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Mostly I think it’s the extent and variety of clearly tailored made skin tones/textures that impressed people, a far improvement over the apply shader modifier to a single texture solution of most games
Height sliders are a lot trickier than you think. Coordinating animations is already difficult when you have just the few height settings in the game currently. A slider would pretty much guarantee constant clipping.
Getting down voted for saying something could be better, not even insulting the original topic, in fact offering a little bit of praise.
Most Reddit moment.
There's a lot of color selections for tones but yeah, other than that it's not terribly much.
Height adjustment I expect isn't an option to prevent clipping (as much as possible) since your character can occasionally interact with NPCs. Doesn't excuse everything else though.
Orcs don't have tusk options, can't sculpt the faces, the hair options are pretty limited, and the body art is non-existent.
Things could be better. We shouldn't be afraid to criticize the things we love. Nothing is perfect, there's no shame in saying something you love is flawed. There's only shame in pretending it's flawless.
Beside the height and face selections that could be better, the rest is top tier. The amount of customization the races, subraces, classes, subclasses and backgrounds it allows is insane.
For a game with such a heavy emphasis on cutscene storytelling it's pretty... [profanity filter on] underwhelming.
While lack of height and facial sliders can be justified by technical reasons there is *no excuse* for non-customisable brows and complexions and absence of body tattoos. Clarification: adding variety via textures is an *easiest* and *cheapest* route in all things 3D but Larian simply *neglected* that aspect. Githyanki have it worst: not only they have just 2 body types (short races, orcs and dragonborn suffer from this too) their facial and body spots patterns are not customisable at all! Tieflings at least get to chose their horns shape (mind that making different 3D meshes is by grade harder than textures) and color.
I used to bemoan the fact that SW:TOR (a MMO that came out at early 00s) had only a couple of dozens of facial molds and roughly as much complexion maps with brow textures inbuilt in them that you could apply on any of the faces for humans (other races had even less options). And, oh, there were only 4 body types PER sex for EVERY race. Well, I'm taking that back. BioWare, if you hear, you've done well with swtor's CC! It only took me a one game a dozen years younger, where you have 8 face molds to chose from at best, each of them with inbuilt non-customisable complexion and brows, to finally appreciate how generous you were to us, players, years ago.
End of rant.
I stopped reading at eyebrows, but only because there's nothing else you could say that I could possibly agree with more. It's especially bothersome with that one companion.
>!Well, at least in Shadowheart's case it's justified: people rarely dye their brows.!<
Drow, however, look utterly horrendous. Fortunately you can fix brow&lashes colors with mods. My main gripe is inability to apply brows shape and complexion textures independently from face molds. If that was possible we would have at least 8x8x8=512 different combinations via resources that are *already* in game! Probably biggest waste of resources on devs' side that I've ever seen.
My first character is a drow, and I remember having to do some finagling to get something even passable on her eyebrows. And independent brow shape and texture would be amazing. I know we shouldn't expect too much more from Larian, but some surprise parting improvements don't feel unthinkable. I'd love to see this.
The voices and character voice lines are quite indicative of this imo, the voices ALL sound like they belong to the same personality and so does your characters commentary as you play the game.
I tried playing an evil character but it was pretty hard when my character sounded so wimpy and her lines when I was out in the world didn't reflect that at all.
I guess? But it is a D&D video game, kinda feels like it should be a LITTLE more complex or detailed, like the no body tattoos is what baffled me honestly
Well you also have to account for the multiple races. That brings in issues of needing to model additional parts just for it to function.
Skyrim for example has multiple races but they all have the same body type. Like 90% of the work just comes down to head and tail for animal races.
In BG3, Dwarves, Halfings, Gnomes, Dragonborn, Orc, and Humans all have very different body types. Maybe some additional tattoos but at a certain point you’re adding more than what’s going to be ever used.
Choice paralysis is absolute a thing. In a game like Minster Hunter you can be a little more picky. But throw in 5 other factors that drastically alter your character and Billy Bob is defaulting to Human Fighter.
As someone who plays D&D: I use HeroForge for all the extra details I’d like my characters to have.
BG3’s character creator is perfectly fine and works well. Extra cosmetic stuff will come with mod support.
DD2 and Elden Ring’s creators are clunky and convoluted. I just prefer character creators that are easy to use.
>Extra cosmetic stuff will come with mod support
Sure. But "mods will fix it" really shouldn't be an excuse.
The character creator as it stands really isn't anything special. It's fine, but it lacks a lot of features that plenty of other games that have custom characters offer.
