Character Creation Has A Race Problem

[Magic-Mal]

That's cool - okay, yes, add more character customization features.

As long as they are within the established lore and don't detract from the influx of actual new content of course.

(Maybe you should have started this thread instead, it would probably just basically be responses like this)

Starting another thread while this one is still going is the last thing I'd do. That would be nothing but clutter after all.

[Nandina]

I skimmed the thread, and there is a lot to quote and respond to, and I probably won’t get it all, but I’ll do my best to respond to everyone as I can if I can. But I do want this point addressed:

she turned the tone of this thread when she responded to valkyrie's response with a semi-racist post of its own. I'm gonna call it what it is. It was semi-racist. Not calling her racist, but the tone of her very first response was semi-racist in nature.

Please explain to me, how what I said was hateful, disparaging, and advocating that no one else get their representation? We’re not getting anywhere, because people are claiming non-issues and evidently don’t know what racism is, but keep utilizing the word. You all keep saying I’m looking to be offended, when I can flip the script and say the same thing back.

Anyways. . . The videos aren’t the same length cause I tried to speed things up instead of doing a 360 on every hairstyle like how I did with the Highlander Male. I will try to break them up in separate posts. In any event, I’ve taken the liberty of putting relevant quotes and commentary under each video, but I also want to highlight and bold the relevant points of the OP.

So, I've been tempted to use a Fantasia, and change from Miqo'te, so I started playing around with the character creation, and the lack of diversity is abysmal. I wanted to make a Hyur female, but I can't help but notice there isn't much wiggle room. There's only one cute braided mohawk style, and some dookie dreads. Where are the curly or even kinky hair styles? There are no flat twists, no cornrows, no box braids, no senegalese twists, no two strand twists, etc. I thought there was an afro option, but I didn't see that either. Under the nose options, there's are no truly wider options (I'm not saying the nose has to take up the entire face). There are no larger fuller lips. Skin tones run either cool or red, and there are absolutely no yellow undertones. Many of the little boxes on the skin color grid are virtually indistinguishable from the ones at least four spaces from them vertically, making them a waste. On brown skin tones, this makes the character appear ashy and in severe need of lotion. Skin tone alone is not diversity. Sure you can make your character Sudanese black, but if the nose and lips are slim and thin, is it really a black person? No.

Either way I think labeling it and making into a purely racial issue is heavy handed, and labeling facial features as "Black lips" or "white lips" etc is pretty unhelpful to any case you're trying to make when you're talking about race. It's not very hard to say fuller lips, wider noses, flatter noses and so on.

It's.. rather mistaken to say some of the stuff said here. There's no such thing as "black noses" or "white people lips". We know better than that now. Far better.

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.

The darker skin tones are odd, but not completely unusable to make a dark/deep skin-toned character, to represent themselves or culture if that's their wish to do so.

However, it has already been said there will not be changes made to the creator section any time soon. They do however add hairstyles often. [b]A post suggesting hairstyles, probably would have been better received, with maybe some examples of what you would like to see.[\b] I do think some of the requests would be difficult to implement in the game, as judging by the "afro" which is a mess. I would love to see curly/kinky options, but the physics/textures would probably not work well with however they currently design hair.

But I did do that, lol. I gave examples and everything as shown above.

I'm not taking an issue with the suggestion itself. My issue is with the way that is being framed. If FFXIV did not have any option for darker skin tones, then the weight of the argument for representation would be much heftier. As it stands, though, there are options in-game to allow for people to design a character to their personal tastes.

I never argued that there weren’t ANY options, lol. I clearly said that you could make your character darker, just that the undertones were off and looked funny.

I advocate for the creator's choice to include whatever race, gender, etc. they want without being forced to try and appeal to everyone's sensibilities..

I never tried to force anyone; if anything I asked a question which was directed to SE. I never said “SE better put these extra options in the game.”

Notice in each of the videos that when I up the color scale, the skin gets cooler; as I go down, redder. When I go up, the skin has a greyish tint because a cool undertone under a browner one has that effect. Yes this isn’t real life, but it’s safe to assume that Hyur were modeled after real life humans. Humans aren’t grey like that unless they’re ashy like I mentioned or have the wrong makeup foundations hade.

Female Midlander

There's only one cute braided mohawk style, and some dookie dreads.

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.

Ignoring the fact that most of those screenshots look like Caucasian people with darker skin...

So cleary people can see what I see, yet they’re still have a problem.

This the easiest way I can convey my point. If people still don’t get it then. . . I just know what else to say.


———

Female Highlander

You should probably look at highlander then.

Now hang on, that was a perfectly viable suggestion, and in fact I think you'd find male and female highlanders have a lot more option to make traditionally "black" features.

I actually have to change what I said about the “dookie dreads”. If you notice, the back of the dreads are still straight, but it’s close.

Highlander Huyr has better options for those looking for yellow undertones and some of their hairstyles are braided too.

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.

