Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Elves are not Elven - Tel-quessir feed back ;)

Have to say I'm lukewarm towards the goblins as well. Larian is allowed creative license but they're not coming across as the pack of conniving, savage little beasties I know and love them to be in their designs. Taste is very subjective but at least I'm not the only one who seems to think so.

A thread about elven faces came up months ago that I remember pitching in on raised this very concern about the Elves looks un-Elven after a gameplay demo aired. What was said there bears repeating despite the masses of people content to have Elves just look like pretty Humans - taste is subjective, again, but good gods these are not pretty.



Wide nose, wide lips, shrunken and far-apart eyes, the feature coming vaguely close to "Elf" is the cheekbones. Drow and High Elves share face models so it doesn't matter much which I'm using.

Elves are distinctly Fey-like, slender and shorter than humans. The jaws, the chins, the facial structure is all terribly off and unrecognizable from Elves. Goldberry's diagram was even posted in the thread of months ago I mentioned, and it still illustrates brilliantly the problems with the Elven head models Larian has gone with. I've long been a fan of the studio, since the first D:OS game came out and have never taken particular issue with any of their design or artistic choices - but for something as strongly pre-established and rich in lore as forgotten realms, there does need to be that extra attention to detail to hit the nail on the head. This nail was missed and the hammer landed on the fingernail instead.

In forgotten realms, High elves are not shorter than humans, in fact they tend to be tall. Drow are supposed to be short, off hand i cant remember where wood elves fit in the height spectrum.

But i agree that elves should have generally more delicate features with more almond shaped eyes that are usually on somewhat more of an angle.


IMO, the only elf-like face the elves get is head 1, it's narrower than the rest with more angular features without being ugly.

They are shorter in other editions, but 5E (the one BG3 is based off) they are around the same height I think. Drow are definitely shorter.




Thank you! For clarification though, it's not 'mine', I just ripped it from a player's handbook manual

actually again no, even in 3.5 and 4e, high elves (sun and moon elves at least) have always been human height. 4'10" +2d10 was the sun and moon elf height in 3.5 and 3e, which was the same as humans, Eladrin in 4e (which is what sun and moon elves got lumped into) were between 5'5" and 6'1", so in 4e they were marginally shorter but able to be as tall as typical humans at around 6' and in 5e, sun and moon elves are high elves and the same height as humans. 5e has high elves as 4'6"+2d10 and humans as 4'8"+2d10. So again pretty similar in height.

I guess you can argue elves are shorter still in 4 and 5e, but not noticeably so. Whereas in greyhawk and i think a few other D&D settings, elves were traditionally a lot shorter than humans.

Well, Wood/Green Elves and Wild Elves (not in the game), should be broader/more muscular and slightly shorter then Moon and Sun Elves... but still, not going off human figures, but elven ones. They also should have more "robust" faces... wider jaws and noses, more facial hair (no beards, obviously, but sideburns and thicker brows). Asian features though? Nope... elven features are, well elven. They shouldn't have an equivalent in human races. Just as dwarven faces are slightly "off", with being too broad and wide, and have far too big noses, compared to humans, elven faces have a structure not found in any human ethnicity either. Especially the eyes. Elven eyes are supposed to be almond shaped and angled, yes, but also very large, not slanted at all.

Actually, looking at the facen in game right now, I think they could even be morphed to fit the general triangle/arrow head shape they should have. Elongate them a bit, angle the eyes and brows, slim down the noses and clean up the skin (even male elven skin is more delicate/smaller pored than human skin). It could work. Also, the hair: It should have a softer texture too it.

...a few axamples from my sidel:

I'm pretty sure I already said it all summarised as 'You can make better looking characters in Oblivion'.

Because the point is that by current standards, Oblivion actually had very atrocious character models and it didn't age well at all, yet somehow BG3 manages to still be worse in 2020.

The small pick of default faces pretty much all look the same. Select a beard then switch through each face and you can barely see any difference at all. They are not sufficient to meet each player's choices or desires in how they want their character to look.

A fully customisable character creation engine like in Oblivion and Skyrim should pretty much be a mandatory requirement for new AAA RPGs.

