Why is the Protagonist so ugly?

I loved Geralts voice. It goes with the character so wel. But yeah, I had the moments (Jesus Christ that’s weird).

Elaborate. What makes him drab?

“The witchers for example, each and every single one of them is
interesting. Geralt is the good loking one, Eskel is the ugly, Lambert
is slightly weird. Each recognisible and interesting.”

For me, this doesn’t make them interesting. This just makes them papier mache and trite. You look at them, listen to one, carefully written line of theirs and decide where that guy fits on the “characters”-titled list. Weirdly, this doesn’t make me love them - just makes them distant.
The main drive of KC:D is “realism”. While I try to understand your reasons, and yes, any good book / movie needs characters drawn with thick lines, you don’t see these characters in reality. You don’t see the hero, the sidekick, the sexy, perfect love interest and such. You see common faces, swearing, caring about pity problems, faces you forget right in the next minute. What do you expect in a village of Bohemia, in the early XV. century?
I’ll be honest with you; for once, I want to stand in the shieldwall knowing I’m not better than anyone else. Knowing, that I’m only as important as I can make myself for others. Playing without super abilities, without any gift of nature, where a sword is just a sword and the enemy also has one.
There are plenty games where I can be someone else. This time I want to be somewhere else.

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you don’t see these characters in reality

Have you ever lived in reality? :smiley Seriously. You never met person with interesting face, interesting features? Really?

What do you expect in a village of Bohemia, in the early XV. century?

Can we please not forget this is a game. And Authenticity is always more important than reality. And bland character defeats the purpose of having a motion captured face. Or, the other way arround. Maybe the character will be much more interesting with the motion captured face. Either way having an interesting main character is a must. Especially in RPG, in which you will be watching your face in dialogues half of the time.

I want to stand in the shieldwall knowing I’m not better than anyone else. Knowing, that I’m only as important as I can make myself for others.

Oh don’t get me wrong. I love playing as nobody, doing your part, in the grand scheme of things. The Normandy mission in the original Medal of Honor is still one of my favorite missions todate.

There are plenty games where I can be someone else. This time I want to be somewhere else.

Okay. I’m not talking about being super power God. Not about having the powers to change the world. I’m talking about interesting facial features. In order for the Main character to be appealing to the player visualy somehow. As opposed to be annyoed at his blandness.

the witcher 3 faces are stylized and frankly don’t look very believable. kcd faces are scanned and processed from real people. lambert is indeed weird, in the way most game character faces are weird. ie, not very believable.

when they changed geralt’s face from witcher 1 to witcher 2 to 3, people were talking about how it became bland as well. more fidelity=more detail=more subtlety. not everyone is going to be happy with a face that you have to study and pay close attention instead of instantly recognizable weird stylized face that pops out at you.

but i think its high time that changed and respect war horse to go with the realism approach, to fit the same style as rest of the game

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Yes!! I’m with you my friend!!

Well said mate.

On the flip side, I can understand where the others are coming from. People are naturally drawn to interesting characters…

But as of right now, we posses very little knowledge of Henry’s overall attitudes, values, personality and the like, to make an accurate assessment or judgement call on his character. Looks aside, the personality and traits of any character maketh the man so to speak. That is by far a more important aspect to any character creation / development over and above the aesthetic.

I have complete faith in the team, and am in no way bothered by our protagonists appearance at this point. For those that are, I fear that they’re missing the whole point of what WH are trying to achieve.

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I was wondering, do you people like this npc or do you think he is ugly? It is an npc standard face from W3.

@213
“the witcher 3 faces are stylized and frankly don’t look very believable”
I agree with most of you comments but I strongly disagree with this :slight_smile: I think that the faces has been given a lot of attention in Witcher 3. I am not talking about scanned faces (that are obviously better) but W3 faces are matching the NPC background and story. Don’t get me wrong, I am not an W3 Fanboy but it makes no sense if we don’t value good work in other games because we (and especialy me) prefer this one here :wink:

Yes! The allmightly timeless bucket haircut! The fashion that transcends centuries of human history. :stuck_out_tongue:
To my mind Henry does not look half bad. Seems a decent character.
Of course they are going to tweak him a lot. Still plenty of time untill the release.
What he certainly needs is a bit of (e)motion to his face and they are working on it too.

devs would not agree i believe.

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Disagree with the OP.

I like the way Henry looks; to me personally giving him more of a stereotypical ‘Hollywood’ appearance would be bland and dull.

“Needs interesting features” etc… Sorry, but no. These kind of comments make me think of people who cover themselves in utterly generic tattoos, or the odd ‘meaningful’ phrase in another language with the thought that they now somehow look more unique and interesting. LOL.

Just my opinion of course, but making Henry look more along the lines of a typical blockbuster lead would only serve to give him less personality not more.

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Hehe yes from that point of view every day, every hour is priceless. :smile:

eeds interesting features" etc… Sorry, but no. These kind of comments make me think of people who cover themselves in utterly generic tattoos, or the odd ‘meaningful’ phrase in another language with the thought that they now somehow look more unique and interesting. LOL.

Nope, you just don’t understand how that stuff work. First writing and voice acting gives the appearance meaning. If those two will end up being dull. The main protagonist will end up feeling dull, no matter his features.

Second interesting look is a must. Interesting doesn’t mean edgy, cool, gorgeous, super sayan, no. Intersting does mean something that will let you conect with the character. It’s a psychological thing. If the face you will end up looking at the whole game, feel boring to you. You end up not enjoying the game as much as you should.

