I don't want to make this black specific problem all about me, a white guy, but does anyone feel like hair choices in games are just getting worse in general?
I play old RPGs and always find a hairstyle I like, but now I'm playing Dragon Age Inquisition and there's like 10 variations of "bald" and no good hairstyles at all. I just want a damn Pixie cut, it's not even a rare haircut and it wouldn't look too out of place.
Also if you tie hair and beard to a single choice you burn forever in game designer hell.
The best character creator I've personally seen was Star Trek Online. Fallout 4 was pretty decent too, but again lacking for hair options.
I'm gonna edit to clarify, it's bad normally and it's even worse for black characters.
I've noticed that, yeah. The 90s hairstyles are no longer represented in games, when they used to be.
The most devastating one are the lack of mohawk and devil horns in Fallout 4.
They had tonnes of cool "punk" haircuts and then replaced them with bangs, or a buzz cut.
Edit - okay Fallout 4 has a mohawk but it's an unlock and not available at the start.
Makes sense. The higher the fidelity, the more dev time it takes for each player option, so when you're looking for features to cut during crunch time it's easy to see character customization options as a waste of time.
I think I've come to associate graphical fidelity with bland gameplay and storytelling. All of the best looking games out there are by Ubisoft or EA or one of these other big game companies, and every single one of them has so much money dumped into it that it becomes "too big to fail" and that means that the choices made by the game designers are extremely conservative. Can't take any chances and risk making the game fun, just make it like every other game in its genre so that it makes its money back.
G*mers are already pissed off at Elden Ring for not recognizing gender so they might as well double down
I pirated it, installed it, laughed my ass off creating the most fucked up character possible in the character creator, played for five minutes then thought "what the fuck am I doing? I hate souls games" then uninstalled it
10/10 character creation, but I forgot that souls-like games are not my thing... will be seeding for a while though, while I wait for the inevitable Monster Factory video to watch while high
I forgot that souls-like games are not my thing
what do you not like about jumping around like a fucking cricket
You might be waiting a long time unfortunately. Rumor is they ended the series bc they were worried someone might potentially look like a character they created and feel bad.
Oh, that's a shame. Understandable, though, even though I highly doubt that there is someone out there that looks even remotely like one of the delightful boys they create in the videos
Man, I used to fucking LOVE monster factory and the McElroy family. I also hate souls games, the extreme difficulty and losing over and over just isn't fun to me.
An old gf got the first dark souls for me as a birthday gift like ten years ago, and I felt bad because I played it for two hours, hated it, and never turned it on again.
the extreme difficulty and losing over and over just isn’t fun to me.
Same. I simply don't have the energy that I once had for games, I suppose. It's a shame because I really wanted to like souls games, they look so damn cool, and Elden Ring is absolutely gorgeous.
While ago I watched this Black Pokemon youtuber. He's got a couple vids on race/racism in the games/community so I stuck around since that's not something you hear about anywhere :agony:
Anyway, in one vid he talked about how Pokemon games since adding character customization have also had this problem and how he'd be much happier having more options to play around with. The other day I started Legends Arceus and saw there's only like one braided hairstyle per gender. Most others are pretty straight (a little frustrating for me too as someone who's around a 2C type). Really sucks; made me think of his vid instantly.
Not having hair options for black characters is something you hear about all the time. How have big developers not learned this is a problem, yet?
Japan tends not to follow the discourse very much. Overworked otaku coders even less so. For completness sake howver computer peopel in the west are not much better. Which you would think they would be given the steriotyoes.
Swtor just added some black hair styles and one is laughably bad, literally clipping with your character's head.
well, idk what you mean by "chud," or how that might differ from being a "reactionary" as in :brainworms:
In the end I don't think what he said was acceptable at all for our community, despite how we both might define his behavior.
:rat-salute:
all I can think about right now is how baller it would be to have Geralt with a Jheri-curl
Jheralt
The Demon's Souls remake had awesome options for creating Black characters and should've just been imported to Elden Ring.
Yeah, I know. Importantly, a western one. Japanese companies tend to not even think about Black people.
Wildly unfamiliar with afro-american culture here, what are black hairstyles? Dreads?
Character creation sucks ass period if you want to create a non-white character. Wasn't so long ago that it was flat out impossible to create a passable looking East or South Asian character in most character creation games.
Recently more Japanese and Korean games have more robust character creation for East Asians, but I still struggle to think of any games where you could create a good looking Indian character.
