Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Bearded females

I mean I kinda think it's dumb to argue about bearda when we won't get sliders for headmorphs but whatever.

It doesn't work like that with RPG genre, because the point is having choice, the less choice you have the worse the game objectively is, like I already said before, having a choice that you won't take makes the choice that you will take worth more.

And you’re not understanding what I am saying. Choices are fine if there are resources for it. But not everyone is going to get everything. That’s an impossibility, an objective impossibility.

If Larian wants to have bearded females and it’s in the budget then sure. But if it means taking away from what Larian considers more critical? Then no it won’t happen. They will assess if catering to the specific 0.1% is worthwhile.

I’d love to have custom companions with deep stories and voice acting. But I can’t. I mean more choices are good right? I’m sure there’s more than 0.1% of the players who’d want this. It’s not always just about choices. It’s about how many choices can a studio fulfill while having realistic goals.

This happens in every business.

We are talking about a choice that takes very little resources.

That’s according to you. What if there are 100s of choices that require little resources. Only 50 can make the cut. Now what?

Now you make sure that a few of those 50 choices are fringe.

You mean the fringe of the fringe?

I mean something that will make the game stand out and be unique and niche as opposed to the majority of other choices.

Allowing female characters to have beards or providing nonbinary/other categories to mix/match options is kind of the standard in non-tripleA RPGs these days. Battletech and encased being the two off the top of my head. Its not radical or weird, it's just not reactionary, approaching being standard and I full expect come half a decade from now it will be.

You say if it is too resource intensive “it won’t happen” but beard options for women are already in the game. And it isn’t resource intensive at all. It’s a really easy feature to implement, so there is really no reason not to.

Funny thing about software products is that the recurring cost of a feature is ... zero. If we were talking about putting beards on Barbie Dolls, then there would be a unit price impact caused by the extra feature. But in software, once it's done, it's done. I have used the DLTCEP Infinity Engine game editor to create lots of new spells and magic items for the original BG series. It takes me about 20 minutes to do one item or spell, but I have to re-use existing graphics. So if we assume a game developer is making maybe $40 per hour, with an overhead wrap rate around 1.9, then the total cost of creating a new item or spell, assuming no new graphics are needed, would be (40)(1.9)(20/60) = $25. Not too bad, really. But, now say that new graphics are needed as well. Based on the information garnered in this thread, I estimate that a female beard animation that is not using any existing male beard artwork would require approximately 483 hours in total, thus costing (40)(1.9)(483) = $36,708. The next question is whether or not a skilled person is actually available and willing to do the work. If said person was already working on something actually important, such as the Efreeti City of Brass, then I would say the custom female beard should probably wait until patch #14 which is likely to release in 2023.

I'm not going to assume this or that about cost of labour/productions regarding beards. But having beards for female faces aren't just a matter of removing a "if_female = NOBEARD" line of code or simply reusing the same asset with no adaption. They have to spend time fitting the beard to the face models. I don't know if that is easy to do or if they can program an automatic beard shaping program so I'm not saying it's a big deal. But it's not a "no more amount" deal either. I'm not in the know of whether all the models share a basic shape so they doesn't need fitting but just from glancing at the face models they certainly look different enough that they might need not just fitting on a gender or racial basis but actually need it on a face-by-face basis.

Now, the largest amount of work is obviously the creating of the beard model/asset, and that has already been done at that point. It would be easy to argue that at that point, fitting the asset not just to the male models but also to the female might be getting the most out of the buck, so to speak. But it is more work than just fitting them to the male faces.

(This is likely why the hair choices have not all been made choosable by both genders and all races too by the way -- they haven't been fitted for everyone.)

kind of a waste of resources, but hopefully it will make some people happy