For example, Highlanders (yes, you wanted to make a Midlander, I've read that) are the ones that have more options to make them look like black people and there are many black NPCs in Gyr Abania.


You maybe can't make a black Hyur girl that looks truly black, but you can with Highlanders and Roegadyn for example.

I don’t agree with the Highlanders at all in that regard.

[Nandina]

Male Highlander

Pretty much the same thing with the females I would say to this. But I will also that a bald or buzzed head is something anyone can have, and because of that, there are zero textured hairstyles for male highlanders. No high tops or any of that, so when people say that you can get a pretty black looking character with them. I don’t see it.

— — —

Male Midlander

Today was the first time I tried the male midlander, and this also had a nice curly style that was similar to the midlander female. The frohawk is very cute, and to me it illustrated they can do this. Does anyone remember Sazh from FFXIII? They did a beautiful job on him despite FFXIII being a Japanese game from a Japanese company, which to me means they have it in them. But this is the best one thus far.

I’m having technical difficulties with a pic I wanted to post, but I’ll edit it in when I get the situation sorted, so check back.

———

But to this point:

Male Bunny Suit on GS NPCs

Gender Bias in Character Creation

Character Creation Has A Race Problem

Three different threads all advocating for representation in the game, even if not communicated in the best ways. Judging from posts we all seem ultimately to want the same things, despite wanting it in different ways...

I agree. With the Gender Bias in Character Creation title, it’s really no different from the title of this thread, just the issue discussed is Gender and not a race. People are clearly more triggered by the word race. Going by the gender thread I would never say things like “FFXIV doesn’t have a gender problem.” “You’re claiming SE is sexist” “It’s their game, they can do whatever they want.” “There are more than enough options for male costumes, you’re sitting here trying to turn this into some pseudo-gender war.”

In those titles swap out the words “problem” and “bias”.

Gender Problem in Character Creation.
Character Creation Has A Race Bias.

Same thing.

Saying something leans more heavily one way than another, is not me calling the game racist. Since math is the universal language, let me put it this way. I have a class of 20 students, and I have 17 pieces of candy. I hand out each peace to an individual, but there are obviously few students without. The students without don’t have a problem with me, in fact they’re happy to visit my class on a daily bases. They just point out that I forgot about them. (1) I’m not going to tell those students who mention it, that there are more than enough pieces of candy, and that 17 were the total amount that came into the bag, so they just have to be content because the manufacturer doesn’t have to add 20 because it’s their product and they can add however many pieces in the bag they want; (2) or that they have to see if the other students mind sharing. In the second scenario, all the students get a piece of candy, just not everyone gets a full piece like the others, which still illustrates an imbalance.

However, it could have been simple absent mindedness on my part, that I didn’t purposefully leave the 3 students out, I was just focused on that one bag of candy to bring, that it hadn’t crossed my mind to bring a bag with 3 extra pieces to compensate. Those students had a right to inform me of the discrepancy. Does this make sense?

[Nandina]

But if we're done arguing the semantics that's cool, I just wanted to post those videos I mentioned earlier.

[Magic-Mal]

But if we're done arguing the semantics that's cool, I just wanted to post those videos I mentioned earlier.

Haven't read the posts yet but man... Those are long. That must've taken forever. Like Star Wars intros...... I don't like Star Wars.

[Nandina]

Haven't read the posts yet but man... Those are long. That must've taken forever. Like Star Wars intros...... I don't like Star Wars.

I did it throughout the day between actually playing the game, and real life errands, and stuff lol. I would've died having to sit there and do it all at once.

[Magic-Mal]

I did it throughout the day between actually playing the game, and real life errands, and stuff lol. I would've died having to sit there and do it all at once.

I almost died trying to hold the fort! Unfortunately I had nothing to do all day.

[Nandina]

I almost died trying to hold the fort! Unfortunately I had nothing to do all day.

Lucky you. I had to do hours worth of driving back and forth, cook, clean, take my puppy out, etc lol. Like I want to respond to everyone, but going back through pages of stuff that I missed is daunting, so I may pass. I want to actually enjoy playing the game as opposed to arguing about it for days. Especially considering we're all obviously not going to see the other's perspectives.

[KisaiTenshi]

I got to page 14 before I decided to reply.

So, I've been tempted to use a Fantasia, and change from Miqo'te, so I started playing around with the character creation, and the lack of diversity is abysmal. I wanted to make a Hyur female, but I can't help but notice there isn't much wiggle room. There's only one cute braided mohawk style, and some dookie dreads. Where are the curly or even kinky hair styles? There are no flat twists, no cornrows, no box braids, no senegalese twists, no two strand twists, etc. I thought there was an afro option, but I didn't see that either. Under the nose options, there's are no truly wider options (I'm not saying the nose has to take up the entire face). There are no larger fuller lips. Skin tones run either cool or red, and there are absolutely no yellow undertones. Many of the little boxes on the skin color grid are virtually indistinguishable from the ones at least four spaces from them vertically, making them a waste. On brown skin tones, this makes the character appear ashy and in severe need of lotion. Skin tone alone is not diversity. Sure you can make your character Sudanese black, but if the nose and lips are slim and thin, is it really a black person? No.

