Guild Wars 2

Me and my buddy were just talking about the game, philosophizing as we played some WvW. Then suddenly my buddy told me: “Haven’t you ever noticed there aren’t many black skin colored characters in the game?” And he’s right. I don’t see many compared to lighter skin colored characters. So this made me wonder.

Assuming only 1/4e of the game’s players are black people. Shouldn’t it be “logical” for there to be about 25% black characters in the game? Of course, if you wish to play a different skin colored character then that is of course absolutely fine. I’m just wondering if black people prefer to have black skin colored characters or maybe not?

Just to make sure i don’t offend anyone, This is obviously not meant racist in any way. In fact, i have some darker colored characters myself as a white man.

I’m interested to hear from people.

I don’t think it actually has anything to with actual skin color.

I’ve tried making a dark char a couple of times and to me it just looks wrong. Depending on the lighting it can make a char look so dark that details are just not viewable.
Anything bright shows up way better.

Kinda like how I see male players having more female chars (also no offense meant!) cause they are nicer to look at.

Lol.. i’m one of those male players who has 8 characters, 6 of them female
Can’t argue with that, i just love watching woman.. i guess i’m just healthy.

But yes, i can imagine that the darker tint would remove some of the details. I never tought of that. Good point!

It’ s partly because none of the initial faces really lend themselves to it. Similarly there’s only 1 face (for males at least) that is based on an asian face (and even then it’s so long and horesy) .

My “main” is “black” but really he just looks highly mixed race because the sliders only allow for so much from the default. Change his skin tone and no one would think it unusual.

I have a female engineer I based off of Elona. There is a female face that has a very regal, African look. I think she is bad kitten looking, gave her the blue/black hair with the braided, shaved looking hair. Reminds me of Tina Turner on Beyond Thunderdome

It’s for lore reasons. The game’s human population is largely Krytan (who are usually tan-skinned) with a sizable number of Ascalonians (typically white skinned) and a very small number of Canthans (Asiatic) and Elonians (African) mixed in. Contact with Cantha and Elona has been cut off for many years because of an elder dragon, meaning that the limited racial diversity in Kryta is ancestral – and even that much has probably been watered down through intermarriage.

UnseeN.4928:

Just to make sure i don’t offend anyone, This is obviously not meant racist in any way. In fact, i have some darker colored characters myself as a white man.

You have a legitimate topic which I find interesting. However, I hate the fact that you felt like you needed to preemptively include this “apology”. Have we, as a society, become so mindlessly politically correct and apologetic that we have to be sorry every time someone mentions skin color or race?

As far as I’m concerned, pointing out the fact that a brown person is brown, a black person is black, or a white person is white should not be offensive to most rational adults. What would be offensive is making [obviously false] statements such as “that person is a bad player because he’s [insert skin color]”.

Either way, OP, you had a legitimate question as to whether or not people choose to play characters that are the same race as they are and you should not be apologetic for asking this.

For me it’s due to RP reasons. My human character is a descendent of my GW1 Warrior (Ascalonian) and Assassin (Canthan), so she looks more white/Asian. To be honest, I didn’t even know that black Norns existed when I started GW2 (all Norn in GW1 were white), so I made my Norn character with tanned skin (to represent the fact that, as a Ranger, she would have spent more time outdoors).

My Asura is something of a bookworm, and so I gave him pale grey skin to show that he probably didn’t spend much time outdoors. My Charr? Well, he’s just a plain old brown-furred kitty. XD And my Sylvari looks like a D&D dryad, all browns and greens.

Back in GW1 Nightfall, I made my Paragon black because being Elonian, he would have been black.

Well, I’m bIack and I usually just make characters I think look cool. shrugs. In every RPG I’ll try to make a toon that looks like me if possible, but none of the faces and facial hair options in GW2 felt right. Incidentally, my first is a sylvari ranger that my mates swear looks just like me, if I were made of leaves. After I got a bit more familiar with the game I just started building my alts to have a particular look that I thought would go well with the best looking armour and weapon sets. Out of the six characters I’ve rolled half are female, only one’s dark skinned and uses the face with the most distinctly ‘African’ features. Kind of modelled her after Jinx from LoL, I think it worked out pretty well.

I happen to find darker skin tones and hair more visually appealing RL, so when I’m making characters in games I’ll usually lean to those. But I go for what fits the world, so for instance Donari is just a touch swarthy as he’s a nobleman of Kryta. And Jin is of Canthan descent, so her tone’s deeper. I have a fairly chocolate skinned Norn that had black hair until I got the new updo hairstyle and it begged for gold (but she has wider lips and nose, and looks a lot like my adopted biracial RL sister now — sigh, my sister’s so beautiful … ).

