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CK3 Dev Diary #07 - Characters & Portraits

Greetings!

Today we’re taking a look at what makes up a character in CK3. As you already know, the game revolves around characters and all the things they get up to, so to make it interesting we have to make sure that they have as much personality as possible!

To start off; each character still has skills and traits, just like in CK2. Their skills determine how well they can do different things, a character will high Diplomacy will be well-liked, while one with high Martial will excel as a commander. The main source of these skills are traits, the foremost of which is the Personality Traits.

Unlike CK2, where personality traits were much like any other trait, we’ve decided to put more emphasis on the personality traits in CK3. In CK2 you could easily end up with 5-8 personality traits without much effort, but then what really defined you? It was hard to get a grip on who a character really was, something we’ve improved in CK3. Personality traits now have a massive effect on the behavior of each individual character, so when a character is Greedy you’ll really feel it. To emphasize this, characters tend to not have more than 3 personality traits so that you can at a quick glance tell who they are (other types of traits are of course still unlimited).

Personality_traits.png

Personality Trait icons. Can you guess which one is which?

We’ve also added a feature where a character's personality is summed up in two words, which is then displayed in their character view. This is very useful when, for example, assigning vassals or getting agents. A ‘Rapacious Blackguard’ might not make for the most loyal vassal, but quite a good agent, while an ‘Honorable Empath’ would be the opposite!

character_portraits_01.jpg


Prestige and Piety remain in CK3, though with a new element to them. In CK2, you accumulated prestige that you then spent on various things - this rarely made much sense, why would launching an invasion suddenly make everyone like you less, for example? Therefore we’ve decided to split the currency part of prestige/piety from the perception part. In CK3, all prestige and piety accumulated by a character will contribute towards their Level of Fame/Devotion. These have various effects, for example, your Level of Fame increases the opinion of all secular rulers (as it did in CK2), give your more Knights, and unlocks special interactions - such as invasions should you be Tribal. Your Level of Devotion increases the opinion of the clergy and allows you to declare better Holy Wars among other things. These levels range between 0-5, with 0 representing disgrace. Instead of only losing prestige when doing truly dishonorable things, such as breaking a truce, you now also lose Levels of Fame, making the whole thing more of a hard choice. Accumulated prestige and piety can be used for various things as a currency, just like in CK2, prestige being used for vassal interactions, decisions, and war, while piety is the primary resource used when interacting with the church.

Exalted.png


Before moving on to the Portraits themselves, I’d like to mention genetic traits! Traits such as Strong and Genius were much sought-after in CK2, and you often went out of your way to breed those traits into your direct line. In CK3 this is even more involved, with genetic traits having multiple levels that you can improve with successive generations (which can be sped up by inbreeding!), and there’s also more of them. Genetic traits will often have a visual effect on your portrait - the Beautiful line of traits will make your characters more-and-more symmetrical, for example. On the negative end of the spectrum, we have traits such as Ugly or Albino, which will reduce symmetry or alter your character's skin tone respectively (the Middle Ages were full of prejudice).

Now, without further ado, let's move on to the Portrait section, hosted by our very own portrait artist, Nils!

So, when it comes to the visual presentation of characters in the game, we've chosen to switch out the 2D "paperdoll" style portraits of CK2 for full animated 3D characters in CK3. While the portraits in CK2 undeniably have their charm, going 3D just gives us so many more possibilities for all kinds of dynamic features.

Every character has a DNA in which their appearance is defined. Each facial feature that we can control has its own gene. And there's a great number of those to give us a lot of variations and an endless amount of possible faces. For example, the nose alone has over 10 different parameters that define its shape. Compared to just one in CK2.

Another thing we wanted to change is how much of the character we display in the UI. This is, of course, the middle ages we are talking about, where a person's clothes are a more important indicator of who they are than even their facial features. So it made sense to show more of the body than just head and shoulders. How fancy and expensive a character’s clothing looks will give you as player information about their rank. The larger frame also allows us to show different animated poses, and as Alex mentioned above they give a hint of the character’s personality. Additionally, we can do more with body types as well. Characters have different heights (yes including dwarfism and gigantism) as well as different weights and body composition, something that is affected by their lifestyle and traits. So if your character is a gluttonous hedonist, chances are they will have a body rather on the stout side of things while if they are a legendary warrior their pecs and deltoids will also likely be of the legendary variety.

character_portraits_02.jpg


Other cool features that the 3D system allows us to do is seamless aging and disease overlays. Now you can see your toddler gradually change into an adult and eventually (barring any unforeseen incidents...) to an elderly 100-year old. Should your character, heavens forbid, catch a serious illness their appearance will reflect that with suitably repulsive skin texture overlays.

We will have a more in-depth look at the portraits in a future dev diary, so stay tuned for that!
 
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Love everything in this DD, but something I thought about and want to know for sure. Are the 3d characters going to be static and standing still or will they be animated and moving around?
 
Love everything in this DD, but something I thought about and want to know for sure. Are the 3d characters going to be static and standing still or will they be animated and moving around?
Probably stand still just like in Imperator: Rome. Also it don't make too much sense they can move around once they are dead.

