Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Physique Customization

I feel like the game would benefit from a physique customisation, where you could make your character muscular, scrawny, tall/small (within the races constraints).

At the moment it doesn't matter if you're trying to play an old wizard or a burly fighter, you have exactly the same body composition, which takes away from the fundamentals of creating a character to fit a description you imagine.

Yup!

While we’re at it, let’s ask for age customization too – right now everyone looks the same age. Maybe that can be hand-waved because the illithids only took people in their prime, but it doesn’t feel very D&D to strip people of that choice.

There is already a thread for that, just a few threads down from this one (larger body types - despite the title its about all body sizes).

Hey, you can either play a young woman or a young man, or you can choose to play a grim, scarred, well aged halfling.

That's not even a choice, it's so clear

I would be happy with just three fields of three options each:
- Height: low, medium, high
- Physical size: lean, medium, robust
- Age: young, adult, middle-age

I'd be ready to bet the devs are more than aware that people would absolutely love to have as many customization options as possible.
Fairly sure that if we are not getting some of them is not because no one at Larian thought we would like them, but because they were considered too much work for too little payoff.

For instance I've seen plenty of people asking for individual sliders to modify "character heads" but the real questions is if a slider-based customization is technically feasible at all with the system Larian is using. Like... Are these "scanned heads" even deformable in any reliable manner? Can they stretch body proportions at will and still have equipment that behave decently on "larger bodies" (or whatever people will do with the sliders)? Etc, etc.

This was just announced today. Maybe BG4?

Well, maybe. Surely not the third, given that Larian is using a custom proprietary engine for the game.

EDIT - Fun fact: before Epic bought 3Lateral and Cubic Motion that stuff was supposed to be middleware. Now it will most likely remain a toolset exclusive to the Unreal Engine.

That video is interesting, but I feel like the same thing has been dangled in front of us as 'just over the horizon' since NWN2 came out. At the time the best in face generation was like Poser I suppose, but the promises went largely unrealized, because (big surprise) its way harder to create a massive paint by numbers type thing with sliders and gradients and such, to visually service anything the end user might imagine, than it is to just hire more artists to draft a gang of presets and push it out the door.

The problem isn't so much the range of customization options available (or lack of them) but the idea that the average player is somehow going to become a better artist for things like this than pro 3d modellers/skinners, when it comes to crafting compelling floating heads. Or perhaps more importantly, the reality that a floating head or custom 3d avatar isn't really a portrait anyway, and that what I want is a portrait.

I think there was a reason D&D went with unpainted miniature sculpts or tiny pewter type figurines for avatars initially rather than 6 inch action figures, because that leaves much more to the imagination, and what wasn't covered could be supported by an actual portrait (always the most coveted accessory) or descriptive language. But that was in the 80s. In BG1/2 we had virtual paper dolls that were highly abstracted and preset, and a tiny BMP for a headshot. Which doesn't seem like much, but damned if it didn't manage pretty well as a stop-gap workhorse for visual characterization not actually possible in-game. Beyond changing Major/Minor colors, wearing elven chain, or using shadowkeeper to switch between fighter appearance and mage or thief appearance, there wasnt a whole lot there, but it didn't matter because the game had custom 2d portraits.

Not that I don't support more customization options in BG3 for the models... Simple phenotype options for height or weight? Fantastic. A million haircuts and eyebrows? I'm all there. But just acknowledging that the closer it gets to a deep fake or real doll in a 3d model, the more disappointed I tend to become, because, unlike abstracted BG1 sprites (where every wizard has a goat and every gnome is bald) its harder to ignore or suspend the disbelief when the level of detail staring back at you reaches a certain level. If its going to look that real, then you need a much broader range to keep everyone happy with their look. Now instead of just having a beard, its a choice about how much stubble is the right amount of stubble. Or now that we can actually see somebody's face in close up, instead of just a featureless blank, suddenly we need 30 eye colors and 60 noses etc. I'm just kind of underwhelmed at how the 3d tech has been used, and disappointed at the people who decided the character portrait wouldn't be necessary once we went from 2d to 3d.

It would certainly be possible to engineer a portrait creator in 3d, but that would mean some kind of built in studio suite, where you could control things like the direction or color of the principle light source. Emmotive facial expressions. Being able to pose and dress the full figure. I guess that's going to be Unreal?

