Except the problem is that Bethesda writes really flat, unconvincing racists. In fact, I’d go as far as to argue weakly portrayed racists in media like Bethesda’s are part of why racists are always like “I’m not racist!” because they’re comparing themselves to absurdly over the top tropes of badly written racism.
You want Disco Elysium level racists in all your games? Because they got that right.
Maybe not all games, but a 3d open-world RPG written by the Disco writers would be utterly amazing
They do now for sure. Morrowind at least was a lot harsher. It wasn’t just racists. There were groups who still practiced race-based chattel slavery. Now they are mostly too scared to even mention it as a possibility.
(Although I would argue Starfield is pretty racist in it’s creation. A large portion of black characters have African accents. This is long after colonization, and theoretically there would have been lots of race/nationality mixing after leaving earth. Sure, some places may retain or even strengthen their accents, but it probably wouldn’t be race based anymore, or at least not the same as in modern day earth. It’s so uncreative and uninteresting, and seemingly racist in its portrayal. I’m not sure if I’m the only one who noticed this, but it aggravated me.)
It’s not just Africans. It doesn’t make sense that Indian/Hispanic/Russian/American accents exist either. Earth ceased to exist hundreds of years ago, and there are no homogenous cultures anymore (except the va’ruun, their accent makes sense). In Bethesdas effort to be inclusive they treated accents like they’re a racial attribute rather than cultural. In reality there would be a UC accent, a freestar accent, etc but the accents depicted in game would be long extinct.
I disagree on the accents not existing at all. For example, The Expanse does it well. The belters have a distinct working class Irish accent, but there’s nothing there to do with race really. Accents can be used to show where groups come from, but for scifi to work things need to actually be thought about.
One of my favourite examples of a “weak” racist is Ulfric Stormcloak in skyrim. You telling me the Jarl of Windhelm and the leader of the pro nord movement continues to tolerate the grey quarter within his walls? Especially given it is implied most nords are racist, and especially the windhelm ones, it seems it would be an obvious political move to evict/raze/kill off the grey quarter.
Of course this could be seen as a bit extreme but it seems weird to me that the city hosting the leadership of the nord rebellion is more racially diverse than some of the other nordic settlements.