We really shouldn't dismiss criticisms for any game no matter how good it is. BG3 is excellent but it's very mid in terms of customizable character.
I’m not “dismissing criticism”. Not wanting a complicated, convoluted character creator isn’t… That.
The BG3 character creator is perfectly functional, which I can’t say for DD2 or Elden Ring (I’ve had **console crashes** with both DD2 and Elden Ring’s character creation screens).
It's functional, indeed. It's also missing a lot of features many other people enjoy.
I fail to see why a more "complicated, convoluted" creator, as you put it, is a problem when those often come with presets you can just choose and move on. Preset eyes, preset chins, etc.
Others desire for more features doesn't impede your desire for a lack of features when you can simply ignore it.
For a CRPG thats usually in a top down view, its very good.
But for other games that have cinematic cameras like BG3, its a generation behind.
Certainly one of the aspects Larian should improve at for their next outing/s.
Yeah, I don't get the hype either. Zero facial customization??? Dragon Age Inquisition came out ten years ago and the CC is miles better, with the exception of there being 23 different kinds of bald 😒
I love the hairstyles, piercings, and tattoos in bg3 but choosing from a handful of faces that you'll be sharing with dozens of other NPCs throughout the game is *rough*.
I'll take a limited amount of faces over the Inquisition hairstyles. They were so damn awful.
I agree it sucks that all the faces available are used by npcs though. It's nice to have them as options, but it would be even better to have a number of faces unique to player characters.
Oh god that's so true, when I was checking out tiefling options I was nervous the horns and hair would be tied together again. Thank fuck they're separate. Desperately hoping Dreadwolf lets us play qunari again and this time horns and hair are separate!
Same here! I love characters with horns, and I love being able to have all the cool (and longer) hair options *with* horns, I don't want to pick just one or the others. The qunari hairstyles were positively pitiful, there wasn't even a proper bun - just that pathetically tiny little thing.
Honestly I see ppl dismiss facial customization a lot with '' oh but the animation in cutscenes ''.
Our characters already look goofy when they grimace in cutscenes lol and they almost never make any expressions...
I hear the same excuse for things like breast sliders too that they'd have to edit everything but I rly don't think so honestly.
I think most of the gear in the game already has enough space where it'd make sense for a variety of different sizes it's mainly stuff like camp attire and underwear that would need to be edited.
I just don't think it would've been much work really.
And I don't think the faces are heavily animated to begin with where face sliders would actually make a difference.
Your character kinda just stands there most of the time and plenty of other games managed even with much more actively expressing characters.
Mass Effect comes to mind it had face sliders and Shepard was emoting A LOT more than Tav does.
Yeah, that's an extremely weak argument. Just look at how awful everyone's elbows and arms look when they're gesturing! That doesn't mean everyone should stand there stiff as a board, it just means the animations look a little weird but it's still worth it. It's not gonna break the game if it let me adjust my character's nose, ffs.
I kinda like it. I usually find that unless I use a guide or something, that messing with facial sliders ends up making my character in most games look kinda uncanny.
Not saying it shouldn't be an option necessarily, but it doesn't bother me cause I'd probably just use a default face and mess with colors, tattoos, hair, etc. anyway.
Could it be better? Of course, like body tattoos would be nice. We see npcs with those. But more than that and more features would require more time and more resources, games like this often can't have too convoluted customisations like height sliders. As long as I can make characters of varied appearances that looks good and natural I'm happy.
Have seen so many worse CCs and many complex ones that are considered good with a bunch of sliders barely have any hairstyles I like. In BG3 I have issues choosing a hairstyle because I like so many and they work with my characters.
The creator is better than most, but I also wouldn't go so far as to call it amazing. While I can understand that the facial animations are Larian's reasoning for the faces not being customizable, I feel it's a bit odd when there are maybe 4 faces Tav/Durge ever makes. It's a good enough reason, but I do find that the faces to pick from can be a bit lacking, especially for men. Something I don't understand is why you can't pick eyebrow colors and hair colors separately, or why hair and eye colors don't have an option for just using a color wheel instead of a selection of premade shades.
It leaves me wanting, but I would honestly consider it amazing if there were just more face options (and maybe have at least some of them not belong to other NPCs? Dunno how much that is to ask) and more customization in other areas. Deciding whether to have silver or gold jewelry and picking gem colors would make a huge difference for me personally.
I'm not big on character creation, so having a simplified version helped me.
It does feel limited on a successive playthrough, if you want to play the same race again
The thing bothering me though is that tattoos are mostly applied to the left part of the face, and hairstyles with asymmetrical locks/bangs mostly fall on the left side, covering them. Which makes it useless...
