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

Also, this notion that a humanoid race is going to become hideous if - for example - their eyes are enlarged/given an almond shape/slanted (any of which would go a long way towards improving the fidelity of the models) is laughable at best and slightly insulting at worst.

What? Really? I find Skyrim editor quite lacking, at least for males. The faces look ... a bit amorphous. The skinniest variant of the body is still like an anabolic agents abusing muscleman, one of the reasons I never play caster there. And of course we all know that Bethesda is not able to shape human feet (hint: they have toes!) in any of their games.

Ok, in the end it is personal taste. I would prefer a creation method without sliders but diverse good looking presets like in Dragon's Dogma over anything else.

In my opinion BG 3 elves and half elves need more slender and less muscular bodies, without body hair, or at least without chest hair. The faces especially of the elves should be less 1950s superhero-square-chin like. Generally I would like them a bit more androgyne.

I must disagree here ... yes you were able to adjust most (if not all) facial features, but you could never create Dunmer looking like Bosmer, Altmer, or any kind of Humans ... every race had specific facial features that was unchangeable and had to be preserved.
Therefore you were never able to "make them how you want". :-/

Difference between Vulcan and Romulas as far as i know, is just cultural ... isnt it?
I thought they were same race, in biological matter.

Also huge problem with litteraly any fantasy race (until recently at least) is that they had to "look like humans" bcs they were "played by humans".
I dont even know if that is even possible to find some person who would have face shaped as pictures showed in OP ... but i kinda doubt that.
I mean sure, there are some exeptions ... personaly i REALLY love what they did with Tim Curry in Legend (where was also really nice goblins btw). :3
But in the end, they both are "just humans with long pointy ears and nose".

Well ...

Let me rephrase. I liked how you could tweak your character so much.

So I would love it if Larian gave us the ability to take the current models they've given us and then we were able to tweak them like in Skyrim. I like the current models. However, there are those who don't think elves look elfish enough. If they could tweak their models, they could make them look more elfish, and then this would not be as much of a debate.

But really, can't you see the elf in Halsin? He's got more of a round face, but again, why do all elves have to be slender and wimpy looking? Look past the round face for a sec. His face isn't SO far off from being elfish.

I believe Larian allready multiple times confrimed that they will not do sliders ...
I gues we have to hope for more elfish faces ... or wait for mod. :-/

I like the character creator of Dragon Age Inquisition. I made my best characters with that, despite the atrocious lighting. But yeah, if there are no sliders in the final game, I want some more elfy elfs.

I'm all for more faces and more options for character builds. Character creation is one of the things I love to do the most. I'll often create tons of characters and never actually play them through the game just because I like to create characters.

So the more faces and such, the better, imo.

You obviously didn't have an elven male main character, making something somewhat handsome was super hard. Very frustrating that what looked decent in CC, more often than not came out weird in the real game.

Really not a fan of sliders where the vast majority lead you to making freaks in general. Presets are preferable to that...if the options are good and varied enough. For male elves they are not - which seems to be somewhat of a recurring trend.

Hah! I find males in general are hard to do in video games. I tend to like to play female MCs because most of the time I can't make a male MC that looks good to me. Whether it's Solasta, Baldur's Gate 3, Skyrim, Pathfinder, Neverwinter Nights 1 or 2, or whatever. It's like female characters can be made to look good, but males just suck. And that doesn't matter if it's half-orc, elf, dwarf, human, or whatever.

I guess I really don't care for sliders either, now that I think about it. The only time I really do like to use them is when I hate all the preset models. If I can at least tweak a preset model to look a bit more the way I have it in my mind, that's better than just having no presets I like. So that was really what I was thinking when I was thinking about Skyrim character building.

I was also thinking about Solasta. Gosh! The models in that game are not so good. There are maybe 1 or 2 per race, if I'm lucky, that I find acceptable at best. Nothing really great and I feel is awesome. I was practically begging for sliders in that game just so I could maybe reduce the nose size of some of the models or tweak the cheek bones or something.

I tried out Male Drow One as my dream-guy-guy, because it looked the worst in char creation. Actually proved to be a lot more attractive in-game. Maybe some animation in the creation screen would help to get a better idea of what the char would look like.

The argument is that the default elves should look significantly more elfin. Generally speaking, Corellon's children are willowy and do possess delicately sculpted countenances which distinguish them from humans; that is not a "stereotype", that is their racial build. If you wish to tweak your elf so that they look notably different (whether they have human ancestry or just happen to be a one-in-ten-thousand outlier), that's another matter altogether. Half-elves have more leeway, but they too shouldn't ALL be "Humans with pointy ears."

While I never play male characters, if I can play female, I saw people create really nice looking male elves too. So it is possible. I'm actually very good with sliders, so I like them. They offer more variety

Sliders with caramelized onions.

Out of so many thousands of players, of course it was "possible". My point is; a satisfying result shouldn't depend on the player either being artistically gifted, exceptionally lucky, or damned stubborn perfectionist like in my case. I wasted countless hours coming up with something vaguely satisfying between the CC, gameplay and cutscenes - each revealing deviant looks but not always immediately so. In my DA:I experience, the positive of increased variety offered by sliders was *much* less tangible than the negative sheer frustration it offered. The mechanic actually contributed to me eventually discarding the game before completion, having burned out on that process and way too many completionist Hinterland runs lol.

Mass Effect offered the iconic default Shepard preset, a host of mediocre alternative presets and sliders offering more mediocre variety. Having a really good preset option was much preferable to me. Default Shepard felt no less like *my character* between my roleplaying options and my specific builds. So much less time wasted between CC and the usual compulsive "new-characteritis" restarts. No frustration. Completed games...even Andromeda.

I would love more presets. Give us more options for size and shape and face. Spend more money on that and not so much on voice acting the MC. For the most part, a silent MC would probably be better than only having a few choices for voices.

So yes. It would be nice to have even more options for character appearance.

But then again, Larian has to weigh the plethora of options with having too many options and overwhelming people.

Well, we are different there. Give me a CC, let me make my individual character. The default Shepards, male and female, were boring and uninspired. I made my femShep myself and was very happy with her.

But this is not even a discussion, since there will be no sliders in BG 3 according to the devs, so you are in luck and I'm not .

With enough time i bet someone will create sliders mod.

That's quite the mod!

To me, his appearance errs too much on the side of "human".

Wait! Look closer Everyone! Elves have longer pointed ears than half elves. So they ARE totally different. 😏

I do get why many have an issue. If this was a game for star wars or star trek, and someone made a bunch of models for a race like the chiss, but they only gave them dark skin, that would be dumb. There are more distinguishing traits for the race than mere pointy ears.