Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback character customization

I cannot be the only one thinking this, but they need to expand the character customization. Its great that they are giving us a lot of options, but creating a character from a list of presets and actually getting to customize your character's facial features and everything are very different. I don't need to choose from over 150 preset faces if I am able to just use some sliders and actually create my own character. Character creation is one of my favorite aspects of games, I can spend hours just working on making my character look perfect. In BG3 im in and out of character creation in 10 mins, and no one wants their character to have the same face as npcs. I want to be able to make my own unique character.


Does anyone know if the current character customization is the final character creation or if they are planning on adding sliders to it?

I'm unsure how much work it would be for them. They've said in interviews that they're using some kind of face scan method of real people's faces and that they're very proud of the result. Adding sliders is probably possible but it might not be in their wishes to do so.

It was specificly told that they will not use sliders ...
But threre still are ways to create customization a bit more comples, even without that thing.

For example ears, few faces for Elfs, or Tieflings could be quite nice, but those ears are looking horrible. (yes, i am a perfectionist in this)
Or facial scars, again for some unknown reason tied only to specific faces.
Or complexion, is that so dificiult to add option to choose freckles? Dunno, Fallout 4 did that 6 years ago. :-/

I can work with choosing whole face, but right now we are choosing whole head like in Kotor (18 years ago) and that is not so impresive for AAA title in 2021, even if some of them looks awesome. :-/

Yup ... they said that they scan over 40 people, creating over 150 different heads ...
Then i wonder why do we have acess to only 6(?) per race. :-/

They can't have you have the same face as some random NPC can they now

Makes you wonder what poor fellow they used to scan for Dragonmens though

I know I'm in a minority opinion here, but personally, I find the character creator to be very flat and entirely underwhelming, and I don't understand really why so many news sites seem determined to sing its praises. Sure, the faces that we have are highly detailed... but we have a paltry few handful to pick from, and before very long there's a really, really bad bout of same-face going around.

- You have a number of preset skin tones, no gradient
- A bunch of preset eyes to pick from, no gradients
- A handful of hair colours to pick from, no shading or tone variation
- A number of hairs, but no customisation within that, and an unhappy number that look more or less similar.
- You might want a beard, but if you want a beard that doesn't cover your upper lip you have precisely one and one option alone. And it looks terrible.
- A half a dozen tattoos, half of which are all variants on one or two things, and an egregious waste of resources for being so
- No other detail or face options AT ALL.


How anyone could call this a *good* character creator completely eludes me. It's very lacking and disappointing. I genuinely feel as though the various news sites that praise it must have been specifically paid to do so.

A scan through the post-your-character thread illustrates this in a rather extreme way. 20 pages of what are essentially five or six characters with slightly different skin tone, hair or eyes, dressing up as different races but still very clearly the same person underneath as about fifty other pictures before them...

No offense intended to the people posting in the thread of course; people have done lots of interesting things with the tools given.... but the tools are not great.

The small number of presets didn't seem jarring to me, until I reached the Tiefling camp for the first time. Half a dozen faces don't go far in a crowd. I felt the same in the Goblin camp too, and can't help but think that Moonrise Towers will be full of cookie-cutter Duegar and Drow, and Baldur's gate will be home to yet more Gingerbread men - stamped from the same cutter with only limited icing to distinguish them.

Because it is relativly easy to make a pretty looking character, probably. And I have seen a fair amount of good looking characters in screenshots, though many looked pretty much the same with just small differences.

But I fully agree the character creator is... lacking. Too many similar looking options with hair/faces/tattoos and not really a good way to customize skin colour or haircolour.

On top of that, almost all the non-human races just look... human. The elven faces are not really elven, and the same goes for halflings and dwarves imo. Gityanki and Tieflings sort of look unique still but their options with hair feel even more limited than the other options. It feels underwhelming for how much praise it apparantly is getting.

That is why i mentioned Kotor ...
There, when you picked up head that was set for an NPC, that NPC get another head from your character selections ... right now we have 6 heads per race reserved for PC ... it seem like enough to make sure that no NPC will be players twin sibling. :P

I'm also fairly underwhelmed by the character creator for reasons already listed here, so I won't rehash them.

I have another issue with it, though. Every time you change an option, the character completely disappears for a moment and then reappears with the new option. I'm finding that this can make it very difficult to tell what actually changed - especially for the face shapes. Is anyone else having this issue? I wonder if morphing or even just jumping from the old option to the new one, without the disappearing, would help things.