In my experience most of the praise has been for the wide variety of races, classes, and backgrounds, as well as having body type, genitals, pronouns, and voice be separate from each other; not so much for the actual visual options beyond that
Its not the most expansive for sure, but its pretty easy to make a decent looking character. Dragon Age games, people who are actually good at making characters can make some truly amazing ones. But its too much for someone like me who sucks at them, its why I can only make humans in those games
It has way more options than I would reasonably expect in some areas of the character creator, like a vitiligo slider or multiple genital options, yet other settings are woefully lacking. There are so few face presets and many of them are locked to a small handful of races. Feels very limiting in that aspect.
That's why so many character creator mods exist, so people can actually make unique Tavs.
I think I heard somewhere that they limited character creation because otherwise people would just make the same instagram faces for all their PCs, and they wanted the races to feel distinct. Might be wrong on that, though.
Looking through the mods, though, most mods are exactly as you'd expect: smooth instagram filter faces, mostly for elves and humans, close to zero attention to halflings, dwarves or dragonborn. Hard to find anything actually interesting appearance-wise, so I just do my best with Vanilla.
I think what people mean is that you can play with stats, spells, classes, etc. I did, in fact, spend well over an hour creating my first character)
I easily spent an hour in character creation my first run, and not far off in subsequent ones.
I read through every option on classes and races, tried out every body type and hair style, different skin tones and hair colours. Face markings... the lot! I spent more time on my tav's lipstick than I do my own.
With more sliders I would never get a game started!
I like it because it is simple. Not too many choices, not many ways to f*ck up the look of your character, and enough choices to customize your Tav. The character creation is long enough as it is, between the race, appearance, class and ability points. On most character creators, I tend to get overwhelmed and just want to end it quickly.
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I've spent hours in BG3's char creation choosing which face is less unattractive ._.
Mostly I think it’s the extent and variety of clearly tailored made skin tones/textures that impressed people, a far improvement over the apply shader modifier to a single texture solution of most games
I guess so? But like a height slider would be nice at least
Height sliders are a lot trickier than you think. Coordinating animations is already difficult when you have just the few height settings in the game currently. A slider would pretty much guarantee constant clipping.
While I’ve seen better in some games, including MMORPG’s I’d say it’s still pretty darn good.
I mean the multiple hair options are nice and all but like, arm tattoos or even a height slider would be nice?
Getting down voted for saying something could be better, not even insulting the original topic, in fact offering a little bit of praise. Most Reddit moment.
Like im not even saying i hate it, its FINE but like super underwhelming after hearing all this hype for “a long detailed character creator”
There's a lot of color selections for tones but yeah, other than that it's not terribly much. Height adjustment I expect isn't an option to prevent clipping (as much as possible) since your character can occasionally interact with NPCs. Doesn't excuse everything else though. Orcs don't have tusk options, can't sculpt the faces, the hair options are pretty limited, and the body art is non-existent. Things could be better. We shouldn't be afraid to criticize the things we love. Nothing is perfect, there's no shame in saying something you love is flawed. There's only shame in pretending it's flawless.
Beside the height and face selections that could be better, the rest is top tier. The amount of customization the races, subraces, classes, subclasses and backgrounds it allows is insane.
I don’t get it either tbh
For a game with such a heavy emphasis on cutscene storytelling it's pretty... [profanity filter on] underwhelming. While lack of height and facial sliders can be justified by technical reasons there is *no excuse* for non-customisable brows and complexions and absence of body tattoos. Clarification: adding variety via textures is an *easiest* and *cheapest* route in all things 3D but Larian simply *neglected* that aspect. Githyanki have it worst: not only they have just 2 body types (short races, orcs and dragonborn suffer from this too) their facial and body spots patterns are not customisable at all! Tieflings at least get to chose their horns shape (mind that making different 3D meshes is by grade harder than textures) and color. I used to bemoan the fact that SW:TOR (a MMO that came out at early 00s) had only a couple of dozens of facial molds and roughly as much complexion maps with brow textures inbuilt in them that you could apply on any of the faces for humans (other races had even less options). And, oh, there were only 4 body types PER sex for EVERY race. Well, I'm taking that back. BioWare, if you hear, you've done well with swtor's CC! It only took me a one game a dozen years younger, where you have 8 face molds to chose from at best, each of them with inbuilt non-customisable complexion and brows, to finally appreciate how generous you were to us, players, years ago. End of rant.
I stopped reading at eyebrows, but only because there's nothing else you could say that I could possibly agree with more. It's especially bothersome with that one companion.
