this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2024
543 points (99.6% liked)
196
16710 readers
3199 users here now
Be sure to follow the rule before you head out.
Rule: You must post before you leave.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I love how Elder Scrolls treats the fantasy races. Real grim danky and full of racism and dark shit all over.
I love being in Morrowind and being called names because I'm a giant walking lizard where cat folk and lizard folks used to be slaves. Lean into that shit Bethesda. Gimme dat race war.
Except the problem is that Bethesda writes really flat, unconvincing racists. In fact, I'd go as far as to argue weakly portrayed racists in media like Bethesda's are part of why racists are always like "I'm not racist!" because they're comparing themselves to absurdly over the top tropes of badly written racism.
You want Disco Elysium level racists in all your games? Because they got that right.
Yes. The Disco Elysium devs deserve to write all games.
Maybe not all games, but a 3d open-world RPG written by the Disco writers would be utterly amazing
Have you tried New Vegas?
Oh what am I saying, of course you have
Hahaha only a few thousand hours. You just reminded me that it's been too long since I've done a playthrough so thank you, I'm off to add a few more
If it's been more than a few years, you'll be blown away by recent mods. There's been a bit of a modding Renaissance.
Music to my ears. I'm hoping to get a modded playthrough working on the steam deck. I did a TTW playthrough a couple years ago and it was great
Steam Deck definitely has a learning curve to mod with, but I've done it. You can either go the Wabajack route and transfer the list from a Windows PC, or manually mod it using Linux natively on the deck. Viva New Vegas is fantastic, if you want a TTW list the Wasteland Survival Guide is fantastic too. You can add the Mojave Express Guide on tip of VNV if you want more content.
I need a Khajiit Measurehead
They do now for sure. Morrowind at least was a lot harsher. It wasn't just racists. There were groups who still practiced race-based chattel slavery. Now they are mostly too scared to even mention it as a possibility.
(Although I would argue Starfield is pretty racist in it's creation. A large portion of black characters have African accents. This is long after colonization, and theoretically there would have been lots of race/nationality mixing after leaving earth. Sure, some places may retain or even strengthen their accents, but it probably wouldn't be race based anymore, or at least not the same as in modern day earth. It's so uncreative and uninteresting, and seemingly racist in its portrayal. I'm not sure if I'm the only one who noticed this, but it aggravated me.)
Oh great, they stopped the fun kind of racism and gave us actual racism.
It's not just Africans. It doesn't make sense that Indian/Hispanic/Russian/American accents exist either. Earth ceased to exist hundreds of years ago, and there are no homogenous cultures anymore (except the va'ruun, their accent makes sense). In Bethesdas effort to be inclusive they treated accents like they're a racial attribute rather than cultural. In reality there would be a UC accent, a freestar accent, etc but the accents depicted in game would be long extinct.
I disagree on the accents not existing at all. For example, The Expanse does it well. The belters have a distinct working class Irish accent, but there's nothing there to do with race really. Accents can be used to show where groups come from, but for scifi to work things need to actually be thought about.
Yeah, I had no issues with the accents so much as who had which. Except for the Engineer Pilot NPCs who always had illfitting voice lines to their NPC look
One of my favourite examples of a "weak" racist is Ulfric Stormcloak in skyrim. You telling me the Jarl of Windhelm and the leader of the pro nord movement continues to tolerate the grey quarter within his walls? Especially given it is implied most nords are racist, and especially the windhelm ones, it seems it would be an obvious political move to evict/raze/kill off the grey quarter.
Of course this could be seen as a bit extreme but it seems weird to me that the city hosting the leadership of the nord rebellion is more racially diverse than some of the other nordic settlements.
Used to be?
Looks like some n'wah forgot to lock his shed and now all the farm tools have run off.