Character Creation Has A Race Problem

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Originally Posted by Magic-Mal

Seems the storm has settled so you might not have to argue anymore! You could actually talk about your request now.(Edit: Ugh. Try to ignore those attempting to continue the argument)

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I mean yeah, I appreciate your efforts. Going back to the intent behind the idea, and putting aside a less than stellar delivery (which to be fair, I'm guilty of myself, so I don't want to sound rude to the OP, but probably have anyway as communication isn't my strong suit), I'm fully on board with better customisation options, as I mentioned in my previous post. I play a dark blue skinned Au Ra (I'm a Xaela, wanted to match the horns). However, I do think having a better spread of skin colours and other such features would go down well. I think there's other features the OP wanted but can't remember them off-hand (memory gone to pot and going through 31 pages again to check for every suggestion, RIP no thanks). Since this is meant to be an RPG (just online), it fits that the more customisation, the better.

Personally I would like more fuller lips and fuller nose options, most of the time it's only 1 for all the race. I give them credit for adding at least 1 though. The day they add bigger butt/other stuff is the day I would also like to see more of those "fuller" face features which are Afrikan by nature/science.

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Originally Posted by MoroMurasaki

Petty sure Iscah was replying to [the post directly above]

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Correct! I was posting on my phone, which makes it difficult to pick one sentence out of a longer post, so I figured I could get away with it since I was responding to the last thing that had been said in the conversation. I didn't even consider people interpreting it as a response to the overall thread.

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Originally Posted by Skivvy

I took it as them just summing up this hot mess as "I just want more hair", but I very well may have missed something. If that wasn't the case, I apologize D:

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Apology accepted. :)

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Originally Posted by Nandina

Notice I did say wider noses and fuller lips. Not once have I ever said “black lips” or “white lips” as the two above claimed I did, and the post is time stamped and has time markers for when it was edited. If you look at when I edited my initial post (because I had too much typed) you’ll see that it was before either person made those comments. Therefor they reacted to something that was imaginary.

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Ah, I guess I must have misread or just saw what I wanted to see then, I apologize for putting words in your mouth.

I really do hope for more options that you and others have suggested as I'm always down for more options, especially more curly hairstyles!

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Originally Posted by Nandina

I’m fine with the rest of the post, but this point in particular I don’t agree with, only because they’re still straight hairstyles despite the braids.

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Yeah, you're right. I noticed my mistake when making the female Highlander. I must have been thinking on some other gender/race combination.

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Originally Posted by Nandina

[other posters' character model suggestions]

Notice that these two faces are the exact same. If you were to change the skin and hair to a lighter one, it doesn’t effect the other features. You still get a pretty Euro looking person, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. Does Rachel Dolezal and Martina Big changing their skin color change the other features of their face? Or how about an example people can relate to: Kylie Jenner. Lol.

[your 'European versions']

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I'm a bit lost where you're going with the celebrity examples, but for the first bit of your post - I don't think the two other examples have used the same face at all - or if it's the same basic face, the eyes are quite different and they don't look the same to me.

Anyway, if a face can look African when paired with African colouration, and Caucasian when paired with Caucasian colouration, I feel like that's not quite the same as "not being able to make an African-looking character at all", even if you're more restricted in the choices.

And again, you're further restricted if you're set on being able to create the appearance you want specifically with a Midlander Hyuran when ultimately the character creator is quite limited for each single race but does add up to having more variety spread across the different races. Midlanders cater to a particular subset of human appearances, Highlanders to a different subset (and further appearance options are available from the other not-perfectly-human races). I don't know if they've covered all the bases between them but I think it's better that they have their own niches with subtler variations than to try and make one race cover everything.

Hyurans are also the one race where they've actually split the clans to have completely different appearances - effectively doubling the available number of 'human' face options versus any of the other races (even if it it firmly divided into two sets of options). For any other race, the models for the clans are identical and it just comes down to differences in colouration or details in the eyes.

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On the issue of whether Hyurans=humans and whether they need to have all real-world races covered, there are two ways to look at it.

On the one hand, Hyurans (Midlander and Highlander together) are the one race that are physically human - height somewhere in the 150-190cm range, small rounded ears, skin tone varying from peach to brown.

But there's another element that defines Earth-humans: we're the one sapient race found across the planet. This is not the case in Hydaelyn, where there are many other races who have physical features we consider 'non-human' but are still culturally equivalent to them.

All Hyuran cultures = real world human cultures, but not all human cultures = Hyuran. Some translate to being Miqo'te desert tribes or Xaela or beastmen.

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And again, there's the question of geography. Hydaelyn is clearly Earth-inspired, and we have Eorzea (= Europe and the Near East), Ilsabard (Russia and middle Asia?), Othard (east Asia) and the vaguely referenced 'New World' (apparently the Americas, judging by that one glamour set) and the mysterious southern continent of Meracydia, origin of the Warring Triad.

Meracydia is the one place we know nothing about - by deduction, it may equate to either Africa or Australia, both candidates for local Hyurans being dark-skinned but only if they exist in the first place. The lorebook doesn't say what kind of people live there - only that much of it was rendered uninhabitable by the ancient war with Allag, and the few modern inhabitants are hostile to outsiders, thus the lack of Eorzean knowledge about the place. (The only possible indication that there were Hyurans there, at least in the past, is that there's one among Sophia's 'demiurges' - but they are transformed in appearance and can't be seen as any particular race, or it could have been a captured Allagan woman rather than a native Meracydian anyway.) The only Meracydian races specifically mentioned in the lorebook are the 'tree-beings' and 'centaurs' that summoned Sephirot and Zurvan, respectively, and also dragons if they are as sapient as their Eorzean cousins.

