FFS the Aldmeri Dominion is clearly the British. The evidence: virulently racist island empire, the islands are literally named after part of England, they literally do old-timey race science, their architecture is some fucking Disney World style bullshit.
The bretons are the British race though, I mean they are literally called brentons
Also, go on youtube and listen to any line made by Lord Harkon, or any other vampire for that matter. They sound almost exactly like 4chan CHUDs.
le-pol-face trying to flirt with a random Asian girl: “I offer you my blood. Take it, and you will walk as a lion among sheep. Men will tremble at your approach, and you will never fear death again.”
The Asian coded “race” are the Akaviri, which are on another continent – Tamriel is just one of the many continents on Mundus. They initially invaded but then found out that Reman Cyrodiil was a dragonborn and because they largely idolatrised dragons (and other assorted lizards) they came to a kind of Varangian arrangement where they’d just serve as warriors under the Dragonborn. But they’d know this if they weren’t a fake fan.
Also if anything, the Aldmeri Dominion is more muslim coded than anything else, but alas, let’s not get into that.
The way elder scrolls handles race is very bad imo. A lot of the races are based on actual cultures and have real racial stereotyping in them.
Redguards are literally the Black race, in earlier games they had bonuses to stealth and lockpick which is kind of racist to make the Black people race oriented to the thief playstyle. It’s been toned down since Skyrim and now they are the pirate race.
Dark Elves, they had a Black voice actor in morrowind, they became British in Skyrim. They went from the black elf race to more of a blueish color. They were also evil in that they owned slaves and did necromancy but they toned it down and now the high elves are the evil elf race.
Khajit are just Arab cats, they steal things, that’s their entire identity.
Orcs are just orcs, the non evil variety which is okay I guess.
Bretons are literally British people, they also are part elf for some reason. I hate Bretons.
Nords are Scandinavian, now they can be kind of olive skinned but having a Viking race is probably why Skyrim was popular with chuds. And you know, they were racist and not the villains which deserves a :jesse-wtf:
Imperials are Italians, I’m sorry romans, who gives a shit.
Argonians are interesting, they have boobs but reptiles do not lactate
High elves are your typical fantasy elves with a bit of fanatic racism thrown in with the aldmari dominion.
Wood elves are probably the most elf out of all the elves considering they live in trees and love animals and shit.
Can I say that race in the elder scrolls is stupid? Elder scrolls 6 should just abolish the concept entirely. Skin, facial, and hair differences should be purely cosmetic.
Redguards are literally the Black race, in earlier games they had bonuses to stealth and lockpick
:what-the-hell: why was it so impossible for old-school game devs to not be ridiculously racist
they steal things, that’s their entire identity.
Maybe in memes. In actual lore their identity is diversity. Their country is kind of like India in that it is a loose collection of lots of different cultures which have been unified by outside influence. In this case it’s exactly 16 because this setting has dumb numerology stuff going on so numbers are important. (Elsweyr was made of 16 tribes, which became 16 kingdoms, in which live 16 different subspecies of Khajiit with a ‘special’ 17th one as their religious leader)
Theft is culturally important to them no more than it is culturally important to us, in the real world. In the same way that we have stories glorifying thieves and theft (whether they’re “morally good” thieves like Robin Hood or just interesting / funny / cool thieves like, idk, Conan the Barbarian) they also have that.
It just seems like you’re completely ignorant of basically everything written about the Khajiit, the most unique and interesting race in the setting.
I would sound like a complete loser if i said that the “original” lore was outside of what was defined in the “scrolls” series of games, they just built on top of it, but alas, that’s what the lore IS now, so there’s no use fighting it. The original lore was not very woke, but the games people have made a huge chud version of it nonetheless.
My favourite bethesthification of the original lore is how the orcs, rieklings and goblins are the only ones that practice male preference in terms of inheriting titles; you read that right, if your firstborn is a woman, she takes the lion’s share of your titles. Anyway, in all the games, 95% of all rulers are men. This is never explained, it’s just a fluke of statistics. Firstborns are never women for some reason, I guess half of them are trans.
Bretons were never supposed to be British, but closer to the people that left for Brittany after the various Germanic invasions.
Redguards are split between various cultures, and they don’t even have the same faith between them, so it’s kinda rich to just call of them Redguards, it’s akin to calling them all “the blacks” which is indeed what the very point of that term is.
Sho on and sho on tugs shirt
The way elder scrolls handles race is very bad imo. A lot of the races are based on actual cultures and have real racial stereotyping in them.
Yeah, I feel like more recent RPGs would have rolled most of the human races of Elder Scrolls into one “human” species with the same stats and let you choose backgrounds (Nord, Redguard, Imperial) with some skill buffs and maluses.
That way you can still have diversity without implying that humans of different backgrounds have different inherent physical or mental abilities (beyond what skills they’re more likely to pick up due to environment or culture). You can also still have Stat differences for the non-human races since they’re actually biologically different - like saying “gorillas are stronger than humans” is much less stupid than “black people are stronger than white people”.
Kinda reminds me of some pen and paper RPGs used to give strength maluses to women but stopped because it was horribly sexist.
Yeah, I feel like more recent RPGs would have rolled most of the human races of Elder Scrolls into one “human” species with the same stats and let you choose backgrounds (Nord, Redguard, Imperial) with some skill buffs and maluses.
That’s really how we’re supposed to think about it, the concept of “race” is an outdated video game concept. In-universe no one thinks of Nords as being, like, genetically able to handle the cold or Imperials as being, like, genetically silver-tongued. They’re just humans, and it might not even be possible in plenty of cases to tell someone’s race. Not to mention that obviously, being just humans, a Nord and Imperial could have a child and then that child would be mixed-race and it gets even harder. Then add in the fact that that mixed child could then bang a dark elf and produce a mixed-human with red eyes and scarlet hair. I honestly think that races will be handled very differently in TES6.
