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Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest news on Alpha Two.
Check out general Announcements here to see the latest news on Ashes of Creation & Intrepid Studios.
To get the quickest updates regarding Alpha Two, connect your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
Possible, but just because a different race lives in kaelar land, doesn't mean they are kaelar
We agree it was possible. Perfect.
Again, it's easy enough to become educated about when and why that changed.
Any human population with enough trade will mix. Even if the main population is a majority skin tone. The races before exile to the other realm presumably traded. Even if the populations were isolated, skin tone flexibility sticks for many many generations. Therefore even from a realism perspective.... IT'S STILL WRONG. I don't care if monotone populations are possible in humanity, because that ISNT WHAT WE ARE TALKING ABOUT. We are talking about two 'fallen' civilizations who once presumably had trade.
If you continue to the reponse of 'it's not realistic to the lore' all it takes is one small change in phrasing from Steven to make it way /more/ possible than it already is because skin tone is flexible and complex.
"Race" is not "common sense".
Trying to determine race by skin color is not as simple as some people think.
My grandmother was born Colored but is light-skinned enough that the coroner assumed she was white.
Similar for my niece as a newborn at the hospital.
My friend's grandparents were Persian but her father was born and raised in Northern India. When he was born, he was classified as Caucasian and that is how he identified while he was alive. When he died, in the US (which is where my friend was born and raised), he was classified as Asian because he was born in India.[/quote]
You are confusing arbitrary notions of race set by nations with the biological concept of race. A Persian ia Caucasoid even though Persia is geographically in Asia, the same applies to India.
Once again you are confusing geography and nationality with ethnicity. An ethnic Sub Saharan African can be born in Scandinavia but that does not make him ethnically Scandinavian, ethnic Scandinavians are Nordics, Finnic and Sami people. The same counts for an English man born in Somalia, he may be Somalian by nationality but by ethnicity he is still English.
I agree on your point that skin colour isn't the main component of a race, you are right but not in the way you think. A Caucasoid's skin colour can range from fair (like a Nordic) to light brown/olive (like a Arab or Indo-Aryan). Race isn't classified by skin colour only, but instead by DNA, skull shape and skeletal structure. If a sub race is based off a real world ethnicity than that sub race should have the skin ranges associated with its real life counterpart, the same goes for a sub race based off the Mali Empire or Nubians. A pasty white Nubian would not make much sense.
You guys should really learn what the term African means. Numidians were Africans but they were not Sub Saharan African (black in american terms), they were Berber and thus Caucasoid. Barely any contact was made with Sub Sahara Africa by Europe in the ancient world, with the exception of the Greeks encountering the Numidians occasionally. Sub Saharan Africans had no significant presence in Europe until the slave trade started and likewise Europeans had no significant presence in Sub Sahara Africa until the age of colonisation. To include a Sub Saharan African in a European fantasy setting would be laughable. Just as it would be laughable to include an Englishman in a Sub Saharan setting.
Why is it such a bad thing that people want the sub races to be unique?
Even if they include every real life race into each human sub races, not only would that make them no longer unique but it would not make sense. If a tribe that is isolated has many different ethnic groups existing within their lands, then over the course of years they would all eventually mix and become the same ethnicity anyway. Take Madagascar as an example, inhabited originally by Malay and Sub Saharan African, over the course of centuries and isolation they mixed with each other and today most Madagascans look the same. (with the exception of some very isolated tribes)
There is nothing in that definition about skin color.
Skin color is not what makes ethnicities unique.
And, it is possible for any ethnicity to have members/people with dark skin.
...don't even bother @Barbillus he is just hopeless. It is sad, but there are peoples like him...facts, reason and reality don't work with them. They ony care about their feelings. And if the facts are not maching with their feelings...just run, you can't do anything...they are unreasonable.
I agree with you 100%. Limitation is "often" the catalyst for true creativity. We both know that often and always is not the same word. Stuff like this needs to be evaluated case by case.
There is a point where limitation can be too restricting.
How creative could someone be with the Vanilla WOW character creator vs the City of Heroes character creator?
I can't think of a game where restrictions in the character creator leads to more creativity. What restrictions do is make me like the game less and make me not want to play certain races because I can't get them to look good.
DDO has a race called Warforged that looks like ass. Everything in that game looks like ass, but Warforged are extra ass. For years, I refused to play them because I could not get them to look right. Eventually, they came out with a set of cosmetic armor and helmets that actually worked with the race. I had to spend a few extra dollars on cosmetics to make a race playable to me. Which sucks because the race has a lot of potential for good builds and hybrid play styles. In this case, my creative solution was to throw money at a paper bag to put over my character's head because no options in the character creator were good.