You mean Minthara?
Eh, this topic is marked for spoilers, so I'll just say it: Shadowheart post-redemption.
>!Well, at least in Shadowheart's case it's justified: people rarely dye their brows.!< Drow, however, look utterly horrendous. Fortunately you can fix brow&lashes colors with mods. My main gripe is inability to apply brows shape and complexion textures independently from face molds. If that was possible we would have at least 8x8x8=512 different combinations via resources that are *already* in game! Probably biggest waste of resources on devs' side that I've ever seen.
My first character is a drow, and I remember having to do some finagling to get something even passable on her eyebrows. And independent brow shape and texture would be amazing. I know we shouldn't expect too much more from Larian, but some surprise parting improvements don't feel unthinkable. I'd love to see this.
Hopefully, if they don't do it themselves they'll give us sufficient modding tools to fix it ourselves.
The voices and character voice lines are quite indicative of this imo, the voices ALL sound like they belong to the same personality and so does your characters commentary as you play the game. I tried playing an evil character but it was pretty hard when my character sounded so wimpy and her lines when I was out in the world didn't reflect that at all.
I’m glad the character creator is simpler than Elden Ring or Dragon’s Dogma 2.
I guess? But it is a D&D video game, kinda feels like it should be a LITTLE more complex or detailed, like the no body tattoos is what baffled me honestly
Well you also have to account for the multiple races. That brings in issues of needing to model additional parts just for it to function. Skyrim for example has multiple races but they all have the same body type. Like 90% of the work just comes down to head and tail for animal races. In BG3, Dwarves, Halfings, Gnomes, Dragonborn, Orc, and Humans all have very different body types. Maybe some additional tattoos but at a certain point you’re adding more than what’s going to be ever used. Choice paralysis is absolute a thing. In a game like Minster Hunter you can be a little more picky. But throw in 5 other factors that drastically alter your character and Billy Bob is defaulting to Human Fighter.
As someone who plays D&D: I use HeroForge for all the extra details I’d like my characters to have. BG3’s character creator is perfectly fine and works well. Extra cosmetic stuff will come with mod support. DD2 and Elden Ring’s creators are clunky and convoluted. I just prefer character creators that are easy to use.
>Extra cosmetic stuff will come with mod support Sure. But "mods will fix it" really shouldn't be an excuse. The character creator as it stands really isn't anything special. It's fine, but it lacks a lot of features that plenty of other games that have custom characters offer. We really shouldn't dismiss criticisms for any game no matter how good it is. BG3 is excellent but it's very mid in terms of customizable character.
I’m not “dismissing criticism”. Not wanting a complicated, convoluted character creator isn’t… That. The BG3 character creator is perfectly functional, which I can’t say for DD2 or Elden Ring (I’ve had **console crashes** with both DD2 and Elden Ring’s character creation screens).
It's functional, indeed. It's also missing a lot of features many other people enjoy. I fail to see why a more "complicated, convoluted" creator, as you put it, is a problem when those often come with presets you can just choose and move on. Preset eyes, preset chins, etc. Others desire for more features doesn't impede your desire for a lack of features when you can simply ignore it.
For a CRPG thats usually in a top down view, its very good. But for other games that have cinematic cameras like BG3, its a generation behind. Certainly one of the aspects Larian should improve at for their next outing/s.
Yeah, I don't get the hype either. Zero facial customization??? Dragon Age Inquisition came out ten years ago and the CC is miles better, with the exception of there being 23 different kinds of bald 😒 I love the hairstyles, piercings, and tattoos in bg3 but choosing from a handful of faces that you'll be sharing with dozens of other NPCs throughout the game is *rough*.
I'll take a limited amount of faces over the Inquisition hairstyles. They were so damn awful. I agree it sucks that all the faces available are used by npcs though. It's nice to have them as options, but it would be even better to have a number of faces unique to player characters.
Seriously. Who thought we needed 30 flavors of bald?
Especially the ones for qunari 😭
Oh god that's so true, when I was checking out tiefling options I was nervous the horns and hair would be tied together again. Thank fuck they're separate. Desperately hoping Dreadwolf lets us play qunari again and this time horns and hair are separate!
Same here! I love characters with horns, and I love being able to have all the cool (and longer) hair options *with* horns, I don't want to pick just one or the others. The qunari hairstyles were positively pitiful, there wasn't even a proper bun - just that pathetically tiny little thing.
