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[The Verge] Elden Ring's character creator fails Black players
- Thread starter Neoxon
- Start date
The problem is their color key is fuck. I tried directly inputting R,G,B color codes for different shades of brown (e.g., Chocolate is 210, 105, 30) but they come out in-game wildly off from what they should be in the real world.
This is Elden Ring's "Chocolate":
It's light orange.
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Haha What the fuck...The problem is their color key is fuck. I tied directly inputting R,G,B color codes for different shades of brown (e.g., Chocolate is 210, 105, 30) but they come out in-game wildly off from what they should be in the real world.
This is Elden Ring's "Chocolate":
It's light orange.
Wish they'd taken notes from Bluepoint's work on the character creator in the Demon's Souls remake. Not that I would say the black options in DS 2020 are necessarily amazing but they're obviously at least some kind of effort.
Monster Hunter Rise patched in more diverse character creation hair styles after launch; Elden Ring lets you change your character's appearance pretty freely, so if this gets enough attention and is addressed at least existing characters can get updated without restarting the game.
Monster Hunter Rise patched in more diverse character creation hair styles after launch; Elden Ring lets you change your character's appearance pretty freely, so if this gets enough attention and is addressed at least existing characters can get updated without restarting the game.
that's a bit IF though
You know what game actually did have a decent amount of black options?
Babylon's Fall
I played the demo last night and spent a few minutes before deciding to just go, but the black hair options were pretty good for how limited that game is on CC as a whole. Was pleasantly surprised
Babylon's Fall
I played the demo last night and spent a few minutes before deciding to just go, but the black hair options were pretty good for how limited that game is on CC as a whole. Was pleasantly surprised
I'd love to be able to rock a turban and uncut beard/hair (Kesh) in a character creator.
Alas, the western audiences would just be incredibly insensitive and racist about it.
Alas, the western audiences would just be incredibly insensitive and racist about it.
What kind of chocolate they been having out there?The problem is their color key is fuck. I tried directly inputting R,G,B color codes for different shades of brown (e.g., Chocolate is 210, 105, 30) but they come out in-game wildly off from what they should be in the real world.
This is Elden Ring's "Chocolate":
It's light orange.
The problem is their color key is fuck. I tried directly inputting R,G,B color codes for different shades of brown (e.g., Chocolate is 210, 105, 30) but they come out in-game wildly off from what they should be in the real world.
This is Elden Ring's "Chocolate":
It's light orange.
Perhaps I'm confused -- 210, 105, 30 in sRGB is definitely orange.
I pulled up a 'Shades of Brown' color mat to test like 50 shades and that's what they had next to Chocolate.
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I'm not really sure how to explain that! The orange in that screenshot corresponds to 210, 105, 30 according to the colour picker I have installed on my computer. I've built a system for picking skin colours for characters before and there is no way that any human's skin (even Donald Trump's) would be 210, 105, 30 in sRGB colour space. Values for light skin would be more even, and values for dark skin would be far lower.
I think part of what makes this so glaring is that other Japanese developers have been getting better about this. Both Nioh 2 and Monster Hunter World have been a step forward in this regard. From seems like they aren't even trying. Hell, the DSRemake makes this look even worse.
Game developers and publishing forgetting that a bunch of us who enjoy playing their games are black? Who knew. Tired of this. For every game that gets it right, another 10 fuck it up completely. I had to just go with the buzzcut in Elden Ring because everything else just looked terrible. Even Nioh 2 got this right. C'mon FROM/Bandai Namco.
I haven't played Bloodborne but I actually didn't know there was character customization in that game, I was under the impression it was just a premade MC that you were stuck with.
...I should play Bloodborne.
...I should play Bloodborne.
I mean, yeah. Part of that is beauty standards being heavily influenced by white westerners, part of that is just thinking "the biggest demographic for this game is the US and Europe" and just caring about how white people look above all else. Like, they acknowledge black people exist, but not enough to give them anything worth a damn, just the bare minimum (and sometimes not even that).
That's weird, and I even ran a Google search for '210, 105, 30', and one of the results says it corresponds to 'Cocoa brown'.
I definitely concede to your color knowledge and software though.
