Baldur’s Gate 3 promises to be more than just the new standard for an RPG. It aims to be, thanks to its production values, attention to detail, and obsession with creating the closest experience to a Dungeons & Dragons role-playing session within a video game. This will make it more than just a benchmark for other games to imitate; it will likely become a beacon of what can be achieved with resources that the vast majority of studios don’t possess. This is evident in a recent interview with Kotaku, where they explain why they aspire to create the most complex character creator in the world.
In an interview with Kotaku, character artist Alena Dubrovina from Larian Studios has shed light on some specific aspects of the game, including the ambitious approach they have taken.
The most interesting thing is that Larian never intended to create a character creator. What they used to create their characters was the system they developed in the studio to make them easily customizable and give them a sense of belonging to the same world, ensuring coherence among them. This allowed them to efficiently create many characters in a relatively short time, considering the massive size of the project.
To achieve this, they utilized different pre-defined faces and bodies to which they added what they called “accessories,” such as hair, jewelry, scars, tattoos, or facial hair. In doing so, they aimed to make all the characters feel tailor-made, even if, unlike the select group of main and supporting characters, the majority of the game’s characters were created using this tool. The result was so impressive that they ultimately decided to turn it into the character creator for the players.
In this in-depth interview, Dubrovina provides specific details about character creation and how they have been designed. She discusses the special attention given to how different types of hair behave under various weather effects, the existence of four body types, none of them classified by genders, and the ability to customize our characters’ genitals in detail. All of this is intended to allow players to immerse themselves in a world and a story where they feel like a specific character.
In that sense, there is no doubt that Baldur’s Gate 3 aspires to be one of the great games of the year, if not of all time. To find out if it will succeed, we will have to wait until August 3 on PC and September 6 on PlayStation 5.
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