Quote Originally Posted by Alleluia View Post
But, what's the difference between using an NPC face and a player face? Its not like we have face sliders or something. His face should be able to rig for as much emotion as a player character than it did when it was used by Ardbert. What's holding it up from being used? The facial hair?

EDIT: I don't necessarily expect you personally to have an answer, Iscah. Just thinking out loud, mostly.
It just seems to be a thing that the developers have a power to do with NPCs when they're setting them up - there's some kind of back-end system that lets them apply a custom face to an NPC that replaces the default model applied in the character settings. Players can't do that and there's no option in the character creator to do so.

Any NPC with a unique face will still have default face settings listed in their character data, but they often don't match up with the character's actual appearance at all.

This is just from observation and seeing which characters are tagged as "custom face" in Garland Tools, but it's clear that it's something that can be done but not by players. A lot of them seem to be derived from existing player-accessible faces - eg. all the Scions are actually custom faces, probably to add their Archon tattoos - but I'm guessing it must be exported and converted into a separate model stored somewhere else, and probably applied as a single piece.

Maybe they can't add it into the character creator as it exists; maybe they just don't want to give us access to those specific faces for recognisable characters.