So where are the Black people in Fable?

I can understand why due to time constraints they cut out gender. Leaving in the clothing and a couple of flags to trigger some humorous (or not) cross dressing convos isn't too difficult or time consuming. But not having at least some initial and basic control over your character's appearance does work against what they're trying to accomplish with this game, imho.

It really isn't a huge big deal, but it does go down as one of those WTF decisions that makes you wonder at times. It would have been a relatively simple change to the game, and it didn't even inherently require any other changes to the game, such as enabling a female character would.
 
Because from a coding standpoint, allowing allowing the player to choose from 5 skin textures instead of defaulting to just one really isn't a big deal. Especially since they could easily take pre-existing skin textures and either use them directly or modify them slightly, something probably any artist on their team can do quickly and painlessly.

Edit - And I said, they could have done a relatively bare bones version which only changes your appearance, and not how other characters or other elements of the game react to your character.
 
Mejilan said:
Because from a coding standpoint, allowing allowing the player to choose from 5 skin textures instead of defaulting to just one really isn't a big deal. Especially since they could easily take pre-existing skin textures and either use them directly or modify them slightly, something probably any artist on their team can do quickly and painlessly.
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With Fable's characterized style, you can't just take the standard white guy head and color it black. That would look ridiculous. They would have to model a new head (several, in fact, for different ages) different hair/hairstyles, and all of the other morphs involving alignment changes, from horns to the way the character's jawline shifts.
 
Again, all very singular and pretty easy additions to do, all things considered.

That said, are there no NPCs of other races? Because if other character types already exist outside of those you can actually be, that makes the whole deal even simpler.
 
The game engine was initially much more impressive looking and they had it up and running like that. The problem was that the XBOX could not handle those visuals with tons of people running around and all of the gameplay systems active.
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Hence, they may as well have been renders.
 
CrimsonSkies said:
Where's the black people in Nintendo games?
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warioware_3.jpg
 
Mejilan said:
Again, all very singular and pretty easy additions to do, all things considered.

That said, are there no NPCs of other races? Because if other character types already exist outside of those you can actually be, that makes the whole deal even simpler.
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it's not an easy addition. They'd have to pretty much check and recheck every little change that happens to your character, from growth to scars. To say otherwise would be very ignorant of you.
 
CrimsonSkies said:
Where's the black people in Nintendo games?
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Punch-Out!! Of course, outside of that (and perhaps F-Zero and Pilotwings, IIRC) there aren't many. Still, non-Japanese/'white' characters are still rare to see in video games... Fighting games and sports games...
 
Because from a coding standpoint, allowing allowing the player to choose from 5 skin textures instead of defaulting to just one really isn't a big deal. Especially since they could easily take pre-existing skin textures and either use them directly or modify them slightly, something probably any artist on their team can do quickly and painlessly.
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Dude, haven't you seen how the main guy morphs and changes?

fable.jpg
bilde39.jpg
And I can't find the picture of the really evil guy that has horns growing out of his head.

and this is the base model
fable.jpg


Now what kinda techinques are being used to change that inital base into every other possibility?I don't know and so I can't say how difficult it would be to change the skin. It might be that the techniques used to morph the base model into bulky-scarred-good as opposed to aged-skinny-evil are not transferrable at all, or a lot of effort went into the base hero model that would take a lot of dev time to redo for a different model or hell both.
 
There was a Spanish guy in Final Fight 2, but, aside from some joke Mexican wrestlers, there have been few hispanic characters in games (let me amend that to include Front Mission 4 and Parasite Eve). Even Rafael in Soul Calibur 2 was French instead of Spanish, and Greco in Chrono Cross doesn't exactly count.

Of course, there are also few Italians outside of crime games, few Belgians, Hungarians, and the only Germans and Romanians seem to be in Castlevania games. Street Fighter games have Thai characters occasionaly, but other SE Asians are uncommon. Russians show up in cold war games, but not much else.

How about putting someone slavic in Fable?

Vague European descent Americans, Asian (although not usually asian lookingand the only non-japanese seem to be Chinese or Korean martial artists), and Japanese or Americans of African descent (often portrayed humorously, as in Shenmue) seem to be most of what you see in video games.

Front Mission games and fighters throw in token diversity to make the characters more interesting, but little else does. I'm okay with it, though, since most games I play are in fantasy settings that areusually pretty homogenous with humans and then have elves, dwarves, kobolds, and others.

Suikodens have been improving also, as they have at least 108 characters to fill in.
 
The only videogame representation Indians have got is Dhalsim. We make up a 1/6 of the world's population dammit! :D
 
So, to be black you simply have to make evil choices and your tone and color will darken?

Is that how it works?

You grow horns too?

I'm going to ask Paul Mooney how black people hide their devil horns.
 
Lost Weekend said:
warioware_3.jpg


I have no idea what his name is, but this guy is my favorite video game character ever.
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Jimmy T the groovy disco dancer! Hard to tell in that pic, but his moustache is in the shape of musical notes!
 
