this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2023
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The Elder Scrolls is wild because there's all these huge historical race wars and feuds but then you play the games and 95% of the time it'll be a Nord, his Dunmer wife, a Khajiit and an Orc co-owning a brewery or whatever together and vibing. Guess it's almost heartwarming in weird way.
this is a big failing, i don't know exactly how morrowind treats you if you roll an argonian but i suspect the game isn't made too much harder/impossible---the devs are too cowardly to put class/race into a game in a way that actually effects the player. oblivion is more cosmopolitan & apparently peacefully presiding over a whole continent with equality so it kind of makes sense.
skyrim is especially bonkers---"skyrim for the nords!" why yes of course there are a dozen elf-owned businesses and farms in stormcloak territory, we don't want it to appear as if the racism regime is racist! not just from not wanting to constrain the player, i think they tried to make the segregation seem tame so the player wouldn't be impacted by what segregation actually is like (and think something ought to be done). yeah there's a ghetto associated with the dark elves but they can leave whenever they like, there's 3 sympathetic nords to 2-3 racist ones, dark elves aren't barred property ownership. it's just the aesthetic of racial oppression without any substance, god forbid we make a player think or feel something about racism
If you truly build that kind of systemic racial oppression into a game then it's incompatible with allowing players to choose the race of their character because you're basically building multiple games in one, at least one of which is about doing systemic racial oppression. Game development is a business after all, there's no market for doing twice as much work to sell way less copies (because who really wants to play a KKK orc instead of more fun escapist fantasy)
tbf, I don't think you don't need to impede the player themself that much to give a much stronger impression of systemic oppression. In Dragon Age: Origins it's definitely a lot more present, though it doesn't really affect the player themselves ultimately. Like the ghettos ("alienages") in the game are definitely a lot more enforced compared to the Grey Quarter in Skyrim (i.e. they are walled off with guarded gates, and they get locked down occasionally when e.g. riots happen inside), though an elven player isn't ever actually barred from entering a city or anything, other than during the origin quest. And the same goes for the other origins, specifically mage and dwarf commoner, the player basically only really faces the systemic part during the origin quest, after which them being a Warden kind of just supersedes all of that? (Though people will still give you shit, especially if you are an elf)
That is the smart to do it. You limit the player based on their race/class at the beginning to help them understand what it feels to play that role. But give them a big upgrade in social power that lets them logically overcome how systemic oppression limits their character, but still have options to role play. They also give you two Fereldan humans to back you up.
i dunno i'd have a lot of fun subverting an unjust hierarchy with ultraviolence, that's still power fantasy
Oh wild, I never played different characters in that one. I didn't know there was a difference. The hard part of that game was learning to aim lances while riding, not so much the stats iirc
Yeah true, a lot of games do pull punches when it comes to showing that sort of thing. Witcher 3 and Deus Ex Mankind Divided come to mind, where you're ostensibly playing a persecuted minority but they're still massive power fantasies where you can basically do what you want, it's kinda jarring.
I mean isnt that real life also