For skyrim, fallout, or other mute game. Your protagonist is only a sets of pants, you will wear. And will never, ever look at closely again. It happened to me more times than I can count. When I started Tes or Skyrim game. And at the end of the game, I end up getting his/her helmet off, forgetting completely how the character looks. This can’t be the case in voice acted, animated RPG with facial Mo cap. What do we know. Maybe the way how they mo caped him, will end up look interesting, maybe that’s the reason why he looks so dull when non-animated.

Anyway dull main protagonist simply can’t happen. For dozens of reasons.

Love that guy! He pops! He could never be a protagonist, but as a sidekick, a smithy or merchant, sure! That’s the thing with loads of characters in W3, cause A LOT of them are ugly… But they fit their respective scenarios and the world.

Like I said before, it’s not necesarily about good looks, it’s having “A look”… Like people in movies always say “are you a cop, you look like a cop”. The way they dress, the way they talk and the way they handle themselves. That along with an interesting look, goes a long way for a main.

It’s fun to see though that this subject has caught a lot of interest. Because it’s one that people need to talk about in order to improve the final outcome of the game.

you keep contradicting yourself. if you say you don’t care about ugliness, why you would you make the thread title about the character being ugly?

also, there’s a head in the game. i would not say it’s ugly, but it is atypical, and quite striking. would you be alright if the main character looked like this?:

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That speaks of how little you know about the world and of me, the author of this thread. I’ve shaved my head, I never wore special clothes and I’ve never altered my body with piercings and or tattoos.

But unknowingly you touch upon a very strong topic. Because MOST, like 80% of all people does do stuff like this. Why? Because like you say they want to be noticed, because they know that this is how the world works. They are not obstinately sitting in their room refusing to change with the world because “They were right and all the rest were wrong”.

This is the basics of attraction, men usually attract using muscles and the way we talk, hold ourselves and women put on loads of make-up on because that will make them “pop”.

Say what you will, but most of you would choose Jessica Alba over random girl walking down the street in bedhair (no funny remarks on this now guys). I’m not even gonna describe why cause you all know the reasons.

I don’t know why so many people get angry over a simple situation that you all have agreed on “Henry looks, acts and sounds normal”. Now together with that and how the world of attraction works, my opinion should make complete sense.

His face is fine, not the biggest problem, that hair though, please, looks like a lawnmower went over it and missed a few spots.

The two bigger problems are his attitude towards things and of course (and that we won’t know until later) his voice. So far his responses towards people are more like he wants them to be pleased, not as if he is an agent for his own quest and the people he meet are his steppingstones.

Like I said before: Simon Templeman for voice acting… SERIOUSLY, listen to him in Blood Omen Legacy of Kain. That game has THE BEST voice acting of that era, and it holds it’s own against most games today.

And look at W1-3 dialogue evolution, Warhorse, you can learn A LOT. Dialogue in W1 sucked in so many ways, now their writing is brilliant!

I don’t contradict myself, you would understand that if you’ve read and understood what I’m talking about.

Same for this threads name. Any person who’s ever written an article or held a speech knows you start by waking up the audience. I got a huge reaction, people looked my way, most because they were angry with my post. But that doesn’t matter, cause it started a discussion.

A small part of the topic does revolve around Henrys looks, but that is the minor part in a bigger scheme. But starting out this way is the most effective way of getting people started.

In my original post (if you did look at anything other than my thread name) you would see that my actual comment isn’t very aggressive or focused on “Good looks” so to speak.

And to answer your question, NO. This guy could never be a lead. But not because he is ugly, but because he lacks expression. His eyes are that of a goldfish, his complexion is perplexing at best. His mustache and soul patch looks out of place. Dude, if you just take a look at the guy above from W3. That guy has more to offer. He is weatherbitten, his eyes are somewhat sad and he choose that mustache because god damn it he liked it!

Otherwise, if we just spoke of facial structure of this guy, sure. He has a nice jawline and he has a strong nose albeit a bit toned down. You can also catch a glimpse at a strong cheekbone…

But dude, I’m the type of guy who sits 3h in The Elder Scrolls to make my guys and have their name pop. At least they can, since in reality I don’t. I just look way to average, not even ugly, just average.

Well thanks for admitting your a troll and this is flame bait but we already knew that.

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again, you contradict yourself. you say the title was meant to be clickbait, but then you say you didn’t contradict yourself. do you think the protagonist is ugly or not and do you think that has any bearing on him being an interesting character? it’s a simple issue that you keep dancing around. misrepresenting your views just isn’t going to generate any kind of honest discussion.

also, your point about that character never being main character is basically based on him being not very handsome. so i think we got to the bottom of the issue.

lets have the make up department work over henry’s face so he looks like tom cruise.

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I don’t admit to being a troll, that’s something you are saying. Jesus christ why do people refuse to understand? Is English really that difficult? Please don’t tell me you are from an english speaking country, because that would be embarrassing, for you.

I raised a genuin concern over the characters looks and appearance. I got a few people who answered only by saying “his look has not been finalized” and that’s fine. That was enough.

In doing this I also got a lot of people who shares my concern to raise their voice as well. And from the other spectrum I got a lot of people to disagree.

Either way I am genuinly scared. Because the main character is THE FIRST thing you flesh out in any given story. And some are saying he is not finalized, and even more scary the thought of him being finished, is even worse.

This is my prediction… KC:D will be a failure when it comes to sales, granted the following things don’t change:

  1. Combat
  2. Archery
  3. Having to eat (should we go take a dump too becuase it’s more real, maybe we could invent a shit-stick to smell whilst we take a dump to make it extra authentic)
  4. Dialogue
  5. Alchemy
  6. Features of the protagonist

I respect what they are trying to do, that’s why I backed their game and why I look forward to it.

But they just aren’t gonna sell if they don’t change these mechanics. Sad, because they do have the potential to become the next The Witcher-series.