It does get hard to see the facial detail in game, though. My main sylvari has very dark brown bark but I gave her white hair and eyes to stand out, along with a very pointy set of features that the hair silhouettes and the white mottling skin pattern.

Could be interesting if there were a study done on how much variance people go for in character looks vs. their own RL looks, perhaps correlating in whether they RP or not. As a somewhat plain faced woman RL, I do tend to go for better looking characters be they male or female. I’m playing a fantasy game, I don’t want to be frumpy!

sylvari in dark color looks great, especially when it glows =)

This is purely speculation, but I somehow doubt that 25% of the playerbase is black.

If you have the culling settings turned down, nearly all other player characters are displayed as generic characters, and their skin color is jet black. Maybe your friend is seeing that. Also they are displayed just after you zone into an area and remain until the game builds the actual player model and displays that. In very crowded areas this can take several seconds.

Thanks everyone for your answers, i see a lot of reasons coming up that i did not think off. Very interesting approaches!

Also, as pointed out before. Some skin coloring isn’t really correct (lore-wise)
For example, a black skinned Norn isn’t really possible. We know there were no black Norn in Guild Wars 1. Guild wars 2 being approximately 250 years after the events of GW1, it’s not possible to “adapt” enough in the given time in order to become black skinned.

Darthaemos.6370:

UnseeN.4928:

Just to make sure i don’t offend anyone, This is obviously not meant racist in any way. In fact, i have some darker colored characters myself as a white man.

You have a legitimate topic which I find interesting. However, I hate the fact that you felt like you needed to preemptively include this “apology”. Have we, as a society, become so mindlessly politically correct and apologetic that we have to be sorry every time someone mentions skin color or race?

As far as I’m concerned, pointing out the fact that a brown person is brown, a black person is black, or a white person is white should not be offensive to most rational adults. What would be offensive is making [obviously false] statements such as “that person is a bad player because he’s [insert skin color]”.

Either way, OP, you had a legitimate question as to whether or not people choose to play characters that are the same race as they are and you should not be apologetic for asking this.

I agree with you completely. However, i have had some really bad experience with racial discussions running out of hand because one person felt the need to stamp something non-racist with “that’s racist!” This being an example of such discussions.
I prefer to speak my mind and ensure people i mean no harm then to see people flaming each other because someone misinterprets the whole thing.

I’m kinda waiting for Elona to re-open before making a darker skinned character.

I blame Palawa Joko.

Darthaemos.6370:

UnseeN.4928:

Just to make sure i don’t offend anyone, This is obviously not meant racist in any way. In fact, i have some darker colored characters myself as a white man.

You have a legitimate topic which I find interesting. However, I hate the fact that you felt like you needed to preemptively include this “apology”. Have we, as a society, become so mindlessly politically correct and apologetic that we have to be sorry every time someone mentions skin color or race?

As far as I’m concerned, pointing out the fact that a brown person is brown, a black person is black, or a white person is white should not be offensive to most rational adults. What would be offensive is making [obviously false] statements such as “that person is a bad player because he’s [insert skin color]”.

Either way, OP, you had a legitimate question as to whether or not people choose to play characters that are the same race as they are and you should not be apologetic for asking this.

The only thing silly about prefacing something with “not meant to be racist” is thinking that in some way absolves the writer of having racial bias. It often doesn’t matter whether someone intends to “be” racist, often times they don’t…but it happens anyway. It’s akin to claiming someone is not racist because they have friends of “insert ethnicity here.” which, oddly enough, the OP said…with characters. If you say something racist, sexist, bigoted, a disclaimer isn’t going to help. Racial bias is expressed in both conscious and unconscious choices, but that’s a point that can be debated until we run out of breath. No worries though, the question is all good.

On to the question at hand, I haven’t read much about how people choose to design their avatars but what I have read suggests that you can be sure that men and women design their characters differently depending on culture, ethnicity, and other experiences (negative and positive). I would assume a number of people with dark skin play the game but not everyone wants to make a character that looks like them. Some people do, as evidenced by the beta changes to the dark skin tones to make them more realistic, but even then they may want to play characters that have a different life story and look. In short, I doubt every dark skinned person feels compelled to make a dark skinned character but some like that option. As for exactly why that is? That is a subject that could go on for days. Interestingly though, your question is relevant to persons of all skin colors and not just dark skinned people. Why not approach it from that angle?

I’m a black guy, and of the eight characters I have, seven are female and one is a dark-skinned male with an afro.

I wish there were more “African-inspired” faces though like there was in Nightfall.

I have 8 characters, only one of them being white. That white one is asuran. Even my sylvari is black.

