Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Focused Feedback: Halflings

If this is true then halflings should have necks almost the same size as there bodies with heads almost as wide as there should length. With stronghearts/stout having beer bellies, ghostwise with hairy feet and maybe more hairy areas...along with all of them having chicken legs.

Edit* I think I found one that fits.

Alright, thanks. I will check out the thread. Yeah, i saw the pictures of the stances and the ones without clothes. It looked comical. Found out 5e dnd changed the halftling appearance back to the "hobbit" look.
So i guess the this is a widely discussed topic of dnd in general. I wonder if larian will change the race's appearance to the more athletic 3.5e version if they are following 5e.
Changes are needed either way to be sure.

Not sure how you can do intimacy scenes with small humanoids in general without it feeling strange.:P

Fortunately, in the realms, a decent percentage of most built up areas are comprised of a standing population of mature, consenting adults, employing staff, running businesses, debating politics, enforcing the law and engaging in mercenary work, who also happen to stand at three feet or under.... and has done for many, many generations... so that kind of stigma rarely exists, beyond individual personal preferences ^.^

((As a lady who is 138cm tall, I have a vested interest in denouncing the idea that smaller people can't be seen as mature consenting adults... but that's only tangentially related))

"Not sure how you can do intimacy scenes with small humanoids in general without it feeling strange.:P"

Hahaha. That's great. I'm probably biased being a normal sized person and all.

Unless there are reasonable objections, I think that this thread could be merged with the other Halfling Models thread.

I agree

Dislike the hafling models also... look more like an under developed dwarf... not a hafling imho

Everything about them says they should look more like shorter elves... who by the way could also look more elven...

Personally hoping we see an evolved avatar builder or something... while some races are worse than others... they all seem a little too similar... probably a pipe dream at this point...

I just see the illustration from the 3.5 ed book and that is what the races are supposed to look like imho...

Sounds like a plan.



That's what hobbits are right? D&D didn't want halflings anymore they wanted hobbit ripoffs like how they used to be.

"Smaller elves" would be gnomes, being fey-like as well; halflings are supposed to be like smaller humans. (But not humans with dwarfism. I very much agree with this thread, as I've posted here earlier.)

And I agree that races in general should be more distinct from one another and less human-like. There's a similar thread for elves.

This sounds like yet another problem solved, if Larian will implement at least few body types ... O_o
Maybe except that animations. :-/

Where's my hairy feet ?

We Demand More Sexy Halflings

I completely agree with most of this, the halflings we have at the moment look less like halflings, and more like people with achondroplasia, which is a type of dwarfism that causes a curved spine, predominant abdomen, among other traits, some of which are present, and some aren't.

On one hand, there can be an argument for this to be a more positive, realistic portrayal of little people. On the other hand, portraying little people as separate from humans feels incredibly problematic. I personally think this is why halflings have very clearly lacked traits traditionally associated with dwarfism up to this point.

I could very easily see the current halfling model being used when a body type system is added to the character creator, at least for humans, and maybe half-elves.

I would definitely come down on the side that portraying people with dwarfism as not being human would be very unpleasant. People with dwarfism still exist as a condition of humanity, but they aren't "Dwarves" as in the race, or "Halfling", or "Gnomes". They'd still be Humans.

Halflings should look like Lidda. We're done here.

Lidda who?

I believe they mean Lidda the halfling, from (correct me if I'm wrong...) 3rd edition; she was one of the "Iconic Characters", which they used as poster characters for their official artwork at the time.

If I may, though, a chunk of this thread has gotten a bit bloated up with people seemingly posting images of 'bad' halfling artwork, specifically because it's bad? I'm not sure I understand the reasoning...

Part of what I was attempting to point out was that even looking solely at 5e official artwork, there are more examples of healthy proportions and believable builds, than the cartoonishly bad or dramatically stylised ones - even though both styles of depiction do undeniably exist.

I feel as though the more people just shrug and say "5e made them that way and it's bad", without considering the other examples, the harder the battle will be to get models in this game that don't have the visual problems that the current ones do.

It may be a losing battle already, but the new patch shows us that they are actually trying to listen and make changes based on feedback, and that they were even willing to re-record new voice lines... so possibly getting the subtle but noticeable changes to the existing models to make them better isn't off the table. This seems especially hopeful when it's so very clear that they need to do small-race animations still, when having them use the animation anchors that medium creatures use is so completely terrible.

I wanted to talk more about animations, actually, but there wasn't a good place to start - the problem is absolute and pervasive, because they're using the animations and anchors that larger models use, and it invariably makes them look ridiculous for almost everything... Just watch a halfling climb a ladder, if you want a good example, or try to pet the dog - the model insists on trying to place its feet in the same anchor positions as the larger model, even though its limbs can't reach properly, and the result is very.... "my-first-3d-animating-tutorial" in calibre.

There's no feasible way the game can launch without them giving small races a completely independent animation set for everything... so hopefully by the time that comes around, we might have convinced them to look seriously at tweaking the actual models as well, while they're doing so.

To refresh (for people just catching up with the thread or seeing it for the first time), the changes to improve the models are simple and quite subtle - they don't need to be massive changes to have a pronounced positive effect and remove the impression of dwarfism/neoteny etc.,

- The head: Needs to not be the same size as the human heads - not necessarily a huge change, or a complete reduction to half the size in all dimension, but a more subtle reduction - maybe to about two thirds its current size, would be enough to prevent the neoteny impression. (this applies to both male and female models)

- The torso: Should be scaled to have a smaller relation to the arms and legs; this again would be subtle, but even a 10% reduction in scaling here would help reduce the impression of dwarfism or of being juvenile, depending on how the eye focuses and relates. (This applies predominately to male models, but female models would also benefit from it; female models are fantastically busty as a result of this scaling, to the extent of it being almost ridiculous)

- The hips: The biggest source of problems, visually - by having the model share the same hip width as a creature twice their size, this reinforces and hammers in the impression of a creature with dwarfism, rather than a naturally well-proportioned creature. the width and depth of the hips and the hip region in general (bum and thighs included), needs to be reduced to scale more fittingly with a creature of this size and frame - again, it only needs to be a subtle reduction to create a valuable positive effect on the visual.

- The legs: The tapering of the legs exacerbates the visual issues caused by the hip region; normalising their legs from the knee down with the rest of their body frame would be another subtle change, but would help.


Sorry for effectively bumping again, but this is one matter that I feel is important - even as much as my other in-depth mechanical threads, and to a certain extent perhaps more. I've played far too many games where smaller race characters are just treated as jokes, or denied the right to be seen as adults entirely... and many more still where they can't even sit in chairs properly because no-one bothered to check their animations compared to larger characters, or knew, and just didn't think it important enough to bother with... and I really, really, don't want this game to end up being just another example of that, when it doesn't need to be.

Yeah I hope they listen to you, Niara.