If someone did a character creator like that properly you almost wouldn't even need an actual game right away, since people could probably sink a year into it just designing character looks while they waited for the adventure modules to drop

Anyhow, not trying to be a downer, but its 2021 already and the tech clearly exists, but I still feel like they're missing the mark in terms of what I want, because the floating heads still just look like floating heads to me. They don't look like badass illustrations from the cover of Dragon Magazine. They're not portraits. They're just floating heads.

But yeah, to the OPs request, it would be nice to choose a physical build for something other than just gorgeous and perfectly proportioned lol

Once something like that Metahuman drops as part of a tripleA RPG it will probably predominate, and I imagine it will become impossible to have anything less going forward after that. What gets shown in that video seems pretty next level. I wish it would be in a dungeons and dragons game to kick off a new era in portraiture, but probably it gets put in something else first like one of the big MMOs with monthly subscriptions.

It will be curious to see, once the mimetic novelty of real humans runs thin and every game adopts that sort of tech, whether we then start seeing a demand for some kind of MetaCartoon or MetaCharicature to come along and recover what's bound to get sort of lost in that process? MetaHuman type tools will probably change 3D gaming entirely and take over like photography did for commercial illustration making whatever came before just totally obsolete, but who knows maybe there will be a renaissance after for things like abstraction or simplified forms? because I think as humans we find those equally appealing. We like to fill in vignettes with our heads. And there's always going to be a charm to the smiling emoji over someone's actually-grinning-at-you mug all hyper real. But we've been waiting so long for 3D fidelity to the real that its hard not to get swept for it, cause they clearly just upped the ante there, being able to animate it convincingly too. Like is anyone going to bother trying to do that stuff in house after?

Pretty wild that 20 years ago this was what we had, with a 38x60 pixel portrait bmp hanging off to the side to tell you what it really looked like.





And next it'll to be Imoen and Minsc looking like actual people you knew in highschool lol. Wild

1000% agree. I made an earlier post about more customization opinions for facial features too. Players should be able to build their vision of a character, not what Larian has deemed each race to be. 150 presets do not go very far when you start limiting them to certain races -- 150 quickly becomes 6 if you wanna play a certain race and chances are none of those available faces will look like how you envisioned your character to look.

I get that Larian thinks using presets will help with the new cinematic dialogues but now I have to watch a character I do not like in all these conversations. Not to mention that in many of the cutscenes my character contorts their face in very unnatural ways and expressions which look extremely awkward. its 2021, we clearly have the technology to allow for actual facial and body customization as it has been done in old games.

I am just super not impressed with what Larian has given us as far as character creation goes, which is sad as I was super excited to see what types of characters I would be able to make in BG3. Turns out not a lot as I have only found 2 faces I like but they go with a race that I do not want to play. Forcing players to stick to presets almost defeats the purpose of character customization. I can spend hours working on creating my perfect character in other games, but I dread making my character in BG3. I don't even wanna try cuz I know it will never look how I want it to. They made it seem like this character creation would be amazing but all they did was add a lot of color options for the same model. You arnt creating your own character, you're making Larian's character.

Idk about other people, but I'd be willing to wait longer for the official release if it meant better, more robust character creation.

I do agree that more options would be great, but just felt the need to commend the devs at Larian for the color options we do have. I’ve seen a lot of games where picking fantastical or unnatural skin tones just looks plain hideous. Larian seems to have found a way to make them look great – there’s a lot of subtlety to the colors, even the most crazy ones.

I agree that on the abstract level none of this really matters, it's like there are two extremes that both work in their own right, but the middleground is never quite satisfying. The BG1 and 2 sprites are acceptable because they're always far away, and really just placeholders for the story in your head. All the drama is based on text. But once you have a camera swooping in for dramatic cutscenes, every detail matters. I think the characters in BG3 are brilliant, not trying to be hyper-real, but rather just appealing. And it works fully with the premade companions that have designs that match the kind of character they are, even custom clothing - the problem is the player being forced into a limited mold, because we want to be just as uncompromizingly unique as the companions, yet here we are, with the same face as the farmhand, and the same leather armor as every other rogue. The player ends up being the least unique character in the party. I don't think the majority plays fantasy RPGs to be a vanilla nobody. Everyone in the world should regard us as unique, and we should be able to look the part.