Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General New PFH announcement.

When people post their characters on Reddit (or anywhere else), I see it as them being excited about their character and the game, which I think is great because I am too!😊

I like the character creator because I can easily create a character that looks good to me. More hairstyles and faces would be great as well, though.

I 100% agree. It's no Skyrim messing with nose and jawline with sliders, but it is better than a LOT of games. And yes, more would make it so much better.

I also see it as people showing off gear, mods, etc. But yeah. People are having fun with it. It's good for the game.

Particularly, I meant that within a specific race, many of the heads are duplicates with minor modifications. Some heads may also be shared across races, but I don't remember that so much. But with the exception of Gith, even the racial modifications to the human face scans are not particularly extreme.

But that wasn't really the point I was making. I LIKE the face quality, and I don't want elves to look other-worldly ( I don't even like the current ridiculously pointed ears; the D&D elves were originally only slightly pointy-eared ). What I was illustrating is that using face-scans reduces the ability to customise the face shape to approximately zero. In EA, this usually means you only get about 3 genuinely distinct head choices for any given race/gender combintaion.

It's a technology choice Larian made that has obvious consequences, both good and bad.

Well, for what it's worth, IIRC NWN was absolutely lousy with reusing stock photos, pictures of celebrities just photoshopped to look vaguely fantasy-y. So they often look a little out of place.

They do look beautiful. I think they also look indistinguishable from half elves, and from humans (if you cover the ears) Which just seems a bit wrong to me.

Bust slider or boop!... I mean, boop slider or bust!

I do agree with the character creation being very underwhelming for a game that embraced the cinematic dialogues a-la late Bioware. Not to mention that the origin characters don't really resemble their key art as far as build goes - the aformentioned slider combined with buff-er arms and the missing tattoo would give Shadowheart a far more authentic look in-game. She does have a much more boyish appearance on the loading screens. As for the faces - it is a big bummer to just encounter your clones (and copies of characters) here and there. The female human head with the mole and the heavy stare, for example, can literally be found on two characters that are practically several steps away from each other (one of Aradin's companions and the cultist girl by Edowin).

Again, I think BG3 could improve character creation for all races with more options, but seriously. Think of the cRPGs of the past and their character creations.

KOTOR. Not great. You had basic character options, but nothing all that diverse.
SWTOR. Okay, but still wasn't that much more options than BG3.
NWN. Portraits were great, but avatar options, no. And the avatars were terrible, like FF7.
NWN 2. Better. Much better. Still, when I compare characters I've made in NWN 2 to BG3, nowhere near as good.
NWN Online. It's good. Lots more diverse options and picks, but the overall image quality isn't anything super great. Before BG3, mind you, it was my go to for avatar creation. I loved my Half-Orc Barbarian Drogyn, and my dragonborn Kiryn, and my drow Lynari. Still, not as high quality as BG3.
BG1 and 2. Yeah. No. Same with Icewind Dales.
Even Skyrim is not great, in my opinion. Lots of options, but dark elves and elves look terrible, in my opinion, and half-orcs are meh. Sure, lots of sliders and such, so much more diversity, but overall I still think BG3 models look more appealing and better.

Never played Dragon Age or whatever, so I can't say anything in that regard, but there are a LOT of cRPGs that BG3's character creation beats out. At least in my opinion.

The CC of Dragon Age Inquisition is pretty good. The Hair options are not so nice, but mods help with that. You can make really unique faces with that.

So far, the best avatar creator I've seen is Elden Ring even though it lacks non traditional hair color schemes and ofc is only for humans. Which is funny considering that the first thing you do is cover your whole character in armor from head to toe :P

Even in the very first Dark Souls the CC was tremendous. I can create literally anything there, and that was, what, 11 years ago?

It does look like the main problem Larian has with its own enfant terrible is its inability to modify shapes. There are seemingly no problems with colours; personally, I consider eye colours in BG3 to be the best of everything I've ever seen (not that I've seen much, but still).

But shapes... this is ridiculous. DS1 had 8 or 10 different body shapes, and it only got better in subsequent reinstalments. Compared to this, BG3 feels almost like Witcher (and I personally detest games with predefined protagonists).

Saito already mentioned it, but if I think of "good, flexible character creator that lets you do basically anything" I typically think of Dragon's Dogma.
Or City of Heroes, but MMOs are a bit of a separate topic...

That’s the look I like for elves! 😊 I don’t like the ugly alien elf look in Elder Scrolls, for example.

I do.

Nahhh.
Elves are supposed to be hauntigly beautiful in D&D, so the Elder Scrolls look wouldn't cater for that in my opinion. I agree that a little more work to help them look otherworldly though would help here as they do look a little to human. Great for 1/2 looks.

I also agree that the CC Tool is rather meagre in it's options, was hoping this was just a modicum of what would be available at launch.

Oh yes, Dark Souls. I spent ages in CC to make the perfect character and then I started as a zombielike undead and since I died a lot, I looked like that most of the time

I used https://www.nexusmods.com/baldursgate3/mods/205?tab=files (New Character Creation Presets mod) on my recent playthrough, most of the faces tend towards the young super model type (very young in some cases), but at least there's a little more variety.

I agree that the faces and offerings right now seem too similar and would like more, but that is more of a full release thing and other things have priority IMHO. But yes, after seeing mods with different armor styles and clothing, this is something I hope they do add.

Their writer PR guy had to defend this massive time sink of PFH series on Twitter from the likes of us.

I've noticed the subreddit is having a field day with that stuff.
Because of course there's no target more convenient to hit than strawman not hitting back.

I don't think many people were ACTUALLY concerned about the PFH "slowing down development" in general, so it's a clarification that doesn't really solve anything.

Personally what I don't like about them is that all this pageantry creates a filter that slow down any direct communication.
When instead of talking to your community on a regular basis about what you are working on and what's coming you need to have a once-in-a -blue-moon over-produced variety show filled with awkward gags, how can that NOT be the case?

Case in point: we have a show in two days to promote the upcoming update and no one has the faintest clue of what it's supposed to introduce, aside for the bard class.


EDIT- Then again, this is the type of content that gets quickly popular there (well, that and massive simping brigades):

https://old.reddit.com/r/BaldursGate3/comments/vs02e7/only_original_opinions_on_this_subreddit/

It's basically like having a board filled just with JandK clones getting catty at anyone expressing any malcontent about anything.

This EA drives me nuts. I am frustrated not knowing what they're working on.

That said, I see the ingeniousness behind it and the PFHs. All this hype and pageantry keeps BG3 alive. Even after a year and a half, every PFH produces scores of articles and posts on Steam and here and Reddit, etc. People get excited about it all over again, and the next thing you know, more people are buying.

I wonder just how quickly we'd stop posting out here if they actually gave us answers to our questions.

Yes, it's a marketing ploy and promotion for the game. It's not actually about exchanging feedback or trying to provide answers