Baldur’s Gate 3, being a game with such detailed high-quality character models, has a LOT of cosmetic mods. On Nexus Mods, a mod entitled “Enhanced Nude Bodies” has almost 1 million downloads, nothing too surprising about that. There’s also the possibly AI-titled “Beautiful Curvy Body and Sexy Outfits”, which clocks in at over 300k downloads.
It’s not the sexual mods I take issue with, though. After all, Baldur’s Gate 3 is a horny game, you can’t settle down for a nice cup of tea in camp without Halsin trying to jump your bones. Some cosmetic mods do irk me though; facial mods that aren’t created in the spirit of the character they’re modifying.
Everything Needs To Be Smooth, Plump, Unblemished And Soulless
For example, “Another Face for Lae’zel” is the most downloaded cosmetic mod for the Githyanki. Predictably, they enlarged her eyes, flattened her nose to make it less reptilian and made her lips plumper. It has over 70,000 downloads. It’s a reinforcement of conventional beauty standards on a character who is wholly unconcerned with beauty.
There has been a lot of, often toxic, discourse in gaming over the last couple of years regarding the appearance of women in video games. A lot of this irrational ire has been directed towards Guerilla Games for their design of Aloy, the protagonist of the Horizon series. According to the terminally online, Aloy is an example of how media is de-femming women, making them intentionally unattractive to push some kind of nebulous agenda.
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This change would make everything feel a lot more conclusive.
That’s all nonsense, obviously, and mods that smoothen out facial features are flirting with this narrative even if that’s not the author’s intention. Why can’t these characters just be themselves? The constant pushing of Western, white beauty standards is tiring, even if it is in something as trivial as a Baldur’s Gate 3 facial mod.
The most downloaded mod with ‘Jaheira’ in the title is one that de-ages her, removing her wrinkles. Another mod removes the scars and tattoos from Karlach, smoothing her skin. There’s a desire among some people to make the women of Baldur’s Gate 3 ‘perfect’, to remove the perceived imperfections that make up their character.
Karlach isn’t an unblemished Barbie doll, she’s a foul-mouthed, battle-hardened warrior. It’s crass to mould her into something that satisfies a misguided need for visual purity. Not all mods have to be true to a character, but these mods add nothing positive to the playing or narrative experience.
Face packs that change the faces of player characters are less frustrating, though I still don’t like the aesthetic of a lot of these mods. That really is just a peeve, though. If you want your Tav / Durge to look like a buxom anime character then that’s your prerogative, even if it looks completely out of place with the rest of the game.
The constant pushing of Western, white beauty standards is tiring.
It’s strange to me just how prevalent these mods are currently. This can be partially explained by thelack of modding supportfor Baldur’s Gate 3, something Larian is currently working on. Without an easier process for developing more complex mods, we see a lot of ‘easier’ mods, like ones that replace textures.
We can take solace in the fact that Larian Studios are the ones creating these complex characters, rather than concupiscent modders in Blender, I shudder to think what my beloved party would look like if they had their way.
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Won’t anyone love these brave souls?
