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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).

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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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Here you go:
https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/11/15/1113050108.abstract

From the Abstract:
... with hunter-gatherers having consistently longer and narrower mandibles than agriculturalists. These results support notions that a decrease in masticatory stress among agriculturalists causes the mandible to grow and develop differently. This developmental argument also explains why there is often a mismatch between the size of the lower face and the dentition, which, in turn, leads to increased prevalence of dental crowding and malocclusions ...
 
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Not so obvious as you think. Catholics commit suicide at the same rate as people of other Faiths.
That's why the Pious trait was specified. Devout medieval Catholics absolutely believed that doing so would send you to Hell; less pious ones wouldn't be so worried.

I feel like a lot of people on here tend to forget that the world now isn't exactly the same in outlook as it was 1200-600 years ago...
 
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That's why the Pious trait was specified. Devout medieval Catholics absolutely believed that doing so would send you to Hell; less pious ones wouldn't be so worried.

I feel like a lot of people on here tend to forget that the world now isn't exactly the same in outlook as it was 1200-600 years ago...
I remember Reading that some people tried to get themself executed because it was thought that execution basically nullified your sins.
 
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Uhh chief, it's more than a distinct look. It comes with a lot of issues. I got a friend who is albino and the dude went practically blind at 17. And before that had a lot of involuntary eye movements which is apparently a part of being albino. Not to mention getting burned by the sun extremely easily. It's easy to be a shut in these days but doubtful in medieval times.

I know breeding in disorders is a part of royalty but I wouldn't go for it on purpose.

Really would be a house of jealous people especially since many of them would have a myriad of eye problems, even including stuff like... eyes looking in different directions... might get burned at the stake for being devils or vampires. Probably partly how the vampire myth came to be honestly.
 
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Really would be a house of jealous people especially since many of them would have a myriad of eye problems, even including stuff like... eyes looking in different directions... might get burned at the stake for being devils or vampires. Probably partly how the vampire myth came to be honestly.
As long as you are the ruler you are pretty safe from being executed.
 
I love the fact that portraits are now fully dynamic. It would probably make it much easier for characters to have trait-based features (blind/one-eyed/scarred/bald/fat/one handed etc.) fully represented on the portrait itself. :)

The best thing is that children will now inherit features from both of their parents, instead of the old CK2 method of randomly choosing one parent's portrait set. Mixed characters will now be possible, for example Westerosi Valyrians in mods.

Imperator devs could learn a thing or two from CK3 portraits...like the brand new revolutionary concept of "headwear" :p
 
Imperator devs could learn a thing or two from CK3 portraits...like the brand new revolutionary concept of "headwear" :p
And CK3 devs could learn a thing or two from the Imperator map style. ;)
 
And how will the pope be able to drag me to the stake?

By excommunicating you, making you unpopular enough among your vassals for someone else to overthrow you who then burns you at the stake.
 
Yes and that would not work well with the stress system and I think the traits mean being exceptional kind or cruel rather than being somewhat kind or somewhat cruel.

You can still have conflicts, for example a kind but just character could have conflict that the law say that somebody need to be punished harshly but that would conflict with the kind trait. However if the character decide to be merciful it would conflict with the just trait since the character is no longer following the law.

Also it is interesting with stress that many of the virtues and other good traits in CK2 can probably become negatives in CK3 since you probably will gain stress if you are a just character plotting to murder somebody.

But a person can have conflict even between kind and cruel: kind towards some and cruel towards others, to an exceptional degree.
 
Hi Devs, will the physical traits be correlated with attractiveness? I just want to know if I can assign (through mod) certain physical traits to my character. For example, can I mod the attractive trait to only use a certain type of nose, mouth, and cheek structure. It's kinda weird seeing a rather unattractive character (portrait wise) to have the attractive trait. She already have -10 opinion from me just by looking at her face. (Jk, please don't take it wrong that I hate unattractive people)
Also, the fair (attractive) trait should be opposite of things like hunchback or harelip.
 
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