Skin Color Update

Regis made a reply to the Skin Color thread over at Camelot Vault to back up Sanya’s reply on the thread. Here is his reply:

Hello, all.

This is an issue that gave us some pause at the beginning of the project. Clearly, DAoC was shaping up to be very “white.” And so, we explored some options:

Tinting the skin tone just isn’t possible with the way we’re doing faces. DAoC uses vertex coloring to achieve tints in the game. It’s fairly effective for armor and weapons, but doesn’t allow the tinting to be selective. Therefore, we could tint the skin, but since the hair is a part of the head geometry (as a multitexture), it would get tinted as well. Worse than that, we would be taking a face map with white features, tinting it “black,” and trying to pass that off as representative of someone of African decent. I’m not black, but if I were, I couldn’t imagine something more offensive than that.

The other option, of course, is to paint truly African faces and give those as options. This would work, but the question becomes, “Why just Caucasian and African faces? Why not Asian? South American? Native American? Indian?” The world is full of races we could represent. If we only made an effort to include one of them, it would simply be a token. Again, I’m not black, but that’s an insult. And in all honesty, we don’t have the time or resources to try and paint every race in the world, so that option isn’t possible either.

In the end, all of these important questions were solved by staying with the fiction of the game, and making all of our human races of northern European decent. It’s convenient, yes. I still don’t feel completely comfortable with it, for some reason. The best I can say is that the problem was given respectful consideration, and the ultimate decision was not racist.

I hope that helps.

Thanks Regis!