I Hope Baldur’s Gate 3 Lets Us Customize Our Character Portraits

In anticipation of what may be my most anticipated game of the last decade, Baldur’s Gate 3, I’ve been playing through Baldur’s Gate 2 (the Enhanced Edition) in multiplayer. One of the things that occurred to me as I was playing (other than how damn good that game still is) was just how important those character portraits are in this game.

See, back in those days, Baldur’s Gate offered hardly any character customisation beyond skin colour, hair colour, and tunic colour. All characters of the same race looked the same, and all were these blobby little sprites that frankly looked nowhere nearly as good as the gorgeous pre-rendered backdrops.

My partner and I were in fact so obsessed with somehow placing a bit more of ourselves into the game that we actually AI-generated Baldur’s Gate-style portraits based on photos of ourselves, suffering through some pretty fiddly formatting and image-naming rules to get the job done after a good 45 minutes of trying. For some reason, Midjourney was insistent on CGI’ing me rather than giving me that painterly look like it gave my partner, but on balance we were pretty chuffed with the results.

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Even in more recent party-based RPGs however, where the actual character models look more convincing, there’s something to be said for well-stylised portraits. Larian’s Divinity: Original Sin games weren’t great in this regard. In the original, uhh, Original Sin, all the character portraits stared dead-faced into the camera like for a passport photo, while in the sequel they all struck the same ‘looking off slightly to the right’ angle. There was no personality in these portraits, no cheeky little expressions that in some way reflected the big characters behind them.

That’s in stark contrast to Mike Sass’ beautifully drawn portraits for Baldur’s Gate 2—the gentle-giant smile of Minsc, the smug, soft and rather air-headed gaze of the Paladin Anomen, the sultry pout of Jaheira, or the sulky distant expression of Imoen. Or how about the wild-eyed semi-maniacal stare of the eccentric gnome Jan Jansen? All these portraits, beyond being beautifully drawn, in some ways encapsulate their respective companions.

I’m happy to see that in the latest (and final) Baldur’s Gate 3 Panel From Hell footage, Larian have finally implemented painterly character portraits in the vein of the older games, replacing the dull face-on mugshots they used throughout most of Early Access (and their previous games). That’s a great start, but now I’m wondering how that applies to custom characters you create.

Character portraits in Baldur’s Gate 2 were brimming with, well, character.

Specifically, will Larian give us some autonomy over the portraits for our custom-created characters, or will they just strike a random pose based on the existing ones? It would be fantastic if, as part of character creation, we could tailor our hero’s portrait, making tweaks to our portrait pose, facial expression, and whether our custom hero looking right at the character or solemnly into the distance. After all, if you create a nefarious warlock intent on using the game’s crisis to further their own power, or a fighter whose faith in the world has been ravaged by the horrors of war, you don’t want them just smiling dumbly for the camera like they would for a school photo, right?

It’s a small detail, but feels so significant in a game like this, not to mention that vital nostalgic throughline it creates with the older Baldur’s Gate games. Here’s hoping Larian gives us some control over those precious character portraits. And if they don’t, then at least let us create custom ones; even if they require bitmap images, AI, weird resolutions, and no spaces or special characters in the file name, I’m ready to do whatever it takes for that perfect character snap.

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