Arena and Daggerfall (and Battlespire lol) had race selection framed as choosing where you’re from instead of picking your race. I have to wonder if this could’ve been avoided if they kept stat differences associated with the province your character is from and then providing race as an additional cosmetic choice. It would’ve been a cool little bit of extra customization too
maluses
I have never seen this instead of “penalties” before and I hate it. Is this entering common usage? Took me awhile to figure out what you meant.
lmao bethesda squandered all vestiges of good will they had earned with the abomination that was Fallout 4 and moreso 76.
I’m amazed they still have such hardcore defenders.
Didn’t Bethesda just fuck over the guy that did the new doom game’s music and drag his name through the mud? It’s a garbage company that ruins good IPs.
The 40 year old denouncing the 10th iteration of Zombie Horror Shooting Gallery isn’t the target audience for its sales. These are literally games designed for children. In another 20 years, the kid that got Call of Duty: Justifiable Genocide for his 15th birthday will be whining about how the latest edition Went Woke because it no longer realistically depicts the effect of nerve gas on toddlers. But by then another group of teenage sociopaths will have their chud parents paying top dollar to hook them up to their simulated murder machines.
Genuine question, what’s the issue with FO4? I haven’t really played it in a while, but I thought it was pretty well regarded, if not as good as previous iterations story-wise. I have no take in either direction, I’m just curious lol
The story sucked, you were basically given the option of two major factions to join, either the scientists that wanted to hide from the majority of humanity while replacing them with synthetic clones or the Brotherhood of Steel chud brigade that is led by one of the guys from Dude Perfect, there is a 3rd faction of freedom fighters but they only offer a handful of quests and I don’t think you can even complete the story only siding with them. NPC interactions were homogenized to the point you had 4 dialogue options (Yes) (Yes but sarcastic) (Fuck you but ultimately yes) (No). The weapons and armor were stripped of unique varieties you’d have to go into vaults or other dangerous areas to find and implemented a Borderlands/Mmo style loot table with stat/effect modifiers. Base building was janky as fuck, some people liked it but it was painful getting tiles to snap together correctly. The whole game likely needed another year in the oven imo, seemed like a lot of it was rushed or incomplete. I will say the gun handling is the best of any of the 3rd person FO games and getting into power suits is basically like stepping into a mecha which was cool.
You can side with the railroad against both the institute and the brotherhood but otherwise I agree with all of that.
FO4 was trash. They retconned tons of lore. the story telling was weak bordering on non existent. It was stupid easy even on the hardest setting. All the quests were overlapping and respawning so you had to do the same thing over and over for different people. The base building was tedious and boring. There were a few things that I did like, namely the modular armors and customizable equipment but they couldn’t make up for the flaws.
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Story and writing was generally not received well, people didn’t like the obvious recycling reversal of FO3’s “look for your dad” and that the central conflict was 100% around androids that were so ill-defined that the game can’t even agree if they need food and water or not. The game also breaks its back bending over trying to preserve the painfully fucking obvious twist of “your baby son is like 63 years old now!!! woahhhh!!! wowowowow”
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Exploration, what’s usually Bethesda’s main strength, is now extremely boring and repetitive because Bethesda’s radiant randomly generated shit finally overtook hand-placed content. Most of the game world is completely interchangeable raider/ghoul/mutant dungeons and completely interchangeable tiny scrap metal villages that have Literally no characters or stories because all but like 2 towns are part of the settlement system. The “pipe gun in a pre-war safe” complaint is symptomatic of this because FO4 lacks anything that could be interesting loot
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Game’s new systems are really half-baked: The settlement system is too limited and ugly to be a fun creative Minecraft-style builder, and the underlying settlement mechanics are too rudimentary to be an engaging base management minigame. The weapon/armor upgrading system is an uninteresting minor statistical upgrade progression system disguised as customization system, which was also an excuse to cull most of the arsenal because half the guns serve triple duty as pistol, machine gun, and sniper rifle. The game’s core gameplay loop is about hoovering up garbage and scrap to break down to parts but Bethesda games have always had terrible inventory management so a majority of the game is spent picking up a desk fan, being overencumbered, then navigating the worst inventory UI invented to see if you can eat or drop enough things to get back down
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Roleplaying and progression have for at least some people hit the point of where streamlining becomes dumbing down. This is kind of a mix of things. Part of that’s the dialogue system and the neither fish nor fowl sort-of-predefined sort-of-blank-slate protagonist. Part of that is that all progression is through perks, which are mostly “do x% more damage with y weapon type” or “unlock Tier X crafting in Y category”. Part of that is progression is restricted in some ways (you need to be level x to get the next tier of this perk) but unrestricted in others (your attributes can be all be maxed out at any time) that together encourage very generalized similar feeling character builds. The game doesn’t really ask players to make very many engaging choices, narratively or even mechanically, beyond which faction you side with at the end
Skyrim is over a decade old. I think it says something that the last halfway decent game anyone still talks about is that far in the rear view mirror. All the big '90s/'00s studios are in terminal decline. So of course the TradCath gamer communities are left floundering in nostalgia, scrambling to find meaning in a reskin of a reskin of a classic setting from 30 years ago that doesn’t bruise any of their priors.
Say what you will about Lord British, but the smartest thing Richard Garriott ever did was hang up the Ultima franchise and go off to do space tourism. I’m glad I don’t have to watch my childhood game setting of choice dragged through the mud like this.
Imagine this person defending the intellectual property rights of the actual workers who designed all those assets, and not the company.