A little bit off topic, but it still concerns elves, so I'm going to ask around here since you guys seem like-minded. I decided to make a second play-through maining a drow, and going the full evil route. It's going better than I expected, you do get some drow interactions (whereas I didn't get any at all as a high elf, anywhere, with anyone, it was kind of disappointing)

And then I met Kagha. Who expresses appreciation for a drow :| ...What... Happened there? Why? Drow and surface elves are supposed to hate each other. Is there a reason regarding Kagha specifically?

+1 Even the half-elf faces could stand to be a little narrower--or at least there should be the option of creating a less "hearty" looking character. I think my wood elf ranger is pretty (at least when weird things aren't going on with hair sprouting out of her helm), but there's no touch of the ethereal in her appearance. I think the current faces are more or less OK as options, but we should have the choice of making a more delicate-appearing elf.

What I managed to interpret from this interaction was that she appreciates how Drow... protect their own? You know. The society of backstabbers where trust is death. At least they do band together against the 'lesser' races and mostly agree on that. Or it could be the Drow's infamous ruthlessness.

The lack of Drow to High Elf interaction and vice versa is something I hope Larian will catch on to, though having a completely antagonistic and hostile play through for a Lolth Sworn Drow would be a hard thing to manage with all the rewriting probably required. Just things here and there, present but not overbearing, would be nice.



Appreciate the correction, I'm very used to playing and talking in circles like nwn1.

I want my elves to be beautiful, emaciated twinks. Not whatever they are now.

The only Wood elf face I found passable was the second one, tat I'm now trying for a Ranger playthrough.

All the Halfling faces on the other hand made me cry.

Yes I agree.
The full elves should be the more alien and angular, or along the lines of "strangely pretty" but for now the half elf males actually look better. However, the half elves are stuck with body hair we can't edit.
This definitely needs to change, even a simple solution like allowing full and half elves to use both sets of head shapes, and allowing a toggle for body hair. More options for body type (thickness of limbs and waist, muscle tone texture) would be very welcome.

I agree that currently the half-elf faces look more elven than the elf faces in BG3. I want my elves to have angular faces and distinctly slanted eyes.

D&D, and sadly most of the derived fantasy works, treat the common fantasy races as nothing more than humans with funny ears. So I am all for giving them distinct, nonhuman features.
And don't stop with elves. Dwarves, Halflings and Gnomes should also have faces which visibly differs from humans so you can see which races it is just by looking at the portrait instead of having to see how large they are.

Not really... I think this extreme humanization of non-human races mostly stems from movies (like the LotR series) and, above all else, video games... as long as they only existed in written or illustration form, this trend wasn't nearly as pronounced.

More classic elven features would be appreciated. Elves as a race are generally seen as extraordinarily beautiful and ethereal. I found only one of the female heads to be somewhat (but not really) meeting that criterium. Elves are not humans with pointy ears slapped on. They don't have broad features but delicate ones. Some of the heads are distinctly missing the mark, which in itself is fine. No need to remove them. But please add more choices. There should be a range of classic elven heads to choose from. Right now that range is simply not sufficient.

True. The manuals do an excellent job at giving elves a lot of nuance. They go into a lot of detail about their ways, their culture, their economy, their dressing, their diet, their emotion, psychology, daily rituals and a lot more. It is the adaptations that fail to represent those things. I suspect elves are simply a niche, and only us, friendless psychopaths obsessed with the race for one reason or another, only care for all of that :'D

I agree with the criticism here. I'm replaying Dragon Age Inquisition with Bioware's butchered elves...I would hate for Larian to do a repeat of their soddy work.

Not butchered - but defeated. And for good reason. Also, ungodly powerful beyond the veil.

Historically, elves look like all sorts of variations of the human form, mixed with human features. Tolkien's elves were just stretched out a bit but folks who saw the early Hobbit and LOTR animated films in the 70's recall how different they looked from modern super-aryan elves of film. From the early 20th and late 19th centuries they looked more like what we think of as goblins, or tiny children with odd animal features. Basically, an elf can look like whatever you want it to look like, it's all fair game, since it's all folktales, and the DnD art I've seen runs the gamut from traditional folk art to just people with pointy ears. This is a pointless thread IMO. rackham elf