Update - September 22: With Baldur's Gate 3 patch 3 live and the patch notes available, players can now change appearance in Baldur's Gate 3 by visiting the new Magic Mirror in camp, with some understandable restrictions. Don't expect to change your race everyday or anything. Today's update has also delivered maybe the best patch notes yet: "Improved performance in the lower city."
Original story:
If you put quite a few hours into Baldur's Gate 3 before realizing you actually kind of hate the way your custom character looks, developer Larian has good news for you. A new camp tool called the Magic Mirror is coming in tomorrow's big update, and it'll finally let you change appearance in Baldur's Gate 3, redoing your character's look, voice, or pronouns – but not their race or body type.
Larian confirmed the long-awaited feature in a tweet earlier today. "With Patch 3 comes the Magic Mirror, which lives in your camp and allows you to change your Tav’s appearance whenever you’d like," the studio says, implying the mirror can be used without any cost.
In addition to your custom character's race and body type, the Magic Mirror won't let you alter the appearance of the core Origin characters. Sadly, that means no taking the likes of Astarion or Karlach to the salon – not that they're anything less than perfect as-is.
With Patch 3 comes the Magic Mirror, which lives in your camp and allows you to change your Tav’s appearance whenever you’d like!💄 Change appearance, voice, pronouns🧝♀️ Race & body type can’t be changed🪞 Can’t alter Origins — they’re all *very* particular about their hair pic.twitter.com/LJ6y9CZ58FSeptember 21, 2023
I'm assuming that your race remains locked not just because it would be canonically absurd for, say, your Dragonborn to abruptly turn into a Drow in Act 2, but also because races bring unique interactions, advantages, and disadvantages to the RPG that Larian doesn't want folks to weasel out of. It would also probably be a nightmare for the game to have to adapt to new races on the fly, nevermind adding understandably surprised reactions for the party members who just watched you CTRL-Z your entire ancestry.
It's equally possible that race and body type are just buried much deeper in the tech, making them harder to alter once your campaign is generated. Whatever the case, these do seem like small caveats overall. From what I've seen, the overwhelming majority of appearance regretters just want to change their hair or tattoos a bit, not break the timeline and change races on the fly. Even if you don't dislike your current look, it might also be nice to try out a new style or tweak your character as the story progresses, which could be a legitimate role-playing opportunity.
Baldur's Gate 3 Patch 3 got a tiny delay because it's so darn big.
