Originally Posted by Zaemon
I wanted to start a thread about appearance variety too. I feel you guys, but my "ask" is about hairstyle. I think right now variety is deeply mainstream, I don't like goblins looking like punk modern girls. I'd like more variety that really looks like medieval hair.


Have to say I'm lukewarm towards the goblins as well. Larian is allowed creative license but they're not coming across as the pack of conniving, savage little beasties I know and love them to be in their designs. Taste is very subjective but at least I'm not the only one who seems to think so.

A thread about elven faces came up months ago that I remember pitching in on raised this very concern about the Elves looks un-Elven after a gameplay demo aired. What was said there bears repeating despite the masses of people content to have Elves just look like pretty Humans - taste is subjective, again, but good gods these are not pretty.

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Wide nose, wide lips, shrunken and far-apart eyes, the feature coming vaguely close to "Elf" is the cheekbones. Drow and High Elves share face models so it doesn't matter much which I'm using.

Elves are distinctly Fey-like, slender and shorter than humans. The jaws, the chins, the facial structure is all terribly off and unrecognizable from Elves. Goldberry's diagram was even posted in the thread of months ago I mentioned, and it still illustrates brilliantly the problems with the Elven head models Larian has gone with. I've long been a fan of the studio, since the first D:OS game came out and have never taken particular issue with any of their design or artistic choices - but for something as strongly pre-established and rich in lore as forgotten realms, there does need to be that extra attention to detail to hit the nail on the head. This nail was missed and the hammer landed on the fingernail instead.