Race associated weapon size scaling

[Jawgo]

Hi All,

I recognize that this game has been out for over a year now and it may be too late to bring this up to any effect, but since part of the purpose of this particular forum is to discuss our "hopes and dreams" for it I thought it wouldn't it hurt to bring it up (or bring it up again if it's been discussed before).

Let me start by saying that I personally think this game is bonkers good, just redic off the wall levels of care and detail and thought-out features relative to it's predecessor and relative to many other similar games. I recognize that there are some harsh criticisms of it out there relating to issues of min/maxing, weapon type balance, the AI and others, but none of that has felt like an issue to me especially considering how much of a beast this game is in terms of story, lore, world building, the writing and consistency of interactions, the voice acting, the audio and visuals, travel and exploration, and the re-tuned combat resource system. It's not hyperbolic when I say that I'm dangerously obsessed with this game right now.

All that said, there is one visual design feature that my OCD won't let me not focus on constantly and bugs me to no end: weapon size scaling based on race. I love dwarves, love their typical physical and physiological design, personality and behavioral traits, their background and lore; I roll a dwarf main character in as many games as I can and their visual design in Pillars 2 is fantastically improved over what they looked like in Pillars 1, so I've been really into my dwarf playthrough... except for the fact that the visual scale of weapons shrink when equipped on a dwarf. It's particularly bad with respect to one-handed weapons. Do you love the sword Modwyr? Well if you equip her on a dwarf, the sword looks like a child's toy. Same with most other one-handed swords. Maces look like your dwarf is melee'ing with a wand. Daggers and stilettos look like you're fighting with toothpicks. And what makes these visual disparities even worse is that all weapons shrink even smaller when they are sheathed. Dwarves may be a bit shorter than humans but they're also stronger than them, as evidenced by their natural +2 Might compared to the +1 of humans. So why do dwarves have to be made to appear to need smaller weapons? They should be able to wield human-sized weapons with no problem, and I would love to see them doing so in this game.

Now I'm not saying the current visual design for weapon scaling ought to be scrapped; I recognize that if you like to play an Aumaua you may dislike having your equipped weapons look too small for your body, so you like the fact that weapon sizes scale up for you. And maybe you enjoy playing an Orlan and don't want to see them carrying weapons that are comically too large for them to be wielding, so there's value in having the current visual system for weapon size scaling. What I hope and dream to see done is the addition of an option in the settings that lets you toggle race-based weapon size scaling off and on, where if you toggle the setting off then all weapons are fixed in their visual size scale to what it currently is for humans. I have no idea whether this would be something that requires a lot of technical work on the part of the devs to implement, but if it isn't something that would be that hard to do (and ya'll actually did it), it would lock this game down for me as unequivocally one of the best games I've ever had the pleasure of spending hundreds of hours obsessively playing.

Just think on it a little. You'd be making this old dwarf's hopes and dreams come true

Edited September 10, 2019 by Jawgo

[Boeroer]

I took a screenshot from a dwarf holding a sword, took the sword and cut it out, gave it a bright color and then put it into the screenshots of a human (average size), an orlan (smallest size) and aumaua (biggest size):

As you can see the sword doesn't get sized down a lot if we use the human as "normal" size. It doesn't look like a child's toy at all.

The only significant sizing that happens: on aumauas the weapon gets scaled up quite a bit (most likely because it would look quite ridiculous if it didn't). So if you compare a weapon on a aumaua and then give it to an orlan or dwarf the difference might be way more obvious. 

On this second screenshot I took the measurement of the orlan sword (left) and copied it besides the human sword (right):

Here it's a little more visible. The orlan sword is a tiny bit shorter. I say tiny because it's not really that much - esp. compared to the size difference of their bodies.

Since armor also gets scaled (would be unusable as soon as it wouldn't fit your race otherwise) I reckon that weapon scaling is ok, too. I am pretty sure that the development team did some tests and decided that this (rather conservative) weapon scaling looks best (or better than leaving the weapon size unchanged).

To be honest I never even noticed that there was weapon scaling before you opened this thread...

A toggle option is always nice though. Why not?

 

Edited September 6, 2019 by Boeroer

[Jawgo]

Hmm...

First off, thank you Boeroer for the legwork and providing some screenshots. Honestly I wasn't sure anyone would even care to comment on this let alone look into, so it's cool for me to see someone take an interest! But I can tell you for sure that that's not what one-handed swords look like on my dwarf...

My OCD dictated that I go and find a measuring tape and actually measure the blade length of Modwyr in the equip menu while my dwarf was wielding it and also measure the blade length on screen while Eder was wielding it in the same menu. On my dwarf the blade length on screen is 2.75 inches long, while on Eder the blade measures out to 3.25 inches long. That's a visually very noticeable difference. Even the blade widths are noticeably different. I took some screenshots to show at what angles I measured each (I positioned both characters in the equip menu the same why to show the disparities).