I prefer not to have my favorite race be limited to a situation where I have to just wear full-body and head cosmetics to make it look good. That is not fun. I would much rather have so many options I feel the need to spend 4 hours in the character creator getting the colors just right.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
However, to the specific point above.
Lets take Dygz as an example here. He has me on ignore, so it's easy.
We all know that his first character will basically be as close to him as possible. White hair, dark skin. Chances are, any alts that he makes will be variations on this general theme.
Now, if the game has a race that doesn't allow for white hair, he will have to get creative in order to make a character of that race that he is happy with.
That is a situation where restrictions in a character creator leads to more creativity.
Your case with Warforged seem more to me like a case of just not having particularly good options for that race at all (you are not the only person I know that has said this same thing).
IDK, Dygz has come off as being pretty stubborn on here many times. I can be that way myself, so it is easy to recognize. If I see something I don't like, there is no chance of getting me to find ways to enjoy it.
It is very possible that he has the same type of reaction I would to a race I can't make look good. He will not play that race or just cover it in a "paper bag". I don't think he or I would take it as a challenge to be more creative. We just get annoyed because we have an image in our head of what type of character we want to make and a game that does not allow it. It is even more annoying with other races have the colors you want.
Undead is a pretty good race in WOW, but I never played it in the past because the hairstyles and skin textures were ass. Recently, in Shadowlands they updated the character creator and Undead were looking quite playable with new skin textures and hairstyles. If the game was good enough to play to the extent that I would have needed an alt I would have gone undead for sure due to the recent improvements to the race's customization. Sadly, the game was so bad I did not even need a main.
I think it is far more likely that someone just ignores or covers up a race.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
In your opinion, should all game developers make all hair styles available to all races, or should some races have some hairstyles that are unique to them?
To me, the answer is that there should be a solid number of hair styles that are common to all races, but each race should have it's own specific few hair styles, including facial hair.
I don't personally think Elves of any sort should be given Dwarf beards as an option, for example.
All hairstyles should be available to all races. For sure.
I can actually style my hair IRL in any style or color I want.
I am also lucky enough to both have hair and live in a place where there are more than twenty approved hairstyles...
This is somewhat like asking if orcs should be given the same tail options as Tulnar. Everybody knows orcs don't have tails. There may be one or two obscure settings where Elves have beards, but it is normally pretty well agreed that Elves don't grow facial hair.
If Elves did grow facial hair, I would see no issue with them having the option to style them in Dwarven style braids. Although I imagine that if Elves did have beards to braid, the styles would be even more extravagant than dwarfs. I imagine some of the more refined Dwarves might adopt these hypothetical Elven braids.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
Sorry mate but I wont indulge that or the crap that Dygz and the likes are saying.
Personally I am Greek and Vaelune would be closer to that than Kaelar. I am still making a Kaelar character without making up fantasies about King Arthur and the sandal-wearing Greek Knight of the round table.
Bringing in misinformed historical references is another thing that pisses me off.
People mentioned black legionaires and that is why the people making up that society had yellow black white and red skin. That belittles the few black men that rose up above men that looked lesser in comparison, and took their place in the legion. They did so by being extraordinary and not because they happened to populate an imaginary spectrum of different coloured Romans.
The first unifier of Japan made Yasuke a retainer. Does that mean that Japan had black Japanese or does it actually mean that Yasuke was African man whose physical strength impressed the Japanese ruler?
Speaking of King Arthur...
Djimon Hounsou, the actor, cast for Sir Bedivere. Tokenism character..
Morgan Freeman in 1997 Robin Hood? Now that's a character in which the writers gave quality.
And before anyone mentions the original occupants of Britain being of dark colour, stop there. They didnt look like that by the time you got your medieval english, which now you have the Kaelars looking similar to.
And let's go to another tokenism feature, this time in AC Odyssey. There is a difference between sunburned and black ye? Yet in that game I saw sooooo many black npcs that it was immersion breaking. There werent any black people in ancient greece. Olive skinned? Whites? Yes.
But not the tokenism of Ubisoft (they included female soldier voices as well on the male looking character models).
If I was ubisoft I would make a mission with Plutarch going to "the land of the most beautiful people on earth, the Ethiopians". We had the ship after all, why not stick with the beautiful truth, instead of making up falso history.
But hey... it's cheaper to satisfy ppl like Dygz with that sort of political trick than to put the effort of developing Ethiopia for a mission.
That is what this topic was about. Developers creating beautiful and distinct human race choices with their glorious differences.