Respect.

I’ve created characters in many games but I’ve never felt any desire to create one that looks like me. I just create something that I wouldn’t mind looking at and they aren’t clones of each other.

HaseKent.1843:

sylvari in dark color looks great, especially when it glows =)

yes! I’ve got 2 sylvari characters: my main is a lilac Ele with dark gray patterning and I’ve a black Thief with bright red patterning. Particularly for the thief I’m aware that I may have fallen for a trope but whatever, she looks kitten.

I should get a picture of my Necromancer for this thread… She’s a gorgeous ebon beauty and I would like to say that I don’t think in any way dark skin looks bad on a character. Infact with the right faces it looks exceptionally attractive.
However I do agree, I don’t see many dark skinned characters myself. I’m black(ish) and I have 2 black characters and a mocha character.

Also, by no means is this meant to degrade what you’ve asked here, it’s just something a friend of mine had said to me.
“Why are all your characters black?” I responded with, why are all of yours white?
Think about that.

I’ve never really considered making characters that look like me. Personally I think it’d just be weird because they’re obviously not me. I just design characters that either look cool or fit a theme.

My only permanent human character in GW2 has kind of mid-brown skin (very similar to Queen Jennah) because she’s supposed to be descended from all my GW1 characters who were split pretty equally between Ascalonian, Canthan and Elonian.

I have noticed that when I make temporary characters if they’re male humans they’re quite likely to be black, I’m not sure why. I think they might be loosely based on my GW1 PvP character (who was based on the theme of Samuel L. Jackson playing Aragorn.)

My charr is mostly black, with white stripes (kind of a reverse zebra pattern) and I really like making black/dark coloured sylvari.

Because in a fantasy world, you are the who you want to be. Colors and gender don’t matter.
I think people generally choose color by character’s good/evilish look. Necromancers generally prefer black skin and black armor while guardians prefer white/blue themes.
Also 70% of my friends use female characters and they are all male. I think, people don’t care about creating a character with their real-world looks.

There are plenty of darker skinned characters. The interesting part is that they’re rarely humans or norn. If you pay attention you’ll see plenty of dark-toned asura, charr, and sylvari, however.

All I can think of is Brutalitops the Magician.

Edit: So having only read the first post before throwing this comment out, I just wanted to say, that I wasn’t posting this in reference to anyone’s picture or anything in particular.

My a sura is black hehe. I liked the way it made his large eyes stand out more glowing that yellowish gold color. But I’ve definitely never made a character look like myself. Any human I’ve ever created in game usually has a dark tan to it. Its just what I prefer.

I’ve played many games with Hispanics and a few black friends. Not many of them make a character that looks like them, a woman I game with sometimes is black but 90% of the time her characters in game are usually white and sometimes white/black males. Really I don’t think there is any link at all to anything, people just make what they like because there is no judgement or stereotype/stigma attached.

My Necro is a Black Norn. She is a decendant of an Elonian Paragon and a Norn Monk.

My Mesmer is a displaced Elonan, brought to Divinity’s Reach by a whispers spy when he was a babe. He is also black.

I love the way they both look, and I would not hesitate to make more black and dark-skinned characters if they didn’t have such odd tones in their pallette. Some of them are kind of blue-ish, and the brown ones just don’t have the warmth.

I have never been one to make pasty white characters, and even my light-skinned avatars are darker than most.

For the record, I am white.

oh, to add: I’ve tried making really really pale characters, but they all looked really boring. The closest to the “cool albino” look I got is with my Charr. and I had to give her enormous horns and a mohawk to compensate all that white.

personally, I like playing unusual colours. But you don’t have that option. (can’t have a blue human for example XD …)

I also wonder statistically IF a quarter players are black. ..Is it more/less. What about the stats on individual servers?

I’d assume the majority of players would aim for a colour most like their own or someone they know. (things you’re used to, generally look better.)
There also isn’t a whole lot black NPC’s, again..which brings us back to “thing’s you’re used to seeing, look better”.

Taygus.4571:

personally, I like playing unusual colours. But you don’t have that option. (can’t have a blue human for example XD …)

I also wonder statistically IF a quarter players are black. ..Is it more/less. What about the stats on individual servers?

I’d assume the majority of players would aim for a colour most like their own or someone they know. (things you’re used to, generally look better.)
There also isn’t a whole lot black NPC’s, again..which brings us back to “thing’s you’re used to seeing, look better”.

I highly doubt it’s that high but then again it doesn’t matter. It’s been pointed out by me and a few posters above who happen to be black that they do not always make dark skinned characters. Also there isn’t many black NPC’s because the human area isn’t Elona.