You can clearly see in the side-by-side that the blade is longer and broader on a human, as are the cross-guard and the pommel. On Eder the blade length reaches all the way under the pet slot, whereas on my swanky dwarf it just barely reaches the edge of the box (you can put a straightedge up to the tip of each blade and parallel to the right side of each image to check for sure).

Again, I have no doubt that probably many people would look at this and go "wow, who gives a fork," and I get that sentiment. This isn't a huge game-changing thing. It's just an OCD thing, and if it would be trivial for the devs to add a toggle for setting all weapon sizes to be equal to that for humans, that would rock my world!

Oh, and the toggle ideally would set the size of sheathed weapons to that of humans too; I'd have a stroke if the toggle increased the unsheathed weapon size but left the sheathed weapon size tiny the way it currently is for dwarves.

#HopesAndDreams ^_^

Edited September 6, 2019 by Jawgo

[Boeroer]

Funny! Maybe Modwyr and some other uniques are special in this regard...? I only used a plain normal sword. 

Or maybe the setting with dwarves is is especially "small" - also when you look at orlans in comparison (which are even smaller than dwarves).

Maybe this sizing can be modded. I know of several weapons that you can add with the console (e.g. ogre weapons) that don't scale at all when you equip them with your chars. They are ridiculously oversized then.

Maybe there already is a toggle (or scaling number) in the gamedata files...? 

[Jawgo]

I was bored at work today so I put together a few more side-by-side screenshots I took this weekend comparing different weapons equipped on Eder and on my male dwarf main character. Here's them equipped with exceptional swords...

So it's not just unique weapons that get scaled down, regular weapons do too.

[Jawgo]

Here's the sabre Min's Fortune...

[Jawgo]

And a superb mace...

[Jawgo]

And here's a couple of side-by-sides of two-handed weapons sheathed (Queen's Rule and a superb morning star)...

[Jawgo]

Really would like to see a toggle in the settings to help serve dwarves some proper weapon size justice, lest we forget that while dwarves may be shorter than humans, they're also stronger than them. And they tend to build and forge things bigger and better, so it wouldn't be weird for them to be wielding full-sized weapons

Edited September 9, 2019 by Jawgo

[Boeroer]

With the mace it's most obvious.

I now wonder if Dwarves ge their weapon scaled down more than Orlans - although they are bigger and taller.
With Orlans the difference doesn't seem to be that big, does it?

The mace is really ridiculous looking.

I'm pretty sure it's moddable. You can even switch certain parts of weapos invisible if they are not one monolithic model (for example the funny looking basket-hilt of the Aldris Blade of Captain Crow). So I guess it shouldn't be too hard to tweak the scaling.

Besides that it can make sense to have shorter weapons if you have shorter arms - even if you are equally strong. Handling and leverage and all that - but the examples above show that it's too extreme. The mace indeed looks like a scepter.

You could write a PM to @BMac maybe and ask if/how that's possible (or maybe he will already see this tag). So far he was always very helpful and supportive with such questions. Since active support for Deadfire has ended now it may be that he doesn't have a lot of time for that anymore - but it still might be worth a try. 

Edited September 10, 2019 by Boeroer

[Jawgo]

Yeah, I was thinking that it's probably too late for devs to put out more updates since the game has been out for so long now. Oh well, maybe someone will make a mod someday like you mentioned. Doing something like that myself is totally out of my wheelhouse unfortunately.

And yeah, maces totally look ridiculous on dwarves XD
It looks like he's wielding a wand for casting spells!

[BMac]

@Jawgo I'm a bit late here, but better late than never? I'm getting a bit rusty on Deadfire stuff, but unfortunately I think the racial weapon scales will not be easy to mod.  I believe they come from a scale on the bone the weapons are attached to, which is deep in Unity data.  I can't think of any ways around that at the moment. If someone is ambitious enough to dig for that data, there are several bones weapons can attach to that need to be adjusted - one on each handle, the back scabbard, and two hip scabbards.

[kaziel]

Sorry for the necro, but I just spotted something similar. It's not specifically mentioned here so I'll post.

When you equip weapons on Pallegina, the weapon models are small when sheathed but enlarge in size when wielded. This is different to what's going with what a few posters have mentioned here so either something's changed since then (patch?), or something specific is going on with either Pallegina specifically or all human female models.

This is a weird concept though as I don't see the point in coding for the weapon to enlarge when unsheathed. It's great that the models are smaller on the more petite characters so that, for example, long weapons like pikes won't clip into the ground; makes perfect sense. But the weapon enlarging when they pull it out is not a good look unless there's a reason, e.g. magically engineered to do so.

I guess, as BMac mentioned, it's not moddable so I'll just have to live with it. 

EDIT: I just realised that all weapons increase in size when unsheathed and wielded, no matter what race the character is. Can't unsee now. 

Edited September 11, 2023 by kaziel