Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback All BG3 Heads Shown Together (visual)

Right on, good looking out Niara. I thought I maybe slipped and fell into the solo echo chamber trap there hehe, so its good to hear from someone with a similar feeling on this stuff. Maybe it was just a bit image heavy for some as well. If we knock onto a page 3 I'll leave more space to just discuss, or for others to post related visuals too. The lipstick post on the previous page kind of inspired that last digression for sure. So maybe we get a bit more of that in days ahead too of we're lucky.

I think for me the char creator (just like colors) is evaluated largely in relative terms. So if you came to BG3 from other cinematic rpg games like DA or Skyrim or SWTOR then perhaps it's fairly impressive. I mean if the benchmark is from like 10 years ago, then sure, this one is slaying it. Compared to slightly more recent fair like ESO or just what we've seen lately coming from Unreal, it starts to feel a bit more meh.

On the whole I'd say the NPC head models are pretty well executed. They also get bonus points I think for applying more "character" to the various monstrous head models, like with the goblins say. Or for the monstrous types that have since become PC types like the Tiefs or Gith. When you see them all dialed out to a level that's typically reserved just for Humans that does get some plaudits.

I think people also saw the hair models and immediately felt like their minds were blown. Cause usually hair is so horrid in RPGs lol. So another notch in the belt there I suppose.

At the same time when I was scrutinizing the Gith, especially Gith without Hair, I kept thinking "ok this is working right now, but what happens when you need to make a Half-Orc too?" Cause they probably end up pretty similar hehe. I guess maybe with more of an underbite and some protruding lower canines there? But you know, when you see them together the generic patterns emerge. Also when I see the Tiefs and Half-Elves next to each other, again I sense a fair amount of overlap, like just add horns and demonic eyes and they're largerly interchangeable. Or of course, the obvious interplay between Human heads and Elves, or Human heads and Halfings etc.

I think it's perfectly fine to present a more limited default skintone selection or eye color where it makes sense for fantasy race consistency, but where it fails for me is the overall morphology when added to that just looking sort of the same. To take the most salient examples, if Elves are just beautiful Humans with pointier ears, or Halflings are just portly shorter Humans, or Dwarves are just Humans with super compressed necks and huge noses, then you end up with something that leans pretty hard into same face territory. I'd love for them to start with Humans for the base, and morph from there for each facial type, but the longer they leave the current scheme in opperation the harder it becomes to build that out in a satisfactory way.

Also, because EA is Act 1 of a 3 act play, I think many people may assume that what we see now in terms of heads or char creation is only like a 3rd of what we'll eventually get. But I'm not totally convinced of that either. Even if that was the case though, and we get this x3 eventually, I still think that's not the wisest plan. Unlike some other content features, having more stuff available in Char creation during EA could only help to maintain player engagement. So this is one of those areas where I think they should dish it up as soon as it's cooked, and not hold that stuff in reserve just to make the full release seem 'fuller' by comparison. Updating the interface for some of this stuff might be a bit more involved than just adding to the pile, but I think it would pay dividends down the line. So I hope they tale note of at least some of these jmpressions. I mean one can hope right heheh

ps. I just noticed that I left the "show all colors" box unticked for the tattoos above, went to edit it in, but then realized that it only shows like one more swatch anyway, and for makeup we don't get anything new by clicking the box. So I guess it doesn't matter much. For comparison with the Skin Tones in the post above though, I did want to include a more standard palette here. Something that would be a lot more familiar and simpler to work with. I chose an SVG template, again cause it was free on the wiki hehe. When the colors were standardized initially, first in 8 colors, then 16, then later into 216 the need to provide clearer "common names" for the various numbered colors in use was more apparent. There is some overlap here between HTML and SVG naming conventions, but what you won't find are colors with names Efritee, Fey, Decay... in scales of 1-4 or 1-8 etc. This is what I mean by the BG3 design being rather more confusing than it needs to be. The game could serve as a more educational tool if it wanted to be, and allow people to learn how to work with this stuff in other contexts, instead of just being a 1-off.


In effect what BG3 is doing is presenting a series of colors like that, but in various combinations and mixtures, because they're in overlays and overlighting. However, the user doesn't really have a way to see the underlying organization or understand where the starting point is, to intuit where they're going to end up. It's basically like trying to mix colors at random, to use an analogy from painting, when you don't have any kind of consistent system for it. People tend to find that stuff frustrating, which is why Munsell and all those codes and whatnot were conjured up in the first place. Cause they help to make all this stuff more user friendly - gives some shared common ground to build on. I'm not sure why they arranged the various BG3 color blocks in the way they did, except maybe to just give it that diagonal sweep at the top? Or maybe this is how it looked in DOS and they just kept with that? I really don't know honestly, but it's like the linear B of color coding. It probably makes sense to someone I guess, but just seems kinda mysterious to me hehe. Maybe the more regular palettes seem boring to people who work all day with that stuff as designers, but for the uninitiated those schemes are very helpful, which is why they exist.

Here's another one I just yanked off google, because I think a presentation like this would be much more intuitive to the average user. I mean you can just imagine it flipped on its side to fit char creation screen layout, but you know, where the Values and Hues are grouped together in a way that makes a bit more visual sense when viewed comprehensively.



Note how that same image still has an internal logic in the overview, even when completely desaturated... Still showing the columns organized in value gradients.


The BG3 palette is in some ways more extensive, by eliminating extraneous unusable colors, and instead showing more variety and duplication for the color swatches that do work, but I still think they could do much better. Ideally this stuff wouldn't reset when you click a different Race like it does now, but be consistent across all models, for example. Even more engaging would be a way to isolate and combine colors for different effects, which is what we see in those BG3 colors like Fey or Decay. They're basically two tone mashups, where the eyeshadow or lips or cheek tones do something different depending on the swatch, but where the results aren't exactly predictable and you have to click click click like chaos to get what you're after, if it even exists as an option.