qft

There is saying that says the beings in Tamriel always take physical characteristic of their mother. As Bretons are a end result of racial experimentation between Aldmer males and Nede females, it isn't uncanny that they look more like humans than elves.

What kind of high school dropouts designed this series...

The alleged merits of games in the Zelda series aside, it is absolutely in the anime style. Not the original NES version obviously, you can't tell the difference at that resolution, but ever game since then has been.

No.

Nothing should look anime, ever.

It can happen in reality too. It's not that rare that you might look more like your mother than your father. But they still have the intelligence of Aldmer, so I say it's a fair trade off. Besides if they looked more like Aldmer, Altmers wouldn't exist and neither would the Thalmors.

They have to look human according to the lore, they had human mothers so physically they are 100% human. Metaphysically they are 50% elves, so they are efficient with magic.

From Notes on Racial Phylogeny and Biology, 7th edition:

" After much anolysis of living specimens, the Council long ago determined that all "races" of elves and humans may mate with each other and bear fertile offsping. Generally the offspring bear the racial traits of the mother, though SOME TRACES OF THE FATHER'S RACE MAY ALSO BE PRESENT."

So when the Aldmer and Aylied males impregnated their female human slaves/captives, the offspring would have looked more human, maybe with some elven features.

You have to remember, though, that this mixing mostly happened quite a while ago, and the mixed offspring have for generations been mixing with other humans since that time. I just figured that the only real elven characteristic left in the Bretons is their proficiency for magic and natural magic resistance.

Elton John. Much as I detest every piece of music of his that I've ever heard.

You may only inherit certain parts of your mother, but not everything.
For example, if you have a black man and white woman breeding, the offspring will be half black and half white, like President Obama.
If two half blacks breed, the offspring may be everything between full black and full white, but it will most likely be more in-betweens (odds for full color is ~1%).

This seems not to be the case in Elder Scrolls. As the mother's phenotype is always inherited you can have a long line of Altmer women no matter who they mate with. This is odd because phenotype is just another part of your chromosomes as is everything else.

Of course the universe contradicts itself here - Bretons are in art shown to be in-between mixes but in-game you can hardly tell them from Imperials.

Obama looks more black than white to me.

Anyway I understand your point, but Tamriel is not Earth. And Elves don't exist in the real world. That's the lore and I don't mind it. It justifies the reasons why Altmers are in to selective breeding, to keep physical characteristics of Aldmer.

Black dominates over white. Though I'm not complaining - global warming means black skin will be more practical than white skin.


But yes, this is not Earth. Combine real world with fantasy and the only thing you get is a ruined day and wasted five minutes.

Obama's actually pretty light-skinned though. Compared to full-on Nubians he looks pretty white.

Semi-unrelated - sometimes Google Image Search pulls up some strange things:
[img]http://www.freakingnews.com/pictures/33500/Obama-The-Demon-33963.jpg[/img]

If more Bretons looked like THIS I'd be happy. Very clearly Man, but with a few hints of Elven features. That, to me, is what a Breton should ideally be.

are you kidding? not a another anime design please...

I've never seen a clear enough difference between Bretons and Imperials--at all. Nords are at least taller.

It's like 'hey you can be whatever you want, like this generic human and this NOT generic human (we promise, they are elfy, a little).'

They don't look like http://images.uesp.net/c/c1/Lore-race-Breton.png for sure. They're just small imperials with a little mood to them. Heh.

Imperials are watered down-Nords. Seeing as Bretons, Imperials and Nords all come from the same source they should share a lot of similiarities. Thousands of years of breeding between these races would help as well.

Yeah yeah, genetics. I agree with the OP mainly on the level that if I were designing a game with x amount of races to choose from, I would make them as distinct from one another as possible.

It's bad enough that Skyrim's inhabitants are about as majorily white as its landscape. Some variety plox.

There is a lot variety in Skyrim. And you can't really add an Asian flavoured race as their culture seems to have been used up to describe the Akaviris to a certain extent.

How so?

Imp-yes, Nord-yes, Breaton-yes
Orc-no, Redg-no, Alt-no, Dun-no, Kakj-no, Arg-no, Bos-no

That's three to seven. Besides one can easily make a Breton as dark as a Redguard. In Oblivion you could make an Altmer / Asari, if you wanted. I miss that creator.

Well the races were described long ago, you also have to remember that Skyrim is the birth place of humanity, three races come from that (partly) Nords, Bretons and Imperials. There is a civil war going on between the Nords and the Empire, so logically speaking the two races you would see the most are Nords and then Imperials. A lot of Dunmer left Morrowind recently so you'll see a lot of them as well.

Most other races have less reason to be there. I think Oblivion came closests to have a lot of different races everywhere, Morrowind also was like 50% Dunmer, 50% rest.

There could have been a lot more, though.

To me, Skyrim is a land of the human races with few visual differences between them plus a few non-humans that could have been given a bigger population, but lore new and old with this installment limits them to mostly being in the background or in deeper nooks.

Actually, that makes me wonder which region is (by lore) supposed to be the most diverse. The biggest melting pot, if you will.

Edit: Crap. This was on Ji Soo's point, by the way.

Exactly. The west has enough [censored] popular culture of it's own, thank you very much. We have no need to import more from the East.

Cyrodiil.

All the other provinces have some outsides but are mostly limited to their own race. The Black Marsh doesn't even allow other races to live in it's deeper parts.