Yep, if we ever get an expansion set in Elona almost all the NPCs will be black.

I haven’t played a person of color because I don’t think I could do it justice.

Darker skin, especially dark African tones, look better real life in my opinion, since they show off muscle definition much more strongly than whiter ones. There’s a reason why body builders in competition use a lot of spray tanning.

I have a few darker skinned characters (I guess more is more bronze) and they look very beautiful but as mentioned above, in a 2-d setting you lose definition with dark colours. I don’t know if it is because of melatonin, or more likely shadows you get r/l and not in games.

There is, however, a SEVERE lack of customisation options in game which allow for a true African look. There are aspects of African facial features which the game doesn’t cater for (wider noses, deeper brows, more full ears etc). It’s a shame, really. My only truly dark skinned character had to be designed based on a Moroccan/north African appearance because of these limitations. She’s dark, but does she look African? Not really.

GuzziHero.2467:

Darker skin, especially dark African tones, look better real life in my opinion, since they show off muscle definition much more strongly than whiter ones. There’s a reason why body builders in competition use a lot of spray tanning.

I have a few darker skinned characters (I guess more is more bronze) and they look very beautiful but as mentioned above, in a 2-d setting you lose definition with dark colours. I don’t know if it is because of melatonin, or more likely shadows you get r/l and not in games.

There is, however, a SEVERE lack of customisation options in game which allow for a true African look. There are aspects of African facial features which the game doesn’t cater for (wider noses, deeper brows, more full ears etc). It’s a shame, really. My only truly dark skinned character had to be designed based on a Moroccan/north African appearance because of these limitations. She’s dark, but does she look African? Not really.

It depends on which part of Africa, as you said. Northern/Moroccan have more streamlined and “Euopean” facial features, and sub-Saharans tend to have flatter, more pronounced features. Both are beautiful, but they do speak to different heritages.

One of the other complaints that I have in choosing darker skin tones (whether black or simply brown/bronze) is that the tones don’t cover evenly on the Human models. The knees and elbows tend to look like they’re a full tone or two darker than the rest of the body, as if one has been playing in the dirt…anyone know why? The Norns don’t seem to have the same problem.

BTW: Did anyone notice that the Human have Beyonce’s face in the creation gallery? It’s only noticeable as hers if you choose a dark skin tone. I think it’s priceless! It’s a throwback to GW1, where they used Eva Mendez’s face (I forget which chapter.) Are there any other “celebrity faces” I missed?

Ashabhi.1365:

Are there any other “celebrity faces” I missed?

Clint Eastwood?

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/images/6/64/Human_male_faces.png

Black character checking in: http://i.minus.com/iKGztKfKBH25O.gif

I now see that my personal experience trying to create a darker char is purely based on aesthetics and that I tried it on an Asura… And for me that just didn’t look good.

There are some gorgeous chars in this thread that prove me wrong (although that is not the point).

I did like reading that indeed a lot of male players like to have female chars
To me totally understandable, I prefer female chars too, grin.

Lore and playerbased influence the tones you see in game. Ive talked and connected to many GW players since 2006. 9:10 chance they were white.

This really seems to be a human-centric problem. You see all kinds of colors and shades of fur, skin, and bark across Tyria.

I usually make a ton of Asura characters but whenever I make a Norn or Human I always make them black I love using my own skin colour.

synk.6907:

This really seems to be a human-centric problem. You see all kinds of colors and shades of fur, skin, and bark across Tyria.

Well Tyria is diverse as a nation. Norns and humans however tend to be of the same kind.

Ashabhi.1365:

My Necro is a Black Norn. She is a decendant of an Elonian Paragon and a Norn Monk.

That’s… not possible. Norn and humans can’t have children together.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Norn

The section on physiology. It was stated in a PAX interview that none of the races have the physical capability of cross-breeding no matter how similar they may look.

I have extensively experimented with the various human/norn skin tones. I found that very light or dark skins don’t look good under certain lighting conditions. Thus, all my human and norn toons are medium brown in complexion.

Generally not fond of the face options for Human male, so mainly I’ve played Asura and Charr. The notion of color applies differently to them, as I’m more likely to make a Charr that looks like my cat rather than try to create a Charr character of color.

Now, all that said, if ArenaNet released some additional faces for humans with features more suitable for a character of color I might make a human. I will say Protoavis did a really good job with the creation of their character though.

Edit: Went back and toyed around with character creation some more and found that my primary frustrations are derived from two sources: Eye color and lip color/tint.

Lips are generally a slightly lighter in tone than the rest of the skin, but with GW2 if you make a character dark skinned their lips are significantly lighter than everything else. This just throws the appearance off for me, and it irks me even if I’m staring at the back of my character’s head 99% of the time.

