I have committed a cardinal sin in Baldur's Gate 3: I created a character who is a basic bitch. I spent hours meticulously crafting her, flitting between multiple hairstyles and hair colours, rotating her to get a look at her face from all angles, adjusting freckles and makeup metallic intensity by tiny, tiny increments until I thought she was just right.
But she's not. She's all wrong! The character creator is like a clothing store changing room—all the right lighting, seemingly the perfect way to scrutinise myself from all angles. Then I emerge into the harsh lighting of the real world and suddenly things don't look quite right.
That hairstyle that I thought was super cute suddenly looks rather plain, and the seemingly perfect blue colour for my eyes is suddenly a murderously piercing gaze that interrupts your immersion every time I'm forced to stare into them. At least I can return an ill-fitting dress, but I'm stuck with my Tav looking this way because for some reason there is not a single person in the entirety of Baldur's Gate capable of taking some scissors to my hair or slapping me around with a makeup brush.
For a world filled with very put-together warriors and gorgeous, horny companions, I can't believe there's nary a magic mirror, barber's shop or esthetician to be found. I wasn't entirely bothered at first—I didn't look too terrible in the initial cutscenes. I wasn't quite the dashing fantasy adventurer I had convinced myself I was after 90 minutes in the character creator, but I was still looking pretty damn good. Especially for a lass who'd just had a tadpole shoved down her eye socket.
That was until the game had the audacity to begin shoving me into cutscenes next to my far cooler looking companions. They've got the cool armour, the cool hair, the interesting looks. Even a fellow basic bitch like Gale looks jazzy when you whack him in a purple robe and pierce his ear. My plain hair, lack of scars or body markings, and my barely-there makeup have left me looking… frighteningly normal. I've been outshone by my own sidekicks. Larian called everyone out for making boring characters in Early Access and I learned nothing.
No drip
A character who looks fantastic on their own can suddenly look awfully out of place when you thrust them into an ensemble cast, and the further I venture into Baldur's Gate 3 the harder I feel that. I've almost been rather gleeful to strip my party of their shiny character-fitting armour and put them into something more drab for the sake of higher AC. Cruel, I know.
I marched onward with my save file in the hopes that I'd get the opportunity to change my appearance, but there doesn't seem to be anything of the sort, even in the city itself. With entire class respecs being so freely available for very little money (including becoming an entire party of bears if you're so inclined), I'm surprised I can't even get a trim. I'm now too far gone, hours and hours into my save, to dare starting fresh with a protagonist I can tolerate looking at. Plus, I'm so horrifically indecisive that the chances of me messing up another character are sky-high.
A mid-game makeover can also show the passage of time. Surely after hundreds of hours of adventuring and many long rests, my character is going to look a little different than they did when they first started. Maybe a new scar, longer hair, a few wrinkles or a greying beard to show how the adventure has taken a toll on my poor bard. It's a big way I immerse myself in my character and my world, and it's something I'm sorely missing the more time I sink into the game.
I'm desperately hoping a magic mirror or barber NPC will be one of the first things Larian ends up patching in. It feels like too huge an oversight in a game where you can do almost anything, with tens or hundreds of ways to tackle any one situation. Failing that, a mod will no doubt appear soon—there are already tons of mods that add extra hair, tattoo and, ahem, penis options to the character creator, but none that let you change it all on the fly just yet. When one does appear, there's handily another mod that reenables achievements for people who've modded their game.
