Baldur's Gate: Faces of Good and Evil (DLC)

Faces of Good and Evil is a cosmetic DLC released by Beamdog for Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition. It does exactly one thing: it adds a collection of new character portraits you can assign to your player character and companions. If you have spent any time in the Enhanced Edition you already know how much a portrait anchors your mental image of a character, so this is less trivial than it sounds, but it is still firmly in the category of optional polish rather than content. The portraits themselves are original paintings in a style consistent with the Enhanced Edition's existing art direction. They cover a range of races, genders, and apparent alignments, which is where the "Good and Evil" framing comes in. Some faces read as noble and weathered, others look appropriately sinister. Whether the specific options land for you is entirely subjective, and that subjectivity is basically the whole review. There are no new quests, no new companions, no dialogue, no mechanical systems. It is a portrait pack. Who actually needs this? Mainly roleplayers who have already exhausted the default portrait options and want a face that fits a very specific character concept. If you are on your fourth or fifth playthrough of Baldur's Gate and you have finally decided to run a chaotic-neutral half-elf sorcerer who looks appropriately unhinged, maybe one of these portraits clicks. That is a real use case, and I say that without sarcasm, because portrait immersion in a long CRPG is a genuine quality-of-life consideration. The harder sell is recommending it to anyone who is not already deep in the game. There is no gameplay hook here, no build variety to evaluate, no story payoff to chase. If you are still working through your first run or even your second, the base game's portrait selection is almost certainly enough. Free portrait mods from the community also exist and cover a lot of ground, so it is worth checking those before spending money on this pack. Beamdog's official art has the advantage of guaranteed visual consistency with the UI framing, but that is a narrow advantage. As a piece of DLC, Faces of Good and Evil is honest about what it is. It does not oversell itself. It adds portraits. If you want those specific portraits, it delivers them cleanly. If you were hoping for something closer to the Siege of Dragonspear expansion in terms of scope, look elsewhere. This is the equivalent of buying a new character skin in a game where you already like the defaults. Niche, unambitious, and perfectly functional within its very limited mandate. Monika, Scout Team