still play occasionally 5 years after I originally bought the game.