Gantz said:
LOL! I was going to post a similar thread about Doom3! Where are the black people?! Only Asian and White people live on Mars?! WTF?
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Well there was one black guy. He came out of the bathroom as you checked into the Mars station. I assume he was probably killed early when the stuff hit the fan, like most minorities in sci-fi.
 
garrickk said:
So, to be black you simply have to make evil choices and your tone and color will darken?
Is that how it works?
You grow horns too?
I'm going to ask Paul Mooney how black people hide their devil horns.
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I'll bite.
What the hell are you talking about?
 
garrickk said:
So, to be black you simply have to make evil choices and your tone and color will darken?

Is that how it works?

You grow horns too?

I'm going to ask Paul Mooney how black people hide their devil horns.
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Dude, to get dark skin you stay out in the sun a lot and you get a deep tan. Most of the evil characters shown in Fable screens are extremely extremely pale

fable_screen002.jpg

You got some major chip on your shoulder guy.
 
Gantz said:
LOL! I was going to post a similar thread about Doom3! Where are the black people?! Only Asian and White people live on Mars?! WTF?
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There's a token black guy in Marine HQ (or was it Communications?) in the intro movie. That's it.
 
Not sure if it was mentioned,but if you stay long enough in the sun in Fable,you will become black,or at least get a very noticable tan.
 
Look the basic idea of this game is that everybody starts out as the same male hetrosexual white boy. And then from there you can make that male hetrosexual white kid into a evil sword swinging male hetrosexual white adult, or a good spell slinging male hetrosexual white adult.
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...you haven't heard?
 
Deku Tree said:
But it was developed by a formerly 2nd party company, published by Nintendo and is still exclusive to the GC.
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So? When someone refers to a game developeed by Nintendo, do you REALLY think they are referring to companies like SK?
 
well so far we have learned... we don't live in space (doom3/freelancer) or in fantasy worlds (fable) just in GTA where we keep it real! (with gats and all)
 
dark10x said:
So? When someone refers to a game developeed by Nintendo, do you REALLY think they are referring to companies like SK?
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I didn't see the word "developed" in the first post that I quoted. You can disagree about whether I'm right or wrong, but I still think of ED as a "Nintendo Game".

In any case, another example is given by some of the race drivers in F-Zero GX (which was developed by SEGA AV) but is still very much a "Nintendo game" in my opinion.
 
Deku Tree said:
I didn't see the word "developed" in the first post that I quoted. You can disagree about whether I'm right or wrong, but I still think of ED as a "Nintendo Game".
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OK, that's bizarre and annoying (that you would discredit SK's work by calling it a Nintendo game). Is Metal Gear Solid - The Twin Snakes a Nintendo game too?

F-Zero GX was a game that was developed by both companies. Nintendo had a lot of input in the design of F-Zero GX and the game also used an older Nintendo IP while duplicating the gameplay of the Nintendo devleoped versions. That is not the case with SK...
 
Azih said:
Look the basic idea of this game is that everybody starts out as the same male hetrosexual white boy. And then from there you can make that male hetrosexual white kid into a evil sword swinging male hetrosexual white adult, or a good spell slinging male hetrosexual white adult. Now if this was a traditional Western RPG then this would be a bad thing as those games are built on as much customisation in the main character as possible (Morrowind, Baldur's Gate, KOTOR), but Fable isn't a traditional western RPG, it's an amalgam of a bunch of different conventions. And they kept the Japanese style convention of a very strictly defined main character initially.
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You know that you can be gay in the game, right?
 
To my mind a Nintendo second party game is a Nintendo game. Nintendo funded it, it was exclusive on GC and hell Denis Dyack was in a permanent state of orgasm over that fact.
 
dark10x said:
OK, that's bizarre and annoying (that you would discredit SK's work by calling it a Nintendo game). Is Metal Gear Solid - The Twin Snakes a Nintendo game too?
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Your reading too much into what I was saying. I'm not trying to discredit SK's work... SK was a second party at the time so Nintendo deserves some credit too.

And as to your second question, I think of MGS:TTS as a remake of a Kojima game.
 
Freelancer 2: electric boogaloo

Blackace said:
well so far we have learned... we don't live in space (doom3/freelancer) or in fantasy worlds (fable) just in GTA where we keep it real! (with gats and all)
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They are just lucky "we whites" threw them a bone and let them play the title role in the third GTA this gen ;)
 
What about the Jews? I can't think of any Jewish game characters aside from BJ Blaskewicz from the Wolfenstein games.

Anyways, in the game I'm working on... I'm trying to add a bit of diversity... Hispanic characters haven't been represented very well either - the guys in Parasite Eve, Robert Garcia are all I can think of offhand. Arab characters as well... I mean there have been games like Defenders of Oasis, Prince of Perisa, and Fugitive Hunter :P . Italians? Well don't forget the most famous game character of all time... Indian characters? Farah in Prince of Persia and of course her father, the Maharajah. I also seem to remember some Dreamcast game with a character that was half Indian, half Japanese. Gay characters? Ummm.... Leo in Lunar:Eternal Blue? You'll probably find that in some Japanese games, that was edited out for the American versions. I'm kinda sick of playing pseudo-White/Asian teenagers in my games... Let's have a polack character, a non gangster italian, an arab... Then again, look at TV... look at the most popular show when it ran... Friends... you don't get more cracker than that show!
 
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