You're right that does seem to be named cocoa brown -- I blame the people that name colours! To be fair cocoa powder isn't that dark, but it's a long way from what I think of as 'chocolate' skin tones. I work on sports games so I happen to have tons of skin textures at hand. I've just quickly picked a few colours from some of those textures:
Nordic white player (Haaland): 175, 119, 92
American light brown skinned player (McKennie): 89, 56, 31
English dark brown skinned player (Saka): 35, 18, 8
The Elden Ring picker looks like a standard hue-saturation-value picker. It's pretty standard in art tools, but it's a fairly odd fit for skin tones which practically fit into quite a small range of values. Obviously the advantage is you can have a blue skinned guy, but it's quite imprecise and unintuitive if you want to look like a real person! It's all further complicated by lighting -- note how different the colour in your screenshot on the picker is to the skin on the actual character.
For realistic skin tones I wish games would get rid of the RGB/HSV pickers and instead offer sliders for melanin and hemaglobin, which are the two main determinants of skin colour.
That's really cool knowledge, thanks for sharing! And yeah that 89,56,31 actually looks pretty good in Elden Ring. The 35,18,8 lacks the rich dark brown of that picture though, not even close.You're right that does seem to be named cocoa brown -- I blame the people that name colours! To be fair cocoa powder isn't that dark, but it's a long way from what I think of as 'chocolate' skin tones. I work on sports games so I happen to have tons of skin textures at hand. I've just quickly picked a few colours from some of those textures:
Nordic white player (Haaland): 175, 119, 92
American light brown skinned player (McKennie): 89, 56, 31
English dark brown skinned player (Saka): 35, 18, 8
The Elden Ring picker looks like a standard hue-saturation-value picker. It's pretty standard in art tools, but it's a fairly odd fit for skin tones which practically fit into quite a small range of values. Obviously the advantage is you can have a blue skinned guy, but it's quite imprecise and unintuitive if you want to look like a real person! It's all further complicated by lighting -- note how different the colour in your screenshot on the picker is to the skin on the actual character.
For realistic skin tones I wish games would get rid of the RGB/HSV pickers and instead offer sliders for melanin and hemaglobin, which are the two main determinants of skin colour.
So, if I may ask: working on sports games, you obviously have to be conscious of properly coloring Black and other non-white players; do you have like a program you can drop a real picture into, and it approximates the digitized color palette you'd need to reproduce it in game?
We don't, but then we are quite a small outfit. The artists will be able to see the results of the model and texture they're building as they go, in 3D with lighting designed to simulate how it looks in game, but that's about it. One of the biggest issues for us is that we'll build heads based on reference photos, but obviously there is so much variance in how someone's skin looks from photo to photo. Bigger studios often use photogrammetry to get accurate material properties (including but not limited to colour), so I'd imagine those kind of processes would be used for recreating digital humans too.
It's ridiculous when you literally have people shooting fire with an arm that looks like a dragon that they can't have accurate representation of POC lol.
All them 100's and nary a peep about this dogshit suite but gon turn around and tell us we matter at the end of the month lol.
No surprise there, black folk never cross their minds and they definitely don't see us in their little fantasy worlds unless to be some racist ass caricature like Ebon Darkmare, Bringer of Urbanization or some stupid shit like that.
But you know what, I don't know why I expected even the bare minimum from Dark Souls 4. Even the skin looks horrendous in the game's lighting. But guess what you can have the Mr. Crocker special but god forbid somebody wants at least a Caesar with a decent line up.
0/10. FromSoftware, Bringer of Racism and Ash undefeated.
No surprise there, black folk never cross their minds and they definitely don't see us in their little fantasy worlds unless to be some racist ass caricature like Ebon Darkmare, Bringer of Urbanization or some stupid shit like that.
But you know what, I don't know why I expected even the bare minimum from Dark Souls 4. Even the skin looks horrendous in the game's lighting. But guess what you can have the Mr. Crocker special but god forbid somebody wants at least a Caesar with a decent line up.
0/10. FromSoftware, Bringer of Racism and Ash undefeated.
Hispanic man brown man checking in here and yeah, I noticed right away in ED's creator.... shit is fucked man, it's 2022.
