The magic of the Baldur’s Gate portraits is that each one really conveyed a memorable quirk or tell of the characters personality. In many ways this was a crutch for the lack of expressiveness of the 2D player models, something their catch phrases also padded out. The hidden effect is that characters stick in your mind in a quick simple way, before you really even get to know them they are already interesting. When your characters go to battle, even in a modern 3D game you often aren’t connected to the expression of your characters. I like that Baldur’s Gate connected you to your characters even outside of dialogue trees and subplots. Could this be done in 3D? Maybe. It takes a strong artistic vision.
Now I think the main challenge is representing the player character. Everyone is used to character creation that fully customizes a player character to whatever they want. There are 3 main types of players that I can identify, people who want to play a role, people who want to create a role, and people who just want to do weird crud to mess around with the game. I was always a fan of importing my own images as a portrait, but not everyone wants to get that creative.
Picking character portraits only appeals to those who just want to play a role. Sure you can try and project yourself into it, but it isn’t robust. So obviously this is why character portraits have often gone 3D in games like this. To compensate I remember Dragon Age added an expression slider of some kind to help customize the personality of your character, but it was far from robust. A lot of characters just end up looking awkward, and the 3D back then wasn’t so good. Perhaps now could be better, and maybe with optional filters or something you could create a portrait worthy of Baldur’s Gate. It may seem like a lot of work for a small thing, but I’m telling you all it sells it.
