Ah yes, there is indeed a problem with overly sensitive, humorless victimhood mentality types, who read too much into things. Hope Larian doesn't pay too much heed to those...
Oh no! They made a joke about the most cookie cutter race with the most cookie cutter look is the most picked character in a fantasy game! My white man privileges are obviously attacked there!
That was a joke, from an update almost 2 years ago (literally the month you joined the forum).
The point in specifically mentioning horns and red eyes, etc, was to encourage people with no firm preferences on characters to consider trying non-human races.
In that update, no mention was made of gender or skin tone. There is no reactivity to skin tone in the game, and a minority of female characters is still enough to test the voice and dialogue options.
@ OP: How fragile of you ... I bet you're a real nice fedora wearing guy with a lot of lady friends IRL...
Besides the obvious bait, I actually do think that in hindsight the original joke/message from Larian is quite telling of the discrepancy between their wish for everything exotic/over-the-top and their audience's rather generic and banal preferences.
I don't think this proves anything gender or identity politics related, but rather that Larian is alienating part of the BG3 player base who wouldn't mind a bit of 'normality' in the game's world,story, characters. No need to do the whole "you're a special boy discovering his powers after a dramatic moment of rupture from your shire-like village" fantasy trope, but damn Larian, please give us at least one location where Faerun life is taking place almost normally. Like I dunno, maybe allow us to either restore the inn, or let us visit it before the raid. Perhaps add a few houses and a generic grocery store outside the grove walls, whatever, just give us something cozy, re-assuring and ordinary worldly to compensate for all the extra-ordinary exceptional mega-rare elements currently taking center stage in the game's world and story.
To be clear, I want to distance myself from the BS accusation and bait of OP (GFY and your fragile masculinity) but wanted to give my interpretation of the Larian statement he quotes.
I've long argued that the game doesn't do a good job at all of providing a baseline of normalcy for players, or of introducing the world/setting. We get a lot of things thrown at us with only context clues and our own assumptions to parse them with and I firmly think that that's a problem, especially when the game is clearly trying (rightly, in my opinion) to court new players to the franchise. I don't know the first thing about the setting and the game has, almost to the end of act one, not given me much of a sense of the baseline for what's normal.
I've long argued that the game doesn't do a good job at all of providing a baseline of normalcy for players, or of introducing the world/setting. We get a lot of things thrown at us with only context clues and our own assumptions to parse them with and I firmly think that that's a problem, especially when the game is clearly trying (rightly, in my opinion) to court new players to the franchise. I don't know the first thing about the setting and the game has, almost to the end of act one, not given me much of a sense of the baseline for what's normal.
exactly, I'm not asking them to undo all their work, its their story after all, but please give us a glimpse of ordinary life in the marvelous setting they chose for their game. Really sincerely hope they counter balance this a bit upon release and include a few instances of a normal Faerun which isn't going trough dramatic apocalyptic events or totally abandoned, war wrecked and burned to the ground. Sadly I fear they explicitly chose not to include this as the first chapter would have been the only place where this could have worked as these moments of ordinariness tend to lose their appeal once you progress in levels. A small intro chapter preceding our abduction could have been an elegant solution to give a more grounded experience but I guess it didn't fit their writing philosophy, preferring to start with a bang (and then another one, and then another even bigger one, etc etc etc). All in all I feel this also relates to how the supposedly first chapter we have in EA feels designed for characters above lvl1 while also our companion's backstory seems to go far beyond what would be expected for lvl1 characters.
huh, a single trollish post brings out an actual Larian employee while all the other meaningful threads..
Although I understand why you feel that way, feedback and outright trouble stirring posts are different beasts to handle.
When it comes to shit threads such as these, the official action here is honestly justified when a stupid troll post is made just for the point of stirring up trouble and outright calling developers racist for a silly joke they made two years ago to showcase how the analytics system in the background collects data. Especially in today's day and age where the oversensitive mental-asylum cancer of the internet by the name of Twitter and other social media loves to overanalyze, dissect, shape their own version of the truth and condemn people for anything and everything they say on the internet... even a light-hearted joke.
Point and case here where one dork made a dumb post on Steam forums about this just recently and now we have two threads popping here about the same topic with the same presumptions. It's an avalanche that never stops with these people.
I know the thread is a joke, but as an African American male who has created a few light skinned male humans during my few years playing D&D ever since Beamdog's Enhanced Edition of Baldur's Gate 1, I have some words of wisdom to drop.
"Those who live their lives with nothing but hatred in their hearts don't know how to live life, they only live in a bubble where the only thing they see are the things they hate." - That's my quote
I bet this popped up again because of that chud on Twitter that randomly tweeted about a two year old joke trying to start shit yesterday. And then tried to backpedal once people started saying it was a joke from two years ago by trying to say he’s still interested in the game, only for people to to point out that he really wasn’t, since the literal first thing he tweeted about the game out of nowhere was a two year old clickbait controversy which he would have had to spend some effort to find to begin with.
Chuds literally have only one joke to cram everywhere they try. And the fucker still got rewarded with some 25k likes for it.