I have this dude on ignore because they're always posting goofy shit. This is yet another example of why. Imagine this being the bullshit to come to a thread to comment on lmao.
Yeah, I was really, really disappointed in the character creator of Elden Ring when it comes to trying to create a black person. I was really hoping to be able to create a Black woman like I did in Demon's Souls Remake, but gave up after a while and just went with some marginally brown looking person :/ . While I appreciate that the character creator is much, much better than previous From titles, it absolutely fails Black players.
I went from creating this MC in Demon's Souls:
To creating this MC in Elden Ring:
Needless to say, I was definitely bummed and disappointed. It's absolutely a step up from previous titles, the customization options are still severely lacking.
And no, I'm over the tried and true excuses that get trotted out each time this topic is brought up.
It's frustrating when, time and time again, character creators fall painfully short at serving people of color with their character creation, and in particular the Black community. At this point, it's not like character creation is some radical new concept, or that the Black community hasn't been speaking up about this shit for years and years now. I can't help but take it personally these days, when, once again, a character creator fails to provide, at a bare minimum, adequate character creation options for people of color.
Lol! I'm also black and lefthanded, so I feel your pain XD XD
Left handed fist bump! 😭😭
I went from creating this MC in Demon's Souls:
To creating this MC in Elden Ring:
Needless to say, I was definitely bummed and disappointed. It's absolutely a step up from previous titles, the customization options are still severely lacking.
And no, I'm over the tried and true excuses that get trotted out each time this topic is brought up.
It's frustrating when, time and time again, character creators fall painfully short at serving people of color with their character creation, and in particular the Black community. At this point, it's not like character creation is some radical new concept, or that the Black community hasn't been speaking up about this shit for years and years now. I can't help but take it personally these days, when, once again, a character creator fails to provide, at a bare minimum, adequate character creation options for people of color.
Lol! I'm also black and lefthanded, so I feel your pain XD XD
Left handed fist bump! 😭😭
Oof. Yeah it was such a let down going from Demon's Souls remake to this. My black DeSo character was so badass looking. Could barely make my Elden Ring character even look black.
Bluepoint need to make Bloodborne 2 or Demon's Souls 2.
...I'm also black and left handed lel.
To the best of my knowledge, I'm surprised that there isn't a colour slider to pick the melanin and hemaglobin of a characters skin colour, along with other general settings where you can change your avatar's racial facial features, as trying to find a natural skin tone can be a headache whenever I've played the Dark Souls games. I truly hope FromSoftware will fix this with new customization features in a future update.
I haven't played the Demon Souls Remake, so I can't make a proper conclusion on how that game fairs with how you can create a brown or black character without your character looking like a complete mess.
I haven't played the Demon Souls Remake, so I can't make a proper conclusion on how that game fairs with how you can create a brown or black character without your character looking like a complete mess.
It could be so much more, but this is probably the best one I have seen so far:
Save for the hairstyles options :( Please FROM, give us more hairstyles!!!
Save for the hairstyles options :( Please FROM, give us more hairstyles!!!
In a bit of comedy, RDC world is streaming this game and literally brought up their video about this.
Right? I was fucking around with that character creator for over an hour, and finally was like, fuck it, I'll just change my plans.
The Demon's Souls character creator was like a revelation for me when it came to being able to create a Black woman, and I was like, "Hell yeah!" I admit I was hoping that, with Elden Ring, and considering how much Miyazaki liked the Demon's Souls remake, that some of that CC DNA would find influence in ER. Unfortunately, that isn't the case.
And black and left handed Era members represent! There are dozens of us! Dozens!!
CoryxKenshin put out his video on it and brought it up, briefly, in his video as well when he made a pure obsidian character.
This is a bit of a necrobump. But I wanted to pass on a template someone could use for a black male like figure. Skin color can be changed from the grey i made. But should be helpful if anyone ever googles this.
(Reason for the bump I had someone privately find this thread on Google and liked my template.
View: https://imgur.com/a/eI99ZoE
(Reason for the bump I had someone privately find this thread on Google and liked my template.
View: https://imgur.com/a/eI99ZoE