Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Elves are not Elven - Tel-quessir feed back ;)

While shopping for Dragon magazines, I chanced across the following issue ->


Ah...good old Tony DiTerlizzi; the man once again proves that he's more than just a Planescape artist.

Do you mean "terrifying" ?

Tolkien source material stated humans sometimes were mistaken for elves and vice versa. And actually he never described pointy ears on elves and flat out rejected it. People misquote a letter about hobbit ears to say he did. He didn't. And no not all elves are fair skinned either. That is another made up myth by certain people. SOME were. There is no doubt on that. But not all.

Tolkien even implied in writing that his fictional history implies that over time the darker skin colors became inherited traits within tribes or ethnic groups because that is what naturally happens.

People use this as proof of fair skin,

Yet Christopher Tolkien flat out states that text is wrong.
So the text in question was referring to the Noldo only, which at the time Tolkien referred to as Gnomes. Editors of the publishers changed it incorrectly to the more broad term making it a description for all elves when it was not.

Clivehusker, I should have made it clear that everything after "Tolkien's elves are, ah, different" in my comment concerns the elves of Dungeons & Dragons (or, more specifically, most Dungeons & Dragons settings) that may be featured in any potential film based on the IP.

My question is, are the elves just not physically elven enough, or are they not elven enough with enough cultural coding? From my perspective the only Elf we see regularly in BGIII is Astarion, and he's indistinguishable from a human noble.

Depends on wich parts of their culture you take under concideration ...

Elves NPCs certainly arent friendlier to other (surface) Elves ... wich i understand is one of theirs racial features. :-/

If you play a stereotypical elf ranger is there a difference in reactions or experience to playing a human character? I mean, aside from the meditation for sleeping which is far too long, I'm not sure what the difference is really.

Cultural coding? That may take some time to unfold; there is still much we do not know about Larian's attempt at doing the Realms justice (even though they've fallen short in any number of areas thus far). Appearance-wise, however, these "elves" are absolutely off the mark.

Depends ...
Logicaly Humans dont get [Elf] dialogue options and Elves dont gets [Human] dialogue options (wich are BTW incredibly rare last time i checked).

Other than that ...
Cant think about any difference that isnt also some mechanics. :-/

Humans obviously dont see in the dark ...
Elves might have a problem when NPC wants to put them to sleep in dialogue.

I think in playing an elf, I've only had it be something remarked on a couple times. I do think Minthara called me a 'fairy' and there has been a skill check or two involving nature or animals. But honestly, the elves at this point, seem pretty indistinguishable from humans.

Appearance-wise, the faces are pretty human-looking, I agree.

I remember we talked about the appearance of elves before. I Do not like the triangular faced odd elves which were quite extreme in some versions, but perhaps more along the lines of the Dragonlance elves for me. At this point, anything might be an improvement, especially the poor drow elves, who look perpetually grumpy and angry.

Drow have a diet of mainly mushrooms.

They are making themselves look grumpy so you can't see how stoned they are.

LOL. That was hilarious! =-)

When it comes to Dragonlance, I prefer this sort of elf...


...as opposed to this "elf".


The funny thing is that all pieces are by Larry Elmore and of the same character no less; I guess he played it safe with later renditions of Laurana.

I remember Laurana. I guess maybe his paintings aren't quite the same as his sketches. I recall liking his drawings of Gilthanas though. His elves are a bit more petite though than FR ones can be.

The big problem for me I think (and I might have mentioned this before) is that half elves and full elves are near indistinguishable in terms of appearance. The only difference is ear length. While there is some variance in the art, elves are constantly being described as being immediately recognizable from humans due to their features and that being reduced to ear size/shape is just a shame.

Personally, I'd like to see a little exaggeration with their features. The larger, inwardly angled eyes are a pretty deeply-rooted look for them even if it doesn't show up in every art piece. Would be nice to see some of those noted angular faces too. There was even that piece in one of the 3.X books IIRC that showed the proportions/angles that were used as a sort of guide for elven features. So there's certainly lot of material for Larian to go on. Plus, the dwarven, halfling, gnomish and githyanki facial models all look tweaked from their base scans to me, so it's really odd that elves stand out as just using unmodified scans.

This isn't a dig at the faces available, that they are ugly or anything-there are some great face models available to the elves. Aside for one or two though, they just don't look particularly very classically 'elven' IMO.

Indeed. Non-FR elves are - on average - shorter and slimmer than humans. However, I don't recall any facial differences between any setting's elves; they all ought to share the same basic physiognomy.

I don't understand Larian on this particular issue, since Elves are quite popular with gamers.

The seladrine drow heads, for example, do sort of look like middle-aged rockers to me. Not anything wrong with that, but they all shouldn't be that way.

I don't get why the heads for Seladrine and Loth-Sworn can't be amalgamated. There isn't anything to indicate their features are particularly different than surface elves. I'm not even sure why the Loth-sworn and seladrine are different races either.

This is a topic where my opinion has changed in recent years. In times past, I was used to the idea of drow looking vaguely their surface cousins...but harsher/more fey; these days, the idea of drow being palette-swapped "regular" elves doesn't seem terribly outrageous.