As I said earlier both sides of the argument have pros and cons. Personally I would prefer no skin tone restrictions.
But some, instead of saying "I want to be able to make a black samurai like Yasuke or a black man that achieved Knighthood in Kaelar society, decided to bring their political brainwashing here.
As for elves and dwarves... Well...
I will play a human as I always do, but the entitlement of real life humans is something to behold.
Imagine demanding skin tones for black elves and black dwarves when these fantasy races dont even have our DNA. So you dont have to victimize your self and say "oh God!!! I cant relate to those white ass elves with such limited skin tone choices!!!"
Imagine that... btw we have Nikua in addition to Dwarves.
Wouldnt it make more sense to ask for Dark Elves or Drow instead of wanting to tokenize everything?
My problem is that I don't like to be limited for just lore.
Here is a major spoiler for Ashes... The lore is not going to be shit compared to human history.
I agree that it is annoying when people inject people into movies about the past because they are trying to push a diversity agenda.
That is not what this is about for me. It is about me being able to have all the reasonable options I can to make a character. This does not have to shatter the lore of Verra or any other fantasy setting.
I made an example that it is very likely that Elves could exist on the equator and have dark skin to show for it. This does not seem like a major breach in lore. It just seems like what happens when people live in a place that has more sunlight.
If I want to make a pirate elf. I am going to make them with a tan becoming of someone from the equator.
If I want to make an elf from a northern forest. I will likely make him white.
I would love real Drow. I just think that is a major ask. Personally, I think it is easier just to give the elf races we have all the other sub-race skin colors and call it a day.
Remember, fantasy lore is not important. We do not look to fantasy lore to gain valuable lessons about our past or ourselves. Human history is important. We learn so much from human history, and there is a massive value loss when we change it.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
If you do a google image search for "extreme hairstyles", and think about the hair needed for the first few lines of hairstyles, you will probably see what I mean.
Why wouldn't we include weaves and wigs though. Does something in my HIGH FANTASY setting stop me from being able to make those? Does my deity frown upon fake hair? I want a new deity if so.
Lol, I guess I do count wigs then.
Why would a world full of magic not have wigs? I am sure a magically enhanced wig would be crazy compared to the "extreme hairstyles" seen on google...
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
Personally I would love to be able to play a drow like race but if the devs don't plan on including one I am not going to ask for unrealistic things like forest elves having white/gray tones for skin unless albinos are a thing.
There was never any reason for this discussion to turn to racism and such, remember that ultimately this is a game and I assume we all want to have fun playing it, real life problems especially ones as sensitive as this should be kept private or on apprpriate boards/forums.
If you count wigs, should they not be a cosmetic you place as your characters head slot item?
Im ok with cash shop hair styles especially if they go outside the games originally intended look and feel of the game. I don't think they could be head slot though. You can wear a hat and a wig you know?
I would prefer not to have the wig take up a cosmetic slot. There are many MMOs where you can still see hair under the head cosmetic. I think that is the case for some head cosmetics in Ashes.
I don't care how you fluff it. If my fake skin and hair color is some kind of long last spell like "Disguise Self" from D&D or whatever. As long as the result is that I get more options.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
As I said earlier, I am not against options, but I am also not against wanting to stick to a games lore (not that we have any idea what the racial lore in this regard is in Ashes).
What this says to me is that my ultimate system for it would be to restrict racial appearances based on what the lore of the game says - if at all - and then provide any other look via other means, such as cosmetics, illusions, or what ever else.
Right, but from a mechanical point of view, it makes no sense to take those options away from the character creator.
The result would be the same. Races with "Unnatural" skin/hair/eye colors.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
This 100%
Exactly. It's the same argument as with the Female Armor thread. Have a broad spectrum and know that there will be a general bell curve of skin tones / hairstyles actually used by players on a race by race basis.
The skin colours should not go over the top. BDO allows that and many people run around with some abominations
What do you consider "over the top" though? Blue and Green on humans for example is where I would say it's too far. But I think Humans (and honestly Elves or Dwarves also) should be able to have any naturally occurring skin tone we have on Earth today. Do whatever you want on Tulnar or Orcs.
I agree that blue and green humans is a bit over the top.
Mainly because humans do not gain access to those skin colors from normal means.
Skin color is mostly a function of ancestry and proximity to the equator.
There are have been modern documented humans with blue skin:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Fugates
I have heard there were documented cases of people having green skin in the Middle Ages, but that was before photography and cannot be confirmed.
I am not really asking for these skin colors. I am just saying they do seem to be possible.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.