So anyway, I may have gone a bit off-track, but my point is - the world of Hydaelyn has no definite Africa equivalent for "African" Hyurans to originate from, so from a lore-building perspective, where would an African-looking Hyuran have come from? The argument that "it's medieval Europe and there actually were Africans in medieval Europe" doesn't simply transfer over, because those Africans still had to migrate there, which they can't if there's no Africa to migrate from.

You can get creative with the lore and say they're Meracydian... for now. But if we ever go there as part of the story and it turns out that actual Meracydians aren't like that, it's back to the question of "how can Africans exist if there's no Africa?"

Perhaps you don't care about lore yourself, but it's still something to think about.

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On the "lack of fuller lips", maybe they don't go quite as large as you want but there *is* a noticable difference between the the mouth options. Is the 'full lips' option (always option #2 if I remember correctly) not big enough?

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For what it's worth, I wouldn't count Highlanders as 'black' (ie. by my understanding, either African or Aboriginal Australian, depending on context - and I assume everyone else here is meaning African. (Though still unclear about correctness of actually using the term in either case, and would avoid it myself.))

Geographically, I thought Ala Mhigo is roughly equivalent to the Middle East? I don't know enough of the cultures around that part of the world to be able to identify anything more specific. Please do let me know if there's an actual location they are based on.

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Ultimately, unless they completely overhaul the character creator, I don't think there's any way they can add more 'face elements' into it without removing the current ones, and I doubt they would do that. Maybe they could have done better at the start, but it wasn't - and it couldn't be changed now without affecting some people's existing characters.

On the other hand, new hairstyles are added constantly. Ask for those.

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Originally Posted by Iscah

wall o' text

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I think a way SE could work around their self imposed limitations in the character creation is to remove the sub-race aspect. Instead of having Hyur Midlander and Highlander just have Hyur, with all the features, hair and body types available to mix and match.

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Originally Posted by Joven

I think a way SE could work around their self imposed limitations in the character creation is to remove the sub-race aspect. Instead of having Hyur Midlander and Highlander just have Hyur, with all the features, hair and body types available to mix and match.

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Actually, from how I understand it works, keeping them split is exactly why it gives us more options in the first place.

To create a character, you pick the race/clan/gender, then the basic face, then the details.

Each face always has six options for eye shape, four options for the mouth, etc. - the face is different but the number of options never changes. (ie. I'm assuming there isn't any space, programming-structure-wise, to add more options for any one face.)

BUT for each of those faces, the options are not exactly the same. Nose #5 on face #3 will not have the exact same shape as nose #5 on face #4. But you can't mix and match the appearance of one onto the other, it can only be used on that particular face.

So every additional face gives you another set of options, so 'merging' Midlander and Highlander would do nothing except cut down the overall amount of faces available. (Also, Highlanders have completely different models and animations - functionally more like a separate race than another clan of the same race - so unless they can add an option to let you choose between the sets, you'd lose that difference as well.)

The only possibility for expansion is whether there's a definite limit for how many basic faces there are - unlike the other settings with a consistent number of options, the number of actual faces is higher for Midlanders (6 male, 5 female) than for the other clans/races (always 4). (Giving Hyurans a total of 10/9 options per gender instead of 4 for the other races.)

Perhaps all races could have six. Only the programmers know for sure. But even if they could give that increased number of characters, we'd only get one extra Midlander face out of it and all the other added variety would go to the other races.


For other races, removing the sub-races wouldn't affect the number of faces available, but it would still lose a lot of other variation that distinguishes the clans - different skin colours, unique eyes (Sunseekers' slit-pupils and Dunesfolk's 'no pupil' appearance), Au Ra scale colours, and varying customisation options - eg. Wildwood Elezen's earclasps vs Duskwights' unique tattoos, presumably stored as the same data. Also all the lore attached to those different clans.

Aside from having ways to alter your nose and mouth, it would be nice to be able to construct your chin or cheekbones? I do get WHY we have pre-determined faces to make it easier for them to code/design the character creation, but not everyone will have the same style of chin or cheeks. It does kind of make me wonder just the kind of coding that The Sims had to allow this sort of leeway that SE is holding back on. I mean, Sims 2 was what...? Year 2004, and yes I realize that it's not an MMO, but that game can be pretty intensive on your graphics card as well, especially if you have buttloads of custom skins and features like I've installed.

I've been told I have high cheekbones because of my Cherokee Indian heritage and people notice it even if I don't (I think when we stare at ourselves in the mirror everyday, we just get used to what we look like and don't notice our own features sometimes). Also, having more stylized ponytails and buns would be nice, and for god's sake, fix the highlighting options.

Geesus christ SE, hair DOES NOT highlight like the way that you think it does. Literally, no one is going to walk into a salon and ask for red highlights splotched on the one side of their head when they ask for highlights unless they're trying to intentionally. Highlights throughout your hair are normally spaced evenly and start from the roots of your hair, not somewhere in the middle.

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Originally Posted by Iscah

Actually, from how I understand it works, keeping them split is exactly why it gives us more options in the first place.

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Yes it is due to height range differences. Midlander is grouped together with Au ra and Miqo te in some gears models (maybe all, cant tell atm), while Highlander is grouped with Elezen and Roegadyn, per gender.