For the eyes, I’ve always lamented the lack of a simple dark brown eye color. I’m all for the option of exotic eye colors, but I wouldn’t mind good old dark brown.

Lips and eyes.

OP, I’m not gonna be much help to you as a white girl, but I wonder about statistics regarding racial preferences, too. This thread has been an interesting read, so ty for asking and ty to everyone who responded :)

I’m white but I have a black character (had two black characters and one Arab-inspired character from Elona, plus my two asian ladies from Cantha in GW1) who is a Norn warrior. It’s important to me to represent other skin tones in my character lineup because… I feel bad when someone says “I made the character I like to look at” and it’s white. I feel like… if I make only white characters am I contributing to a culture telling non-white people that their skin isn’t as pleasing or beautiful etc? Because it seems that way. I think about that a lot.

Someone upthread said “black norn aren’t possible” which is ridiculous because ANet wouldn’t have given us the option to make them dark skinned if that were legitimately the case. I know what the person was trying to say (it isn’t explicitly addressed lore-wise why we never saw black norn in EotN), but that just seems like a lazy excuse to avoid diversity, especially when Elona and Cantha aren’t represented in other meaningful ways within the game beyond a single random npc now and then. I choose to believe that in the ~250 years since Primordus’ stirring in EotN that either inter-species-breeding happened between Norn and Human (my Elonian Paragon spent a LOT of time in EotN and is my GW2 norn’s great grandmother or so) or else the non-white Norn came out of the woodwork/became better placed in Norn society (Norn Civil Rights Movement?).

Like others, I was trying to wait for an Elona area/story arc to be released before making dark-skinned humans in the hopes that better faces+shading will come along (along with some Elonian skins -clings to Vabbian armor-), but I couldn’t wait; my paragon was one of my 2 favorite characters and I had to represent her somehow in GW2. TBH I need them to release more classes with those areas because I have one of each class right now and am finding it hard to justify leveling any more alts without a unique class for them.

I also have a black asura, but I don’t count her. Sylvari, Charr and Asura are the least humanoid characters in game, so it feels incorrect to bring them into a discussion about representation -shrug-

I’m also confused at people who make dark skinned characters with the afro hair style, then give them a name referencing their blackness/afro (not an African name, to be clear. A name like “Pick My Fro” or something) and communicate in purposefully abnormal speech patterns (“jive turkey”esque 1970’s slang and/or ebonics, which I have less problem with because it’s more likely to not be a gimmick but actually how the player parses language). There is a specific character from Tumblr I’m thinking of here and a few people I saw on my old server. Are they loving homages to the blaxploitation genre, a critique of that genre, an ignorant gimmick by some white dude…? I have no idea. I just try to avoid that sort of thing because I obviously don’t have enough knowledge to handle it well. I’d rather make my character’s affectations reference Elona, which is a touchstone readily available and open to all players, regardless of age or culture (I think that in addition to a race gap in understanding the significance of the blaxploitation genre there’s obviously an age and cultural one, since it seems to be a western genre strongly rooted in the 1970s which was before I was even born). I don’t know… thoughts?

To be fair, my black Norn’s name is “Quoth Ze Raven” but that’s because “Quoth The Raven” was taken :\ I wanted her name to make it feel like the spirits themselves had written her into being. I love the feather tattoos norn can have, her patron spirit is raven, she has the dragon bash wings, and the Ze reminds me of Ze Frank (which in turn makes me want to say “that is how raven do” whenever she levels).

All that said, my main is still a white norn and I play her a majority of the time because she’s the character whose equipment is the best, whose class is my favorite and whose build has been perfected — so I’m still doing a kittenty job at the repping diversity thing because I have to split my daily ~2 hours between 7 characters, three of whom aren’t human and of the remaining four, only one is black.

his belly button is an abyss ye only men dare trevel into

I’m white as mess, and this is my main character.

Protoavis.9107:

It’ s partly because none of the initial faces really lend themselves to it. Similarly there’s only 1 face (for males at least) that is based on an asian face (and even then it’s so long and horesy) .

My “main” is “black” but really he just looks highly mixed race because the sliders only allow for so much from the default. Change his skin tone and no one would think it unusual.

That’s pretty much what I imagine when I imagine a War God. Looks fantastic.

My main is a black male Norn. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had people ask if I’m black irl. They also typically note that I don’t sound black on VoIP.

Their flagrant insensitivity aside, I enjoy playing characters that aren’t a dime a dozen. (Human, white) That and darker skin tones complement Mesmer butterflies much better