The problem here is that, this is literately a problem that came from V1.0

I think that's because Au Ra came much later so they had more flexibility with their design while all the other races were just ported over from 1.0

Allow me to demonstrate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0Zul0WVcZo

To begin with, the inexcusable excuse "It's a Japanese game". If you played FF7(Baret), or FF13 (Sazh), you'd remember that the Final Fantasy universe is absolutely devoid of "black" as in POC characters. Of the two somewhat playable characters (listed right above) they're both male characters, of which the latter has an entire recurring gag devoted to his hair. Raubahn is the only principle character in FFXIV that qualifies as he has his own character model. All the other dark skinned characters are player models, which run into the V1.0 problem. This is not Square-Enix being racist, this Square-Enix being a Japanese company who sells games to the Japanese audience, and "western" players as an after-thought. Korean MMO developers aren't any better in this regard.

Now, there is one technical hurdle that is difficult to overcome. It's nearly impossible to have any skin color close to black. For the same reason you can't ever replicate the look of gold, or water. Games do not do raytracing to generate color, they are all self-lit. So a black character can't be lit otherwise they'd not be black. This creates a bizarrely uncanny valley effect, where shaders meant to make skin look wet or give texture simply result in nothing. This is also a problem that is difficult with 2D animation. Hence most "black" characters have a skin color closer to a dark brown to avoid looking like their skin is grey.

You can see this in the video, the default character given has dark skin, but when I click through all the other shades, only the really dark skin colors have a mottled skin look. The alternative would be to have no texture at all, which is what V2.0 essentially does, and allows for more arbitrary colors.

https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/arti...in-video-games

Now with the actual color out of the way, what about all the other facial features? Yes 1.0 and 2.0 both are rather lacking in this department. The reason is that each face is essentially it's own model so they can be expressive in cutscenes and emotes. They could come up with some better facial structures, but it then adds additional work to each emote in the game.

"But (other game) does it!" , is not an excuse, because each game has drastically different content. In Crytek/Unreal Engine games, typically have all sorts of adjustments, but the result is there is no variety at all for character races, they're just specific defaults against the base model. To get a "lalafell" out of the standard human model, would result in a very short human that still runs like they're 6' tall.

We don't notice a lot of the small things, from the way the characters emote, to how they run, walk, and dance in FFXIV, and it's kinda weird to go to another game and see how much lack-of-interest was put into their character creators. Where you can make 60 different changes to the face, and you can't see most of them because the game doesn't have a cinematic cutscene engine. In many other games, conversations are little more than two talking heads, that aren't even zoomed in.

This is why pretty much every game has the same default race set:
a) Human-ish
b) Elf-ish
c) Dwarf-ish
d) Giant-ish
e) Beast-ish
f) Demon-ish

of which the human-looking races have to somehow encompass the whole of what we have in reality, despite being a fictional/fantasy game. What defines a race in reality is less about genetics and almost entirely about culture. So a game that does not take place in our culture, won't have those racially-related culture traits. Thus what people are really asking for is "I want to look like me" or "I want to look like an ideal version of me", when they ask for these customizations. A fictional world that doesn't evolve like our real world, wouldn't have these, so for the purposes making a game look like there is variety, they are put in, and hand-waved away when anyone casts doubt as to if a race would have adapted to the climate by changes in skin color. It's more of a big "so what?", if making the nose different means adding a year of development work, then perhaps that's why they decided on specific options.

I'm someone who is doesn't care at all about making characters look "like me" because I know that is impossible. Anyone who is a descendant of multiple ethnicity's knows what I'm talking about. Games will generally have a generic "Euro" face and a generic "Asian" face, and these two options are insufficient for representing all of Western and Eastern Europe , East Asia, South East Asia, and South Asia, and completely omits African and American-indigenous ethnicity. There will never be a game that is configurable enough for making "like me" characters because the average person is not a 3D modeler and would not even know where to begin to make a face of some ethnicity, or someone who is 1/2 or 1/4 one race and 1/4 another, because there is no standard by which to go by.

If you've ever done any kind of ancestry DNA test, you'd also know there's more DNA for determining what your eye color is (hint, it's not one color) than there is for the shape of your head. Yet the game only supports limbal ring on one race in a way that is different from humans, but heterochromia on all of them.

Something a future game may be able to do is actually use the results of a test from 23andme or some other DNA test to get within 90% of what you look like, and you can then tweak it from there. Present tests do not look for the DNA markers for half the face shapes, because it's still an evolving field of research.

[Magic-Mal]

Lucky you. I had to do hours worth of driving back and forth, cook, clean, take my puppy out, etc lol. Like I want to respond to everyone, but going back through pages of stuff that I missed is daunting, so I may pass. I want to actually enjoy playing the game as opposed to arguing about it for days. Especially considering we're all obviously not going to see the other's perspectives.

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)