Edit: Or, instead of arrows moving between face shapes, just pull up a menu that shows images of all of the options so we can see them all side-by-side. That would make it much easier to compare, e.g. option 1 and option 4, instead of having to scroll back and forth through the options in between.

that is utterly disappointing to hear. its 2021, like it should be so easy to add sliders to the character customization, its not a new concept. I dont need to choose from 150 prescaned faces if I have the ability to create the face that I actually want.

The problem with using presets is that I dont want a character that looks like someone else, I want my character to look like the image I have in my head. additionally, what this sort of character creation will inevitably lead to is all players choosing 1 of 5 faces for their character. Sure they may have different hair or eye color, but 90% of characters made will use the same faces. the implementation of sliders actually allows people to create unique looking characters.

I am actually super disappointed about this. its 2021, I really expected to be wow'ed by the character creation but this is just lacking on so many levels. Larian should stop wasting time scanning faces and implement sliders, this is a major oversight imo.

Regarding the face scans, it's not even as though you actually HAVE much of a choice in the end anyway, if you're crating a character; you'll generally be after something in particular, and you don't have 6 faces to choose from: suppose you want to make an older-looking lady - congratulations, you have 1 single face that works for that. That's it, that's your face. Exactly the same as literally everyone else who ever wanted to make a more aged female character. There is no choice, currently. It actually doesn't MATTER how incredibly highly detailed the individual faces are; this is just not acceptable for a character creator.

Personally I would like metallic and marble accessories for hair and beards for pirate theme. Maybe bone accessories to for like a tribal theme as well. The noble backgrounds should have the optional monocle. Bandana's and headbands too. With customizable patterns and colors. It's not my thing, but earings might be welcome for some.

To keep immersion you can have a fashion bag of holding lol.

For faces I would like more African and islander presets if possible. More dreads and fro variety. Oh and more rugged voices and faces in general. The game leans a bit much into the european "pretty boy" and need more "rugged war vets".

I mean why not go all out for maximum cutscenes.

In games of this genre, there are usually no sliders, this is not Dragon Age. But I really believe they needed to make unique faces for MC that would not be used on NPC.

Maybe they simply want to reduce silliness in their game. :-/
Or to prevent such memes:


I kinda understand the people "want" sliders, they can be usefull, they are popular, and they are quite common theese days. :-/
But i also understand that Larian dont want us to have them, so many time, money and energy they spend scanning and creating faces we can use ... just to be completely dumped for ... well, this i posted above. :-/

Nah, sliders seem to be mod material, sory. :-/
But we certainly need more options in character creation.

Er, what exactly do you mean "games of this genre", Nyloth? Its genre is fantasy RPG, pretty much the same as that Dragon Age game you mention ^.^

This is a game where creating your own adventurer/hero is an important and integral part of the game experience (since it's claiming to be a D&D game). There is no feasible way in which a robust character creator is NOT a fundamentally important part of that.

What genre are you slotting this game into where that's not an important aspect, and why do you think it belongs there?

If you're just talking about "other dungeons and dragons video games", for not having detailed character creators, consider that you'd be referencing games that were produced long enough ago that detailed character creation wasn't as feasible as it is in games today... and bet your life that had it been more doable for the games at the time, they would certainly have tried to do so.

Well, I'm sure that Dragon Age is an action rpg, not a classic CRPG. So yes, I believe they are different. ^ ____ ^ My opinion. And "other dungeons and dragons video games" ? Like Pathfinder? Where there are also no sliders. And this one not old at all.

Wouldn't mind some form of slider or even options to change facial features
Like
Head shape -
Nose shape -
Eye shape -
Mouth shape -
Brows - (please give us juicy thicc eyebrows)
Doesnt even have to give us sliders to adjust these options just simple changeable features would suffice

at least it would give us more exploration as well as a small chance of not running into an npc with your characters face

I actually dislike sliders because of how much time it takes to make the character look how I want. I appreciate pre-sets for saving me time in character creation and I've always preferred presets for being better quality. Also, no game should be expected to have character creation sliders because of what year it is.

I'm still waiting for Half-Orc, sorcerer, paladin etc. to be available in character creation. That's something I'm really looking forward to.

Same. And I figure from a technical aspect, having a robust slider will result in a lot more clipping and graphical issues. That would require more time to fix. Time that could be used elsewhere.

I do support more pre-sets though. I find almost all the human faces hideous which is surprising since all the other races have at least a couple I find attractive (both male and female).

As a long time Dragon Age player, I have to chirp in here. It is not more action than BG3, it's actually a very story driven game franchise. It is a bit faster than BG3, because, it's not turned based.

As for the thread: I would love to have sliders to customize the faces. So far, there are only three faces, I really love and where I don't want to change anything. Those are two Tiefling faces (2 and 4) and a halfling face - all female.