Dear god that is the scariest thing I have ever seen. Please never do that again. I am going to have nightmares for the rest of my life now of that thing hunting me.
it’s not a bad thing, but if it doesn’t fit the lore then it’s kinda meh. if i played a japanese mmo i wouldn’t be upset if the only player characters were allowed to look ethnically japanese. again, it depends on the game and the lore they have.
I think black skin tone blood elves are jarring because the race, like humans, were very clearly modelled after caucasians, blood elves especially so. Which leads to the dark-palette variations of these models looking like white guys in blackface.
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The way I’ve tried to rationalize it is in Azeroth there’s a large variety of genetic variation in race populations to the point where some families in the same city have totally different colours of skin and everyone sees it as normal.
This is also why its so easy for races to diverge (night to high elves in just a few thousand years, etc.) due to accelerated speciation.
There was this obsessive campaigning for blonde, blue-eyed elves and now darker skin tones on a fantasy race are “unrealistic” in a game about dragons and magical sparkles. It’s getting weird…
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It is very telling that is for sure, and at the end of the day the new skin tones are canon and how Blizzard has always seen their human skin toned races / long over due customizations. So I applaud them for it and yeah the people arguing against them are very telling.
There’s also no lore that disproves black blood elves.
Seriously, there isn’t any.
Blizzard does not adhere to the whole ‘skin colours by region’ idea and they never have. Does it make sense genetically/scientifically? No, but this is a magical fantasy world, not real life.
The majority of Dark Iron dwarf skin tones also don’t make sense if you want to get into science/genetics. They have really dark skin (hence the name) but living underground makes the skin pale and even, to a point, translucent, not darker.
I’m gonna keep repeating this until someone actually freaking reads it. There is a character in Thrall: Twilight of the Aspects named Devi. She is a dark skinned blood elf. This has been in lore since 2012. It has been eight years.
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I’m pretty sure a book of an alternate time-line mentioned a dark skinned Thalassian elf…
Sunwell burned them there you go
They spend all day in the sun, quite literally to the point of praising it.
Im sure skin cancer is a thing in WoW, makes more sense for the High Elves to be black imo.
There’s only one skin tone that provides adequate protection against the sun naturally, their OG skin tone aint it.
Everyone saying it makes complete sense, sure, I know lots of black Caucasians.
Seriously though, I get where poster one is coming from though, I just only care enough to make a joke and post how I shrug my shoulders, Absurdism is the way to go in existence. Especially an existence like WoW.
. .
Even 'real life, really,
“Your problem is you spent your whole life thinking there are rules. There aren’t.”
Once a certain level of science is achieved, even absurd happenings such as people changing their sex will be possible eventually.
Absurd as it isn’t the norm, but eh, what does it matter, used to be normal for men to wear dresses in Rome, ah, togas.
There is not really any lore about skin at all. It’s all based on assumption.
Well, we all know who chose the NECROlords for their Covenant.
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it doesn’t make sense, was never going to make sense, but you’re dealing with a dev team that’s bereft of integrity of character and doesn’t care what makes sense anymore.
a lot of people coming into fantasy these days, people that weren’t into it in the old days, but it’s become a bit of a fad to be a “geek” or whatever, into video games and other things. these people have no actual care for what they involve themselves in, no care for deeper thought, just what dopamine hit they can achieve next.
essentially, most of the dev team and newer audience lack any depth of character or soul, and don’t care if things make sense anymore, so you get lore that no longer makes any coherent sense outside of isolated stories.
I think a lot of the darker skin colors look kind of weird and unnatural. Something about the texture file just seems to have a lot of weird artifacts you don’t notice in the lighter tones. I know when I’ve had to color shift texture files in games before, sometimes having to go from something very light to something dark causes some weird patterns to appear in the pixels.
They probably should have repainted a medium level tone to work from over the original pale skin to have a better base to use.
They are also really dull colors, I’m surprised they didn’t do any warmer, richer tones for dark skin. The options they put in seem rather flat.
I have to admit though, as far as the racial fantasy of it goes, I would have thought they would have been darker in a more night-elf or nightborne way, since that seemed to be how their genetics worked. Maybe the darker elves came from distant interbreeding with humans to get their color pallete, like most of the human genes were bred out, but the skin color variations remained.
I’ve made a thread a time or two about this but also about humans you’ll just get called racist for demanding PoC be more than a cosmetic option. They’ll let you exist but know your place type thing
i mean i think giving void elves options to look grotesquely similar to a blood elf is just as weird. i have no problem with the retcon but for it to count as anything significant when it pertains to new customization then yes this is lazy
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I am not speaking of the concept, but the execution. They have a lot of compression artifacts to them that were exaggerated when they were darkened and tone shifted. You probably don’t notice them on the light skin tones because all the colors are so close, but the dark ones don’t look like skin, they look like brush strokes and compression artifacts. I suspect they might have not been able to find the original art file all those years later, and had to do the tone shifts from the compressed version. I think they should have re-painted a base darker skintone and then shifted from there. It would have looked smoother and nicer.
I swear my character’s skintone used to be more tan back in BC and got lighter with the model update, so I was hoping to maybe step up one more notch in skintone, but I can’t get over that the texture has these weird anomalies and I wanted something in more the “warm” tone range anyhow.
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