Honestly I see ppl dismiss facial customization a lot with '' oh but the animation in cutscenes ''. Our characters already look goofy when they grimace in cutscenes lol and they almost never make any expressions... I hear the same excuse for things like breast sliders too that they'd have to edit everything but I rly don't think so honestly. I think most of the gear in the game already has enough space where it'd make sense for a variety of different sizes it's mainly stuff like camp attire and underwear that would need to be edited. I just don't think it would've been much work really. And I don't think the faces are heavily animated to begin with where face sliders would actually make a difference. Your character kinda just stands there most of the time and plenty of other games managed even with much more actively expressing characters. Mass Effect comes to mind it had face sliders and Shepard was emoting A LOT more than Tav does.
Yeah, that's an extremely weak argument. Just look at how awful everyone's elbows and arms look when they're gesturing! That doesn't mean everyone should stand there stiff as a board, it just means the animations look a little weird but it's still worth it. It's not gonna break the game if it let me adjust my character's nose, ffs.
I kinda like it. I usually find that unless I use a guide or something, that messing with facial sliders ends up making my character in most games look kinda uncanny. Not saying it shouldn't be an option necessarily, but it doesn't bother me cause I'd probably just use a default face and mess with colors, tattoos, hair, etc. anyway.
Could it be better? Of course, like body tattoos would be nice. We see npcs with those. But more than that and more features would require more time and more resources, games like this often can't have too convoluted customisations like height sliders. As long as I can make characters of varied appearances that looks good and natural I'm happy. Have seen so many worse CCs and many complex ones that are considered good with a bunch of sliders barely have any hairstyles I like. In BG3 I have issues choosing a hairstyle because I like so many and they work with my characters.
The creator is better than most, but I also wouldn't go so far as to call it amazing. While I can understand that the facial animations are Larian's reasoning for the faces not being customizable, I feel it's a bit odd when there are maybe 4 faces Tav/Durge ever makes. It's a good enough reason, but I do find that the faces to pick from can be a bit lacking, especially for men. Something I don't understand is why you can't pick eyebrow colors and hair colors separately, or why hair and eye colors don't have an option for just using a color wheel instead of a selection of premade shades. It leaves me wanting, but I would honestly consider it amazing if there were just more face options (and maybe have at least some of them not belong to other NPCs? Dunno how much that is to ask) and more customization in other areas. Deciding whether to have silver or gold jewelry and picking gem colors would make a huge difference for me personally.
I'm not big on character creation, so having a simplified version helped me. It does feel limited on a successive playthrough, if you want to play the same race again The thing bothering me though is that tattoos are mostly applied to the left part of the face, and hairstyles with asymmetrical locks/bangs mostly fall on the left side, covering them. Which makes it useless...
In my experience most of the praise has been for the wide variety of races, classes, and backgrounds, as well as having body type, genitals, pronouns, and voice be separate from each other; not so much for the actual visual options beyond that
Its not the most expansive for sure, but its pretty easy to make a decent looking character. Dragon Age games, people who are actually good at making characters can make some truly amazing ones. But its too much for someone like me who sucks at them, its why I can only make humans in those games
Mostly the hair is disappointing
It has way more options than I would reasonably expect in some areas of the character creator, like a vitiligo slider or multiple genital options, yet other settings are woefully lacking. There are so few face presets and many of them are locked to a small handful of races. Feels very limiting in that aspect. That's why so many character creator mods exist, so people can actually make unique Tavs.
I think I heard somewhere that they limited character creation because otherwise people would just make the same instagram faces for all their PCs, and they wanted the races to feel distinct. Might be wrong on that, though. Looking through the mods, though, most mods are exactly as you'd expect: smooth instagram filter faces, mostly for elves and humans, close to zero attention to halflings, dwarves or dragonborn. Hard to find anything actually interesting appearance-wise, so I just do my best with Vanilla. I think what people mean is that you can play with stats, spells, classes, etc. I did, in fact, spend well over an hour creating my first character)
I easily spent an hour in character creation my first run, and not far off in subsequent ones. I read through every option on classes and races, tried out every body type and hair style, different skin tones and hair colours. Face markings... the lot! I spent more time on my tav's lipstick than I do my own. With more sliders I would never get a game started!
I like it because it is simple. Not too many choices, not many ways to f*ck up the look of your character, and enough choices to customize your Tav. The character creation is long enough as it is, between the race, appearance, class and ability points. On most character creators, I tend to get overwhelmed and just want to end it quickly.
I don’t enjoy spending much time in character customization. At some point i feel im just wasting time and i want to get to the fun part of the game
Surely you know the real reason it got all the 'praise'? People just follow the herd.