Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Lizard Race: Appearance/Heads

I was really excited when I read that D:OS2 was getting new races, one of which being the lizards. The lizards were by far my favorite race in Dragon Commander, being pragmatic and even headed, but I was curious on how they would look in the game. I haven't been able to find any in game looks at them, but I thought Id add my 2 cents on how they could look in the upcoming game.

In Dragon Commander the race is varied dramatically from lizard to lizard, Edmund and the lizard ambassador look very dinosauric, as if someone took a great lizards head and popped it on a humanoid body, but Princess Camilla, she looks very humanoid with some lizard crests on her forehead/top/sides of her head. I was hoping in the player creator menu, we could have heads from both sides of the spectrum at our disposal. Each head option could be your raptor like head, iguana, snake like maybe, and of course the Camilla human/reptile hybrid face as one or two. Variety is the spice of life and character creation in games after all. It would be disappointing if the lizard race was simply one lizard head to represent every lizard in the kingdom.

We have concept and promotional art. We also have a render of the Lizards already, but it's only one screenshot on the Kickstarter page. Not a whole lot else, I'm afraid.

However, based on the promotional art, it could get very interesting...

That's actually a nice idea! I like it a lot .

Yea, good character creation options is rarely a bad idea. While I can see how some people might think of it as not very vital to a game, Ive never seen a friend of mine skip over a character creator, without spending a good 10 minutes at least, trying to make him or her look as cool, tough, pretty, handsome, or whatever concept their going for.

Unless the character creation is incredibly limited and/or fixed. The shortest amount of time I've spent in a character creator was around 5 minutes.

The longest I've spent in a character creator is around 2 hours, and that was in Champions Online, and that had an awesome character creator. The combat and gameplay is an entirely different story...

There are several different ways to describe a "good" character creator.

You seem to be focused on a wide range of options. I feel differently about this. I'm not too fussed about having a lot of options. I played the Witcher 3, and in that game you had very little freedom for customisation of Geralt's appearance. I didn't mind that at all. I definitely appreciated the amount of work that was put into designing him. Would the Witcher 3 be better with character creation? Not at all.

Original Sin 2 will obviously have a character creator, but I'd definitely be asking for Larian to focus on the quality of options over the quantity of options.

It would also be great if we could get a color picker/color wheel to be able to choose the color of like the hair, accessories, skin/scale color, etc. For instance, the amount of colors that we were able to choose in the first character creator were pretty cool, but I never felt like that's a color that I'd want my character to have, either in brightness or intensity. Now having lizards in the mix, I think it would be wise to include something like a color picker for the skin so that we can really have some cool looking lizards

Skin/scale color, I would imagine, will be a given. I mean they probably will have many different colored lizard NPC's more so then varied looking NPC's, it would be a very simple way to add diversity.
The first character creator (In D:OS) was pretty... meh. You werent picking what your character looked like as much as changing the color of their skin, and their cosmetics. We all have the same faces after all lol.

@Ayvah, Your trying to compare apples to oranges. Witcher 3 your playing as Geralt, not "your" character, he has his own set personality, back story and thoughts. In games like D:OS, BG1-2, NWN1-2, games that have a literal character creation option, the point is to make your own character, "your" being the key word here.

I understand this, but I doubt the narrative you'd like to craft around your lizardman will depend on details like the colour of your lizard's scales.

Gender selection is the most important thing. After that, there should be enough variety so that if you decide to play a party of four lizardwomen, they will all look distinct from each other (and from other lizardwomen you meet during the game).

After that, I really feel it's important to have good aesthetics rather than deeply customisable aesthetics. Characters in Original Sin 2 will not be disposable, like they are in The Sims or XCOM. Once you make a character, you're married to them for the entire game. Although I love having more options, I really feel that it's more important to have good options.

The concern I had with the character creator for Original Sin was that the heads didn't look that great. I feel this is why they felt the need to give us 2D portraits, which sucked because the portraits would match the custom character you'd made. The heads should look good, and they should be good enough to use directly in the portraits so that we don't lose our customisation (perhaps with a bit of filtering to make them look more 2D).

So you want less customization, but really detailed electorate 2D portraits? I hope your in the minority because that sounds extremely limited. If the graphics of this game were worse, like Baldurs Gate/Fallout 1-2 style sure, but this game has decent, up to date graphics so its kinda hard to ignore what your character looks like in place of portrait.

My problem is that jour char is just an avatar, a set of stats who runs around in a set of equipment. In some games I spend some time in character creation, but after some time of playing I have forgotten the name of my char.
How does my char look? I don´t know, he wears a red full plate armor and a blue helmet.
Whats your race? I am a lizard, because they get a bonus to skill X.
Whats your gender? I guess its a woman, sometimes I hear a female voice when I give commands.

The only way to avoid this would be to have pre generated chars with a fixed personality. But then it would be a JRPG or the witcher, but not a Larian game.

Still, I hope they have a good selection of options of how your char looks. I would strongly miss it if it was gone, even though I rarely care after I created my char. The only time I cared for the look of my char after character creation was in world of warcraft, when you could select that your equipped gear looks like another piece of equipment in your inventory. For example I gave my mage a pointy hat and a robe with stars. But this would make no sense in D:OS2.

Well there are ways around it, some games merge it quite well.

Even if most "Avatar" characters are kind of bland, i prefer them over fixed characters, afterall, it is a canvas for you to paint on.

Good writing can ofthen make the difference here.

Alternativeley, a Story that requires the protagonist to be "different" from other people. I would point to the Nerevarine as an example of that.

Not at all.

The camera in D:OS is pretty static. In X-COM you're constantly zooming in to see your soldiers in action, but D:OS seems to mostly stick with the isometric view. Maybe it'd be better if it could zoom in during conversations or certain actions so you can get a better view of the interaction, and get a better feel for your character as a person. As it is, the 2D portraits are pretty important for giving you a sense of your character's appearance.

But anyway, that's beside my point. It's a waste of time if I have 100 customisation options for my 3D character, but then I only have 10 options for character portraits that hopefully roughly match what I did with the character. 100% of my customisation should be reflected in the 2D portrait. Imagine making the effort of creating a pink lizardman with a bright blue crest. And then the only portrait you can pick looks like a green gecko. It's a waste of your effort designing your character, and it's insulting. I'd prefer that they make the character models of high enough quality that they feel comfortable using them directly in the portrait, rather than the painted portraits they had in D:OS (as much as I love 2D art).

But that's still not my main point. I prefer quality over quantity. Having more customisation options is good, but my preference is that they should be ensuring that the options are worthwhile and of high quality. The last thing I'd want is for the characters to end up looking like Xbox Live Avatars.

And don't forget that if Larian provide a solid foundation and strong modding support, then there'll be plenty of room for more options to be added after the game is released either through mods or expansions.

I'm hoping Larian can get the same kind of enthusiasm for modding that XCOM 2 has right now (although the budget is much different).