What's with the whole chararacter portrait thing?

[Trekkie91]

I just bought this game on Xbox One and have started to customize my squad. I don't really understand the point of the whole character portrait thing. For example, I can create a male character that looks one way but can only choose one of eight portraits that look nothing like him. Huh? This seems really weird to me. Is this one of those old school game things?

[Gillsing]

Old school games used to have way more portraits to choose from, but nowadays computer users can readily download and use custom portraits anyway, so that's why they didn't bother including more than a token handful of portraits. I don't know if you as an Xbox user have the opportunity to download custom portraits, but if you do, there are lots of lots of them over at Nexus mods. And you can take any old images and make them into your own portraits. Personally I found ways to stick to the default portraits, plus the few backer portraits that I downloaded from inXile.

On the computer versions of the game you can take screen captures of the upper body of your Rangers and use those as portraits, but in the Director's Cut they don't provide the option for a background, so all those images end up being quite dark unless you use some image editing software to change the images (maybe by adding a background). And even then they don't really mix well with the portraits of recruited NPCs and enemies, so after using portraits like that a couple of times I decided against it. If you decide to try it out anyway, I recommend taking the screen capture with each Ranger having their size increased to maximum, and then shrink them down to their intended size if that's lower.

[CursedPanther]

Yes, the portraits doesn't necessarily follow your character's appearance, or gender of that matter.

There is a portrait mod pack for the PC version that provides a lot more options to choose from but I guess you're outta luck here.

[Amanoob105]

There's also an in game option to just take a picture of whoever you made and use that as their portrait.
That way the picture and your person look the same.

[SnapSlav]

Originally posted by Trekkie91:

Is this one of those old school game things?

No. This is one of those "this game didn't have a massive budget" things.

[Dufflebags]

I just snap shots of my character models for the portraits.

On PC you have the privelage of modding your own character portraits in.

[SnapSlav]

Originally posted by Dufflebags:

I just snap shots of my character models for the portraits.

That's one of the things that was actually better in vanilla rather than DC. In character creation, you could select a background, and when you took a picture of your character, it was in that background, too. If they'd kept the UI the same as it is in DC, with your character's appearing in a black void, BUT DURING creation you had the option to setup some kind of background, maybe even add some poses JUST for the sake of taking those pictures, I think that would've solved this who potrait dilemma.

Ah well... there's always photoshop.

[Severus]

go to nexusmods and download the portrait packages you want , lots of different portraits available there