That's because atheism, as we know it, basically didn't exist in this timeframe. Yes, really, at least in Europe (and likely the Middle East) as well. Virtually every single person believed in divinity in some form or another, though many were as unconcerned about His actions and their afterlives as people are today. "Atheist" in that time period was more of simply an accusation, kind of like lèse-majesté against God. It is fitting for a character's reputation, though, so it makes sense to be there on the summary.
Pretty sure there was people who was atheist in modern sense during the CK timeframe but holding such view could be more problematic in those times compared to today. Medieval World did have some quite modern concepts while also having pretty strange ones as well and it have just gone about 1000-500 years from medieval to our time period which is a pretty short amount of time.

How is handedness (right-handed, left-handed, ambidextrous, ambisinistrous) and sexuality treated?
Well I would suspect left-handed characters will face negative opinion due to prejudice and maybe could be used against them in a heresy trial.
 
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Why is the character clothes made of shiny plastic? :p
 
Havent read this whole thread so i dont know if i has been brught up again but in previous discussions about the 3d portais there have been concerns of how it will affect mobility, that 3d assets take more time and lees people have the skill sets then making 2d assets, in particular for conversion mods that use TES or LoTR as a setting with elves and dwarfs. What is PDS thoughts on this or have any one seen any statements about ut?
 
Every character has a DNA in which their appearance is defined. Each facial feature that we can control has its own gene. And there's a great number of those to give us a lot of variations and an endless amount of possible faces. For example, the nose alone has over 10 different parameters that define its shape. Compared to just one in CK2.

10 parameters for the nose alone?! O_O How does all of this impact the average file size for the save files since it will presumably have to store all information for all characters (I shudder to think about the amount of data for thousand characters altogether)? But save game compression using ZIP might somewhat mitigate the increased storage requirement per a character, though to how much extent I am not certain.

That lead me to another question: will each game save be a single file or perhaps a folder with various separate files for different aspects (e.g. main state, character state, et cetera; somewhat similar to how game folder and mods are structured)? I imagine there are greater advantages to having all of the save data in a single file, though.

Sorry for going slightly off-topic but with these considerable expansion in data for the characters, it does indeed make me wonder about the save game mechanism. :p
 
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Although it isn't enough for me to really want this game yet, still pretty satisfied with CK2 yet, the quick descriptors should really give some personality to the characters, and the backgrounds are nice too! This along with the improved intrigue does make it look a bit nice. But having fewer character traits does make me nervous.

As for my guesses on the traits, from left to right:

Deceitful, Industrious, Greedy, Impatient, Stupid?, (No idea)
(No idea), Gluttonous, (No idea), Patient, Just
(No idea), Temperate, Generous, (No idea), Wrath, Zealous
(No idea), (No idea), Cowardly
Courageous, (No idea), Socializer, Game Master?, Content, Arbitrary
(No idea), Mystic?, Paranoid, Trusting, Gentle
(No idea), Cruel, Kinslayer/new?, (No idea)
No idea for any of the bottom row except for last two: (Can't think of what it is called), Drunkard
 
It's *very* hard to change your personality, and random events will never do it. There are a few ways you can alter your personality slowly over time, and depending on how you play your character stress might also have an impact... I'll not go into details on that yet though ;)

Can I still use the console commands to get me the traits I want?
 
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I suspect that personality traits would mean the most noticable/defining traits of the character and having 20 different personality traits per character simply make it quite difficult to understand each character.

For conflicting traits, well that applies to real people as well.
Some people have a few "most noticable/defining traits" but many people do not, or have different ones depending on the circumstances so different people would notice different ones.

Yes that is a good Point against having too many personality traits, it would simply be too limiting in the face of the stress system
Why couldn't that be solved by just having a less harsh stress system, so many things stress the character but it takes many such activities to actually get stressed?
 
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Wow, now that character engine is truly epic :)
Gradual aging and many sliders to show various effects in different stages and all sounds awesome.
It looks like a powerful tool to create awesome content for the game now and in the future for addons.

But one question that bugs me the most ever since the game got announced, do the characters have legs and feet?
All media i have seen so far does never show the characters below the hip.

I know most of the work for character design and animation will go to faces and arms. So legs and feet would only add a little extra work (unless you want the characters to dance around).
But if characters are cut off below the hip the possiblities will be greatly limited as they would have to be fixed to predefined UI areas. If the character models are complete for example it would give a great amount of new possiblities, like deciding to make a addon that adds a customizable throne room and the characters will be seen sitting on the throne (which would be impossible if they are missing some parts that are much harder to add later on). Or if visible scenes are to be added like coronation, marriage and others in the future or simply allow other camera angles with the 3d models.

So is there any info if characters got their legs cut off? Or rather if King Careless the one legged, one eyed, one handed will have at least one leg ;)
 
I'm not loving the portraits (yet), and I'll miss the old feel...

But major props to the sheer amount of work you're putting into this! We can see them AGE? Woah! And that's just one of the things that's going on here! If CK3 ends up having its own CrackdToothGrin, these portraits could end up being amazing.
 
I gotta admit, I was VERY skeptical when I first saw the 3D portraits in earlier Dev Diaries. A lot of games that have included 3D portraits have done so in a half-hearted way (such as having VERY limited stock, or "DNA" playing no part in generating a character's portrait), and I feared we would lose the flair of CK2's portrait system. But after reading this Diary, I'm actually excited for this change. I'm happy you have gone through the effort to improve this system, I think the portraits are one of the more important and under-valued features in a deeply character driven game like the CK series. :)