Summary
- The ambitious Baldur’s Gate 3 custom campaign Path to Menzoberranzan has amassed hundreds of volunteer developers since it was announced in January.
- Art director Morgan Camp has 50 volunteers working under her alone, while there are 700 voice actor applicants and five writing teams, each comprised of 10–15 writers.
- However, despite the hundreds of devs now working on the expansion, the team is still enlisting more volunteers.
Earlier this year, a fledgling mod team announced an incredibly ambitious project: the Path to Menzoberranzan, essentially a fan-made expansion. Split into acts just like the base Baldur’s Gate 3, it will take us all the way from the familiar streets of Athkatla to the titular City of Spiders, complete with new, fully-voiced companions and in-depth, branching side quests.
Given what a huge undertaking a project like this is, the team put out a recruitment call for more devs last month. And as VideoGamer reported, it was a major success. The number of fans volunteering has surged, with “hundreds” of developers now working on the custom campaign, chipping in when and where they can in their spare time.
We’re just trying to get close to industry standards […] We have very professional [people] in the leading positions. We have a good quality teaching infrastructure that helps newcomers to understand the toolkit, and caring team leaders [plus] senior devs — u/Lotrich3.
Art director Morgan Camp, who has a background in film lighting, has 50 volunteers working under her alone. Meanwhile, there are five writing teams comprised of 10–15 people each, managed by creative director Thomas Loughlin. These segments focus on their own areas of development, such as the main quest, factions, side quests, etc., with experts joining the team to ensure that the expansion stays true to the D&D universe and Forgotten Realms’ lore.
700 fans have also put their names forward for a voice acting role, though casting hasn’t begun yet.
That’s only scratching the surface of how much the development team has grown; in fact, there’s so much buzz that they’ve even had to develop their own in-house tools to manage the project.
“It Exploded”, But Path To Menzoberranzan Is Still Looking For Volunteers
Like many modders, the Path To Menzoberranzan team began work on GitHub, but it quickly became clear how expensive that would be given that you have to “pay per seat for a person”. With hundreds of developers — on a volunteer project, no less — those costs would inevitably add up.
If you want to support the mod, you can do so on Patreon.
“As we’ve gotten a lot more people interested than we expected […] We ended up posting our own project management tool,” “technical director Chris Heisler explained. “So, instead of paying, we’re hosting it on a server. We run it ourselves. So, likewise, just to collaborate on the code base, we have a tool. We are hosting our own Git service.”
Yet even with hundreds of devs and an ‘explosion’ of interest from the community, there are still roles to be filled, such as VFX artists. If you’re interested in signing up, you can do so on the dedicated Discord.
Baldur’s Gate 3
5.0/5
- Released
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August 3, 2023
- ESRB
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M for Mature: Blood and Gore, Partial Nudity, Sexual Content, Strong Language, Violence
- Engine
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Divinity 4.0