Three years after its release, Baldur’s Gate 3 is officially getting no more official expansions — and the developer has made that crystal clear. Larian Studios founder Swen Vincke told a GDC panel in 2024 that the studio would not be producing new expansions or a sequel, Baldur’s Gate 4, and would instead “move on, we’re going to move away from D&D, and we’re going to start making a new thing.” Yet rather than fade into silence, the game has quietly become the most prolific modding playground in gaming history. Since late July alone, at least four substantial custom campaigns have hit the scene, with a fifth already in development. The question is no longer whether more content is coming — it is why the community is producing so much of it, and whether any of it is actually good.
What makes this wave of content remarkable is that Larian’s official modding support was never designed to accommodate full custom-campaign creation. The studio’s own editor ships with several foundational features disabled — the ability to build brand-new levels, write new dialogue, or design new combat encounters, the very building blocks of a real campaign. Modders have worked around these restrictions, in part by leveraging unlocked toolkits like Moonglasses, which remove those limitations and grant access to developer mode within the game, allowing creators to build new stories from scratch.
Unlocking the Engine
Better dev tools can answer one of the central questions surrounding this content boom. Larian’s official mod support was never built to allow full custom-campaign creation, and the workaround has become the norm. Moonglasses and similar third-party mods strip away the restrictions, letting modders access developer mode within the game and construct entirely new narratives. Timing also plays a role: one of these expansions, A Dream of Silence: ReVamped, was built specifically as an entry for the BG3 July Modathon 2026, an organized community event. That suggests it is not a coincidence that so many projects are releasing at the exact same time — and since the event appears to be annual, there is a decent chance of another drop next year.
“We’re not going to make new expansions, which everybody is expecting us to do. We’re not going to make Baldur’s Gate 4, which everybody is expecting us to do. We’re going to move on, we’re going to move away from D&D, and we’re going to start making a new thing.”
Swen Vincke, Larian Studios
But are these expansions any good? The answer depends on what a player is looking for, since each recent modded campaign delivers something specific. A Dream of Silence: ReVamped drops you and Astarion into a shifting nightmare version of Cazador’s mansion, adapting an existing piece of interactive fiction into a six-hour, four-ending story about your choices to save him or let the nightmare win. The Sunless Citadel skips branching narrative choices almost entirely for a linear dungeon crawl, catering to players who would rather get straight to combat and exploration than wade through dialogue. Act Two Expansion widens the game’s second section into an entirely new region, the Chionthar Wilds, with over 70 new items and 30 new fights. Dinner With Strahd goes the opposite direction from The Sunless Citadel, granting players a new story and full voice acting for one self-contained encounter with an iconic Dungeons & Dragons villain.
Looking Ahead
And — upcoming — there is Path to Menzoberranzan, which promises its own companions and a new protagonist, set one century after the events of Baldur’s Gate 2. Determining whether each is good is ultimately in the eye of the player: seeking voice acting, play Dinner With Strahd; seeking more lore and exploration, the Act Two Expansion may be the way to go.
It is worth being clear that these are not highly polished, official DLC experiences. Some feel oddly disconnected from the rest of the base game — nothing you experience in the Act Two Expansion, for example, will influence your run’s Act 3. None of these expansions are available on console at this time; each requires a PC install through Nexus Mods, since bigger campaign mods like these do not currently meet the requirements for Larian’s official console-friendly in-game mod menu. At least a couple are in flux or running alphas and betas pending further modder updates. The Sunless Citadel, for instance, does not yet have a camp system, which is harder to build than it might appear. Players interested in running more than one of these at a time should tread carefully, as A Dream of Silence: ReVamped’s own documentation warns that combining it with Dinner With Strahd can cause a glitch that unexpectedly swaps out some of Cazador’s visuals.
Still, six hours from one campaign, seven or eight from another, a whole new region to explore in Act 2, and entirely new characters and a full-game campaign on the horizon, the incredibly active and creative modding scene surrounding Baldur’s Gate 3 is keeping the tens of thousands of people constantly replaying this game busy. This is all real, playable content, available now and ready for your next run. For a game that is not getting official DLC or expansions anymore, Baldur’s Gate 3 has a surprisingly vast library of ways to make replays feel brand-new — every single time.

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