#like bg3 character creator is nice but limiting in a lot of ways

[vampirian]

dnd life would be a whole lot easier if i could draw the blorbos in my head instead of having to rely on character creators online/in games but unfortunately i have the artistic skills of a high schooler struggling to make it through art class which means you will be able to tell what i WANT to draw if it's just about me simply drawing sth like in gartic phone or activity or other drawing related games and i can like make birthday and christmas cards for my friends with a lot of help like tracing and collage type of things but anything more elaborate and drawing ideas from my mind is simply not feasible

[dorindameddler]

the thing that kills me about wyll and the way people have responded to him is that yes i do think he became underwritten when they rewrote his whole arc last minute. he has less dialogue than the other origin characters, and while his storyline has some interesting setup it doesn't really cohere the way it could and should

that being said, let's not pretend for a second that fans can't and won't excuse thin writing for white characters they're into. we all know about extremely minor white characters that fandom latched onto and dedicated lots of energy to despite a limited presence in the source material. i mean, they made halsin a companion just because people were so horny for him, and he definitely does not have a better or more interesting story or personality than wyll. wyll, the singular companion of color in bg3, doesn't get that treatment because racism is deep and ever-present, imo even worse in video games than other types of media. if people treated black characters the way they do white ones he would have plenty of fans despite the weakness in the writing.

you see this all the time in video games, koth in star wars the old republic, liam in mass effect andromeda. both black men with "nice" personalities and people either respond to them with hatred for every little thing or call them boring and have no interest in them at all. and the creators throw up their hands like "well i guess people just don't like this character!" instead of looking at it honestly and realizing that people were always going to respond with racism to a black character. people hated wyll in early access and said they thought his heroic shtick was fraudulent, so they rewrote him to be more inherently good and then people call him boring for that! they were never going to win because many were always going to be racist about him unfortunately. and larian should have focused on writing him a good and interesting arc over making him "likable"

[thedarklordsnicklefritz]

Okay I finally started actually playing bg3 instead of just messing around with the character creator. Here's my thoughts on the game so far until I had to stop from headache:

- The character creator is really cool, and probably revolutionary. There's like 350 skin color options. I appreciate that your gender identity is separate from the body type you choose, and that you can select any of the genital options with any of the the body types.

But I was kind of underwhelmed with the face options (although good on them for the diversity range of the face options they had) and that they were locked to the body types. And the body types basically boiled down to small feminine, small masculine, big feminine and big masculine. And the feminine bodies came with boobs, nonoptional.

I do get that there's a lot of limitations like with the facial mapping and clothes and hardware etc, the whole game file is like 10x as big as the largest game I have on the switch. So I don't think it's unreasonable that they didn't work more on that. But still. It would be nice to not have to have tiddies without also having to have ManFace™️ and more mixing and matching of features in general.

-I spent an embarrassingly long time deciding what I wanted to play. (I took a nap rather than make a choice. Twice.) Hopefully I don't regret going with the custom background instead of dark urge.

-I haven't played a lot of current video games. Or even in general. So it's a really weird mix of familiar since everything is based on 5e, but also in a very unfamiliar way.

It doesn't help that I'm using a switch controller so the buttons are labeled different

- I was so caught up in the euphoria of effectively playing d&d without having to schedule it with other people, that for a moment I forgot I had to play in the Forgotten Realms

- I'm really tired of "fantasy racism". It's not interesting or compelling. It takes a complicated and layered real world issue and boils it down to a charicature that absolves people of any self-reflection. (This isn't necessarily unique to the Forgotten Realms, but they're definitely a big contributor to the whole "Elves hate dwarves!" being so popular in the genre.)

- I'm very proud of myself for freeing shadowheart in the tutorial level. It's great having a cleric in the party. But *gestures above*

- I decided on playing a bard (that seemed like the most conducive for vampire pegging, plus I like having skills! And it seemed like for a wizard playthrough it's better to play as gale since you'd get more wizard specific content) and I'm just running around in my silly little outfit. No strength or constitution to speak of, but rolling great so far

-except when some kid pickpocketed me.

And then I tried to gently intimidate him and Wyll is like WOW are you proud of yourself for (unsuccessfully) scaring a child asshole?

I wasn't actually going to feed him to a bear! I was just messing with him and trying to rile him up a bit. I don't see you getting our stuff back!

-Wyll is very cool.

Or at the very least he's a nice break from the girls constantly fighting.

-I've only died once so far which is some kind of miracle

-But also this is like the first map and I'm already lost and I have no idea what I'm doing

-The headaches are probably going to be a recurring thing I may have to figure out some different settings or something

[not-a-space-alien]

Despite everyone touting how awesome the BG3 character creator is, I actually find it unfortunately pretty limited. You can't even have a "woman body" with no breasts (or even just smaller breasts). There are no sliders to customize anything, only a selection of premade features to mix and match. Being able to swap your genitals regardless of body type is nice, but ultimately it feels like an afterthought in making the game "trans inclusive," even though it does let you play as a they/them.

I have to imagine technical limitations play a part in it, but it's impossible to say how much of it was that and how much was the devs not having much imagination to implement something like, say, the Fallout character creator. When I played as a character with horns I noticed they got in the way of cutscenes and clipped through stuff a lot, so I guess it's possible it was a similar issue wrt making clothes and armor fit, but I can't imagine any excuse for locking the face selection to match body type. ...there is also basically no practical reason I can think of to force your man to have washboard abs, but that's another topic.

This game generally does make EXTREMELY beautiful characters that I love to stare at, but I think that kind of coherence might have come at the cost of some flexibility in customization. I'm generally okay with that, but unfortunately it has the effect that if you have a particular idea about what your character looks like, it might not be possible to make it which is disappointing for a game with such a heavy focus on roleplay. The fact that you can play as a dragonborn but not a fat person is kind of ludicrous.

@not-a-space-alien and I were trying to make my OC Addison in Baldur's Gate and we discovered a critical flaw in the ability to make trans characters

While you can put any style of genitals on any style of body, you're still limited to faces that "match" the gender of the body

This meant in order to give them a face that actually looked like them, I had to use the "woman" body, which is, like, not ideal. Although Nasa told me the "man" bodies are all jacked af, which wouldn't really have fit the character either.

I feel like a game with a character customization screen should have three models for a character:

thin and petite

tall and muscular

fat

like, yeah, that doesn't cover EVERY possible shape a human body can be, but you can at least get closer instead of all women being petite and all men being tall and muscular

You don't even have to make most of the clothing and wearable items different based on whether the player character is "tall and muscular (male)" or "tall and muscular (female)." Only a small selection of the most revealing clothing would have to be different.