Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback [Color Customization] - Simplified, yet advanced.

Feel free to lock or delete this thread, will just submit feedback directly.

You are too harsh on the system. I am talking about the "vibrant clown fiesta" part. It is simply not true. I've managed to create a lot of realistically looking characters. Patch 8 added highlights and graying which I also don't consider to be a "clown fiesta". Sure you can make some ugly sh** with it but you can make some very immersive characters as well. Tool is as good as you can make use of it.

Your suggestion about the base colors with slider is a very good QoL idea. +1 to that one

This is brilliant!
I love it!

I'm not too harsh nor am I wrong. I included the links for a reason.


That's dark purple hair color I used to have, which I no longer can because it got turned into that vibrant clown color on the right. I used to be able to match all 3 aspects together (hair, eyes, makeup), but ever since Patch 8 I am forced to use the most basic black color as a base. So no matter what, it just ends up being black with light purple highlights in some areas of the hair, when all I want is true dark purple hair.

A color intensity slider would easily solve this though. I could choose these clown colors currently offered and just lower the intensity to a realistic tone, because the base versions of them are far too vibrant, which is why I'm stuck using black.

If you think I'm wrong, try to recreate the color on the left and you'll see for yourself it's no longer achievable. You can only get black or black with some areas in light purple, but you cannot get dark purple. Same with dark red, dark green, dark blue, dark brown and so on.

+1

I really like the idea of sliders. The gigantic palette is indeed visually a lot! And not the most practical (as a player and as a modder).

Personally, I would love to see more options presented in the UI based on what can already be done by modders/devs.

For example :
- Have an option for rim intensity of the iris.
- Being able to choose the color or the inner and outer iris area.

Also, I would add two sliders in all cases (but the one suggested would already be pretty neat) :
1) Saturation : how pigmented the color would be.
2) Shade : how light/dark the color would be.

Good idea! I like it.


Definitely for hair. Eyes are a bit more complicated as even the colours that have the same name Red 1, 2 and 3, for example) don’t always seem to be simply differing intensities of one colour but have different contrasting colours and patterns in and around the iris which I like. Still, I’m sure there’s still some simplification and enhancement possible along the lines you suggest.

Might as well use the same system absolutely everyone use in every software ever : a color picker.


You get everything, color space choice, a palette and hexadecimal representation. It cannot be more exhaustive than that. You would just have to choose the texture/material beforehand.

You are wrong because you can still create realistically dark colors to an extent, you've even described the way to do so yourself. It is just you can't create the color you want and this is the whole different story. You can't call the whole system a clown fiesta just because it does not offer a perfect solution for you. I mean, you technically can, but this is unnecessarily harsh and subjective judgement. I wrote that you are too harsh and wrong for a reason too. It is not very respectful to call out something that others may enjoy as a clown fiesta, imo. Your suggestions are great but the current system is not more limited or messy when compared to its previous iterations, because you couldn't create a proper bright color before. Now you can. Sliders for fine tuning would be a perfect solution both for those who want their characters colorful and those who want otherwise.

True, some are not purely colors but actual different textures, but it's pretty simple to work with by allowing the player to choose the iris and then the colour. For example with Tieflings, I love their glowing eyes, but there are only a few colors they're available in, so I'd love to be able to choose the iris first and then the color.

They already allow this as a color option, but could improve it to separate the two for more customization options.


Please put that image in a spoiler tag, it's so huge

But yes, I agree that the best solution would be a color picker. Nioh 2 for example, which is one of my favorite games ever, has such a beautifully rich character customization and an integrated color picker so the player can fully and freely customize their character and colors. In fact I managed to achieve the most realistic looking black hair color because of it with a tiny bit of highlight.


It makes every other game pale in comparison when it comes to character customization, but naturally I cannot just provide feedback saying "insert a color picker". Normally I'd want it in BG3 and would be the most obvious basic feature to have, but considering they went with an even worse design than a 1990s Paint, a slider would be a major improvement at this point.

Well, that would be even better though it sounds as though it might be too radical an overhaul of BG3’s current interface. I’d be happy with a compromise solution that made better use of the functionality similar to that already displayed in the CC (given tattoos and makeup already let you pick a colour and then intensity) but if Larian go all out with letting us pick a texture and then customise colours to our hearts’ content I’ll be delighted!

Also it feels really weird that some hair colors are straight up duplicated with the only difference being the color of the lashes. Why not create a separate color palette for them...

I don’t think Crimsomrider was dissing those of us who want (some of) our characters to have brightly coloured hair, just that if you want a non-human-natural colour for your character’s hair but don’t want it to be startlingly bright it’s hard to achieve.

I do agree on that latter point. I was trying to create a moon elf with dark and subtly blue hair but couldn’t manage it as even the darkest blue was too bright for what I was aiming for. The closest I could get was raven black with dark blue highlights, but it still wasn’t really what I wanted.

May be I've interpreted it wrong, if so, apologies to Crimsomrider. Even though I am quite content with the character creation as it is, I'd like to see a broader color variety as well. For now I usually achieve the darker tones by adding a black/brown highlight to the color. Sometimes it works wonders and sometimes... not so much.

Precisely, it was not at all supposed to be taken as a personal slight against anyone, just a harmless funny diss at the vibrancy of the colors themselves. I don't even have anything against these vibrant colors in particular, especially not against the people who like them nor am I implying that they should be removed or the system scrapped. I always advocate for more and more customization options so everyone can create a character in whichever way they desire. The more robust a character creation is, the better for everyone.

The problem is however that from the moment Early Access released and up until July 2022, we had a whole color spectrum of naturally realistic dark colors to choose from. And then 5 months ago they completely replaced them with these overly vibrant ones. So I went from an entire spectrum of dark colors to choose from to a single color for months now, which I'm not even happy with and don't want to use.

If they just added these new colors alongside the already existing ones or simply added a color intensity slider, then there'd be no problem, everyone would be happy. But for some reason they completely removed them all and didn't even bother adding a slider, which is the most obvious thing to do for a character customization. It makes it even worse seeing that Highlights and Graying have an intensity slider, but not the most obvious main hair color. How does such an oversight even happen is beyond me.


Exactly the issue and what I was trying to put across in previous comments.

I also use Black Raven because it's the only dark hair color which I am forced to use as a base, but it is still not good enough and I don't even want to use it. I want my envisioned characters to have specific natural dark colors as they have had for over a year, not black with highlights. And the highlights cannot even achieve that because their coverage varies extremely for each hairstyle. Some barely have them, while others are placed terribly (both my Drow and Tiefling in my signature showcase this as you can see exactly where the highlights end on their hairstyles).

If they would just add a slider for the main hair colors, that'd probably be good enough.

To me it seemed like a bug or something that was just unfinished.

For the vast majority of "fantasy" colors (blue, green, pink and so on, including dark shades), the code actually changed (I compared it when modding). They aren't the same colors at all.
This is also true for some of the "natural" colors (auburn, light brown…).

The "natural" darker colors (dark brown, neutral black and raven black) are actually the same between P7 and P8 but the lightning doesn't seem to always be logical in terms of how bright/dark those colors are rendered (at least in P8).