I have seen this image before but like I mentioned, if you look closely, those elves are still human-like. The difference are the pointy ears, slight eye shape and size, and their face is a bit more angular but at the end of the day, they are still human-like. The OP mention they didn't like that the elves look human with pointy ears. Shadowheart is a half elf so it makes sense for her to look more human. Astarion is a full elf but he's a vampire, maybe they could of made him look more different but the problem is that he a romanceable companion and so they also want to make him look appealing.
I'm pretty sure nobody wants them to look monstruous or ugly, just less relatable while still beautiful and that touch of strangeness to them that makes them seem not caucasic, nor african, nor asian, nor anything but elves.
Nobody except Larian who have decided entirely themselves to do as such without any consideration to how it would actually affect any group of people.
I'm gonna answer you here because it seems like your post was locked where people can't respond. To the issue of fantasy races having non-white facial features, I don't see what the problem is as long as they act like their fantasy race. For example, if you have an Orc that may have Asian or black facial features but still behaves like an orc, what is the problem with that? I also just opened up the game and went through every race and found that for females, only the Humans and Tiefllings (who have human origins) have Asian and black facial features, which is fine. Now, when it comes to the males, they seem to have mixed it up and gave Asian and black features to full Elves and Drow with the Humans only having white and black features and no Asian. They should have done for the males what they did for the females for only Humans and Tieflings, who are of human origin. To me personally, it is not game breaking to have a humanoid being resemble real world minorities and it is NOT an immersion killer. If that is the problem for some then that might make that person seem like a racist. As I mentioned to you before in the other thread, there are now Asian and black Vulcans but they still behave as Vulcans. It doesn't ruin Star Trek. So, the same can go for Dungeons and Dragons, I don't think having minorities depicted in humanoid creatures is a big deal as long as they remain to to their fantasy race's culture and personality.
The issue is that WOTC and Larian are forcing this without ever having consulted anyone about it. They are deciding how they think that ethnic 'minorities' should be represented without their input.
It has nothing to do with gameplay or immersion and everything to do with misrepresentation and misappropriation of real peoples features.
It wouldn't even be an issue if WOTC / Larian werent being so bolsterously proud of doing it to appeal to whatever area of far leftism they think they are trying to satisfy.
Or if they simply made a fully customisable character generation method instead, which will likely still come.
I personally never had an issue with Drow being an evil race until WOTC somehow decided this was wrong because of real world racial issues and started making drow of all alignments. I had never read anything from any actual people to indicate that these decisions were any kind of rational response to any genuine criticisms.
So what purpose other than fake pandering does any of these decisions serve? Why are real world issues being used at all to influence how a fantasy world should be?
