Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Larian plans to improve character customization?

I would like to customize my character's face, be able to choose my mouth, ears, nose, eyes etc.
I don't like predefined heads, I hate the male tiefling heads.

If they have plans to improve it, they never talked about it.

I doubt there will be sliders for facial customisation but the current choices are frankly pitiful. Half-eves look like Elves and male Elves have jawlines an 80s action film star would be proud of. The whole character creation needs a huge improvement.

Im affraid that the only improvement we can hope for is more options ...
Even tho i would be quite fine with option to choose ears separately from my head.

But since Larian use scanning mechanism:

(Source: https://devtrackers.gg/baldurs-gate-3/p/5fd62747-community-update-8-character-creation)

Im affraid they cant allow us to choose different eyes, chins, or nose ... since the engine sees the head as single whole aset. :-/

Can they not just scan everyone in the office? I'm sure most people, myself included, would love to have their face as an option in a video game.

I would be shocked if there aren't more options - potentially significantly more options.

But I would also be shocked if there are sliders and stuff like that.

I'm ALMOST completely confident the latter won't EVER be a thing.
The former is fairly probable, but the question is more a matter of "to what extent". Are they going to add two faces and call it a day or, say, five-six more for each race?

I presume that if they will, they will use those faces for NPCs ...
Maybe some group od adventurers we will meet in Baldur's Gate.

I don't see a Bethesda-style slider customization feature. Maybe some more presets (still hopelessly crossing my fingers for the chance we might get some more lore-accurate elven faces to differentiate the elves from the half-elves and humans)

What could plausibly be added, and I'm crossing my fingers for is some hair styles for large-eared races that don't clip through their ears. There's some amazing detailed faces in this game, but the effect is...I don't want to say 'ruined' but rather undermined when their hair and ears clip through each other on four-out-of-five hairstyles for elves, gith etc. Helmets have this problem too.

I'm hoping for some piercings. Barbarians get them, but only in a limited manner. Would be nice to see some more of that for the rest of the classes.

Those faces also need to animate, and have items like hats and haircuts, facialhair work with it, so who knows how much work it takes for each face to be functional.

Quick, vaguely related side note: does anyone here think there's any chance we'll get some fix for "plastic hair" syndrome?
For instance some last minute "Nvidia Hairworkâ„¢" integration?

Personally I'm very doubtful, but it's not out of the question that the tech could be simpler to implement that I imagine... If you are willing to take a hit on performances when activating the option.

While the sliders for bodies are probably beyond the scope of possibility (you never know, though), having at least the choice of several body types for every race is kinda needed so that the origin characters resemble their key art more - like how Shadowheart is supposed to have far more of a tomboish look to her, with some pretty defined musculature on her arms, and I highly doubt Astarion would have the abs of somebody doing bench-pressing on a regular basis. Adjustible height would be quite welcome too, so that the drow women can be made canonically taller than the males.

Whereas the faces are sketchier as far as the possible extent of their customization in the full game goes. Yes, they are scanned heads, but they do get significantly altered to fit the races (I highly doubt they'd have found a few gith around to get a scan of them), and there are several instances of them just outright using another race's head model for a different one (like the tiefling wizard from the Grove, or some of the petrified drow having human ones). There's been some impressive appearance mods too, where the same basic face structure would receive slight alterations to fine-tune the look somewhat. My ultimate hope here is that we'll at least have feature selection (ears, eyes, mouths, etc.), because just having a selection of preset heads in a game that focuses so heavily on character close-ups and late Bioware-like dialogue cinematography is kinda embarassing, honestly. Not that you can't make some neat looking characters with what is available, but meeting your clones amongst the NPCs is really unfortunate.

Just curious but was customization changed or even addressed since the beginning of EA two years ago? I feel that what we have now is what we had two years ago.
If not, well, thats probably what we will get on release. Or 95% of it at least.

As far as i know we only get few new assets ...

Some make up collors, few new facial tatoo (most of them ugly tho imho) and ofc piercings for wildheart Barbarian.
But if we will concider datamining there are some hints for body sizes.

A few heads were added for most races (dwarves and halflings got left out, though - but the githyanki got a bunch), some cosmetic options (tattoos and makeup - albeit there was a rose tattoo that's missing now), and two hairstyles. And the face-scales for the draconic sorcerers plus the wildheart barbarian piercings.

There is a hint of at least one missing feature in the game itself rather than the datamined material - the player should have multiple facial marking pattern options for the githyanki instead of the single one every head currently shares. If you pick the female gith head 1 for your dream-lover during character creation, she'd have different markings that you can't pick for your PC.

Now that I think about it, single-player western RPGs (not counting the Bethesda stuff) have been kinda neglecting detailed character customization for a while now. I remember Inquisition having a pretty powerful editor, although the characters would often end up looking either butt-ugly or plastic-y because of how the graphics looked, and then Andromeda's was very primitive in comparison, even though it was on the same engine, and didn't have to account for 4 playable races. Or you have the CDPR/Obsidian example of giving you a decent set of options only to make dialogues and cutscenes first-person. It's a real head-scratcher when something like Elden Ring allows you to go wild with customization, but you'd have to go out of your way to even get a close-up look at your character, and there are no dialogues or interface elements to appreciate the appearance, while the games you'd think would really put effort into that kinda stuff because of them having all of the above end up lacking.

Right now, the big fix that needs to happen with heads is swap the Half-Elf male heads with the Elf male heads. The Half-Elf males look more Elven than the Elf males.