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Why no portrait browser? (click, click, clickety click)


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I have to wonder - Why do we have to regress to before the days of the Infinity Engine when it comes to something like portraits? Baldurs Gate had a portrait browser that saved you from having to click through every - single - portrait - of both - sexes. Sure you had to find a small portrait separately but that doesn't excuse this kind of regression.

 

Defend yourself Obsidian - Or better yet, mend this as soon as possible. I tire of having to "click, click, clickety click" through my massive library of prepared custom portraits just to get to the one I want.

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I guess it just wasn't a high priority. I complained about the whole character creation process when we first saw it in the Backer Beta, and nobody cared, and now it's exactly the same as it was back then.

 

I mean, not only is it a chore to find a good portrait, the whole appearance section of character creation happens at the end, while selecting the race happens at the beginning. So I choose a Nature Godlike and think to myself "this guy looks ugly, do I really want to play as him?", but before I can check whether there are better heads and hairstyles etc available, I have to select class, attributes and culture.  :getlost:

Not to mention that I set my attributes before choosing the culture that modifies them. So I almost definitely will have to go back because when I go from the Aedyr Culture to the White That Wends culture, my Might goes down and my Resolve (or something) goes up.

Oh and I haven't seen anything that told me about my current skill values. It's probably there somewhere, but the creation is lacking a good overview and structure.

 

So there's plenty of stuff that annoys me about that, but in the end... this really only matters for ten minutes. So I can understand why they don't prioritize this. And the current system works good enough, even if it's a bit annoying.

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"Tradition, son" ;)

 

It can't be considered tradition if games that came before it HAD browsers though.  :biggrin:

 

Of course - It doesn't make it any better that the character creator system doesn't care to remember which portrait you had selected if you go back a step to make sure the facial features and colours match up to the portrait either.

 

Click click click click - Stay a while and listen... wait what?

Edited by Mansen
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About Baldur's Gate's portrait browser, do you mean the Enhanced editon or the original? I've only played BGI with the BGT mod, so I don't know.

 

I'm referring to the BG2 GUI engine - Which is what Enhanced uses for both games.

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Alright - Fine. Let me just grab all of the old discs, install the games and tell you exactly which ones have the browser and which do not. And then we'll see if "tradition, son" still holds.

 

Tradition isn't an excuse though - With the massive libraries of custom portraits, a simple "left, right" click option is not acceptable at all. Imagine for a second having to manually click through a few hundred portraits - Then going back a step to make sure they match up to the character model...and then having to click through them again.

 

Edit: Actually I'll do you one better. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vf5Tzx8wC4

 

There - that's Icewind Dale 1 with a portrait browser. So that makes Three out of four IE games that had a portrait browser. Tradition, sonny!

Edited by Mansen
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I guess it just wasn't a high priority. I complained about the whole character creation process when we first saw it in the Backer Beta, and nobody cared, and now it's exactly the same as it was back then.

 

I mean, not only is it a chore to find a good portrait, the whole appearance section of character creation happens at the end, while selecting the race happens at the beginning. So I choose a Nature Godlike and think to myself "this guy looks ugly, do I really want to play as him?", but before I can check whether there are better heads and hairstyles etc available, I have to select class, attributes and culture.  :getlost:

Not to mention that I set my attributes before choosing the culture that modifies them. So I almost definitely will have to go back because when I go from the Aedyr Culture to the White That Wends culture, my Might goes down and my Resolve (or something) goes up.

Oh and I haven't seen anything that told me about my current skill values. It's probably there somewhere, but the creation is lacking a good overview and structure.

 

So there's plenty of stuff that annoys me about that, but in the end... this really only matters for ten minutes. So I can understand why they don't prioritize this. And the current system works good enough, even if it's a bit annoying.

 

Well, you can at least just click the heading at the top once you've picked them at least one and go back and change/tweak each bit without having to redo everything in order (had you discovered that?) I spent... an hour, maybe more, futzing around with it yesterday, trying to work out what I wanted to play (which, to be fair to Obsidian, is something of a triumph, because the answer wasn't instantly "wizard, because special effects are pretty" like basically every other RPG the frst time around...!) and fiddling with appearances and portraits an whatnot.

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I didn't think you were taking the whole subject that seriously. Yeah, I agree a browser is better than clicking through portraits. And the more portraits you have available, the more you have to click, and we all want many portraits.

A Custom Editor for Deadfire's Data:
eFoHp9V.png

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It was a lighthearted stab at the developers for the most part (lack of coffee meant I accidentally left out the continued humor in responses. My bad) - But I would prefer it if they'd put in a browser asap. Maybe even add some basic filtering so you can filter out a specific race or gender while you're at it.

 

The filename format they've chosen supports it after all. :)

Edited by Mansen
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