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AI-generated Baldur’s Gate character portraits put players' to shameGo for the AIs, Boo! Go for the AIs!
Go for the AIs, Boo! Go for the AIs!
Choosing a character portrait is one of the key decisions to spend hours mulling over in any decent CRPG. That’s why it’s awesome to see someone using the power of publicly accessible AI to generate fantasy mugshots for classic examples of the genre such asBaldur’s Gate. Indie app dev and documentary editor Alex Hay has created some great examples, whichhe’s sharedon Twitter with Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition devs Beamdog and their CEO Trent Oster.
Top 13 Best RPGs to Play on PCWe think Baldur’s Gate 2 is one of the best RPGs to play on PC, even today.Watch on YouTube
Top 13 Best RPGs to Play on PC
Hay used one of artificial intelligence research lab OpenAI’s image transformer models, called DALL·E 2 to generate portraits in the style of the first two Baldur’s Gate RPGs. There’s more examples of what Hay’s been generating on theDungeons&DalleInstagram account, orhereon Twitter. Hay used this as a prompt for DALL·E 2 to generate images based on the legendary hamster-loving barbarian Minsc, for example:
You can see the result below:
One of my many pastimes as a teenager was fiddling around with character portraits in Baldur’s Gate and its sequel. I had two standard characters I used to play as: The Orc With No Name, which used a basic half-orc portrait for obvious reasons, and Dutch Quaid, a medieval fantasy themed Arnold Schwarzenegger look alike made out of a pack of celeb portraits. You can see the latterhere, along with some other early 2000s stars such as Ben Stiller, Seth Green and Orlando Bloom. Teen CJ would’ve loved all this AI business.
Tools like DALL·E 2 could help solve another issue in RPG character creation too. Stewards of the Baldur’s Gate series Larian took players to task over theshockingly boringself-insert characters they were creating when the latest game in the series entered early access back in 2020. Plonking together all the most popular choices inBaldur’s Gate 3’s character creator left Larian with what they called the “default Vault Dweller” – a very white, brown-haired man in what appeared to be his late 20s. At least be a tiefling, people.
Larian announced in April that Baldur’s Gate 3launches out of early accessin 2023. That still leaves you with plenty of time to fiddle about with some AI and make yourself look a bit more like a bad-arse mage instead of some random lad from accounts. You can sign up to the DALL·E 2 waiting listhere. Hop to it!
