Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Focused Feedback: Halflings

The fact that they are a short race and will stand at or less than half the average height of a human is more than enough for those groups to cry outrage and screech paedophilia with torches and pitchforks in hand. They are not the groups that anyone should be concerning themselves with listening to, because they are, in fact, discriminatory and harmful. The simple fact that they are short will be enough for people from those groups to scream about the models being 'child-like' regardless of whether they are or not. We have seen representatives from that group of people in this thread before, and I've politely asked mods to remove them because they are not constructive.

As others say - this latest example has elements to it that were not the focus - the face design and structure is pretty bad, but overall the model is pretty acceptable, far more than BG3. A small experiment just to show:


This is absolutely and very clearly not the body of a juvenile, in any way. It's developed, mature - it doesn't have 'exaggerated' sexual traits, it's got adult sexual traits - albeit for a petite person, but like I said - her breasts are no smaller than mine, and her hips have, if anything, slightly more definition than mine. This is very obviously not a child, and with the height accounted for, not even a human - and within the art style of that game, the character comes out looking pretty good. I'm not going to talk about the game in any other sense because it doesn't handle the character/race well - the writers for npcs cannot decide whether they are writing child characters or adults, and they flip-flop all over the place in really glaring ways, and a lot of the cosmetics available are fetishised - it's not a shining example of good treatment, at all (and the community isn't much better, since the class is treated as a joke class and called loli bait by a certain section of the community, who rabidly vilify anyone who plays them - again, not the kind of people that anyone should listen to). I looked at it recently and found the model cute and fun to run around doing quests with, and looking for cute costumes/outfits do dress up in, though, and it gave me none of the dissonance and dissatisfaction that BG3 gives me, so I wanted to do a comparison of just the model itself, nothing more.


I did a study on how to sensitively do the choreography for intimate scenes with small characters, a little while back - the moderation staff felt it was necessary to remove the image references from the thread because I used a 3d modelling program that illustrate the essay as I went, but folks can message for the unedited copy of the paper if they're interested in having the visual references for reading along - it helps a lot. I'd very much recommend you taking a look at the thread though, if the concept of choreography with small characters is something that you recognise as a concern. The thread itself is here: Focused Examination: Intimate Choreography with Small-sized Characters. It focuses primarily on M/F intimate pairings and the difficulties presents, as well as how to overcome them - there was originally going to be a follow up thread that focused on the other surrounding intimate acts we might see, as well as f/f pairing choreography (I'm not qualified to write as confidently about m/m pairings, but I did consult some people on the matter; you can't just use your m/f pairing choreography for it, which Larian's earliest scenes neatly demonstrated...), but I can't do it without visual references, and I'm still waiting to hear back form Larian about what I can and cannot post on the matter, so it may never come to fruition.

For those saying that medium sized creatures can have full intimate scenes, but short characters should get a fade out instead: NO. That, precisely that, is a part of the problem - that is people actively infantalising small people and taking away their adulthood and adult rights. Do not stand for it. Small race adults have as much right to be represented as anyone else; they are adults and should be treated as such.

==

One last thing I'll say - While I agree with Black Elk from a biological point of view, that their heads should match proportion without being any larger, there is a bit of visual dissonance that this causes when it's done entirely faithfully in a video game - it might be more appropriate in many ways, but it generally doesn't look great, in the long run - it's to do with the necessary level of clustered detail and the impression that leaves on our eye alongside the rest of the model. I'm happy to accept a compromise here where the head is *slightly* larger than expected, just to dispel that visual dissonance, but it only needs to be slight - very much not the BG3 standard. The screenshots I put up for LoTRO are actually some pretty good proportions in that regard... that's a game that worked very hard to make its halflings look comfortable in their bodies and visually nice; no-one, at all, thinks of them or sees them as childlike there.

((P.S.: I can't actually do a comparison on male models for this game, because Shai are a race/class combo, and male PC Shai don't exist... something about male Shai being much rarer/less populous and far less prone to adventuring lifestyles... it's another point where the game is not a great role model, though points for inverting the norm on that trope, I guess))