WHY So many "Dark/phase out/unknow" Faces/portraits?

[Lauro]

I was wondering i know not everyone "deserve" a face/portrait but the ammount its staggering :(

Keep in mind i am loving this game for me this would -.5 as in 9.5 :) hehe i still am liking this game a lot , and i hope they add later more of the roman empire. with more DLC just this small complain

i wonder if this could be fix with mods?

[Gregorovitch]

This is true of a lot of games.

I believe the reason is that what amounts to painting a portrait of any quality, style and realism takes a long time and therefore extremely expensive. There's no short cut to creating portraits of the quality we see in this game for the main characters. How much does the average reasonably successful artist charge for doing someone's portrait?

Art is difficult and it ain't cheap.

One game that does have a *lot* of them is the Civ like 4X game called Old World. Old Worlds portraits are stunningly beautiful. Guess what? They were done by the wife of the guy who owns the studio that made the game.

No doubt there are ways to auto-generate character portraits but my guess theey would be easily identifiable as such and not have the same visual impact and individuality. So it's a trade off between really high quality art for the main characters or crap for every character.

[MyCabbages]

I would rather it just didn't have them. Every merchant is a shadowy mystery man and it's a tiny bit distracting.

[Raven Ranks]

It's good to know that this is what development time and money was spent on rather than improving systems and game play. I honestly would rather have 2d pixel art with an amazing story than graphics and pretty portraits.

[MyCabbages]

Originally posted by Tesc:

It's good to know that this is what development time and money was spent on rather than improving systems and game play. I honestly would rather have 2d pixel art with an amazing story than graphics and pretty portraits.

Wow what a hot take.

[Cutlass Jack]

Originally posted by Tesc:

It's good to know that this is what development time and money was spent on rather than improving systems and game play. I honestly would rather have 2d pixel art with an amazing story than graphics and pretty portraits.

Personally, I'd rather the portrait painters weren't handling programming duties myself.