this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2024
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All of those are European shades. This is not the clap back you think it is.
The characters are supposed to be Latin American / West African, not European. And while of course those countries have very light-skinned people, they also have a lot of dark-skinned people, which isn't reflected among the characters.
tbh they all look fucking identical anyways, rather than ethnicity i'm more worried about the fact that they're supposed to be different individuals.
They're just dress up dolls, the sum total of their character design lies in clothing, hairdo, and makeup. They're teletubbies for adults.
That's a hard problem to solve. Genshin has, let us say, 100 characters. Making a separate model for each character, as well as the animations to go with it, would make the game size even bigger than it is. Instead they have five or so models, and all the characters are made with palette swaps, smoke and mirrors. (And if you do certain specific actions in the game, you can get the smoke and mirrors bit to glitch, which is fun.)
Uhhh character creators have been a basic feature of RPGs for more than 10 years now, i don't think it would particularly affect their budget to tweak the faces a bit more..
A different face doesn't magically mean you have to redo all animations, you just might have to do a little bit of cleanup work for edge cases.
Oh, you mean the face? That's definitely possible, but as another poster said below, they want the characters to fit a certain beauty standard so players will pay up. That restricts things a bit.
The game is East Asian, so of course they're going to make the characters light-skinned. That's the beauty standard, and people want to ~~gamble for~~ buy pretty characters. Its basically just colorism with extra steps.
But characters don't have to be uniformly light-skinned to be pretty or make money. Fate has dark-skinned characters, and Fate is not exactly known for its moral standards. And miHoYo has generally not been afraid of breaking social taboos.
Anyway, I'm just disappointed that the region which should have darker characters has only one character darker than the palest biscuit. Maybe I should have seen this coming, oh well.
I saw the bass pro shop pharaoh joke when Sumeru came out, but now the jokes just write themselves.
I hated Genshin long before this kind of problem hit its ugly head, due to the gatcha.
(Why do every game nowadays need to be a live service with gatcha mechanics? I know indies exist, but still...)
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