Hopefully there haven't been a million of these.

Now, I'm not saying the Dunmer should be grey Galadriels or just renamed Drow, but at the same time, they should not just get the extremely goblin-ish faces they got in Skyrim. I'm surprised they got so well received that to an extent, any attempts to change their looks through mods to get a more normalized appearance one gets chided for 'ignoring chief Elven features', so let's look at some images of several Dunmer from Morrowind, along with graphically redone versions as to get a good look at specific details.

(Credits to Westly's pluginless head replacer, an HD remake of the vanilla Morrowind heads, and the UESP for the vanilla images)

http://imageshack.us/a/img818/8799/3sc2.png, and an http://images.uesp.net/5/57/MW-npc-Indrele_Rathryon.jpg

http://imageshack.us/a/img706/2337/7qff.png, and her http://images.uesp.net/4/40/MW-npc-Nibani_Maesa.jpg.

The Original heads share an art style with the http://img835.imageshack.us/img835/2042/azvm.png, with added 'skin beads', which is what I call the light-skinned bumps around the eyebrows and cheeks. As for the male Dunmer, most of them had said skin beads, accompanied with heavy scars, warpaints and tattoos, and a huge amount of piercings, and for both genders, their hairs, which features small crowns and clips on them, with the females adorning their ears with elaborate earrings. None of these things returning to Skyrim, except the warpaints in a very small number.

And here's some http://images.uesp.net/8/89/SR-race-Dunmer.jpg

While their style should overall be aplauded due to looking very 'Elder Scrolls-ish', they adopted a new art style that simple looks very ugly, and there's no other real word to describe them, so here's I'll criticize that did make it into Skyrim.

The exaggeratedly tilted almost bug-looking appearance of the eyes

The extremely gaunt appearance of the cheeks and jaw, of which no tweaking of the jaw, chin, or cheekbone can fix. The Elves in Morrowind were said to have higher cheekbones, yet the bone and cheeks themselves smoothed down their face, unlike Skyrim's much more jagged ones.

While Morrowind seems to have the 'skin beads' along where the fore-head ridges from Skyrim would be, the said ridges are in no way a good attempt at replicating them, they simply look rather ugly, the only source of them in former TES games are several http://images.uesp.net/f/f1/MW-npc-Eldafire.jpg heads, and even then, the ridge look is a lot more faint. Their normalmaps must be smoothed out to fix this, when it should probably just be a complexion change.

The plethora of wrinkles that are in the race's base normalmaps, and thus no complexion change can fix.

The extremely pointed and heavy elongated chin. In Morrowind, the chins were indeed more elongated than the very square-looking Human ones, yet the ones in Skyrim are very gaunt, almost jagged looking, and cannot be undone with any slider movements tweaks.

And I'm not saying these are all inherently bad. Some may like the unique look, or believe that Elves SHOULD simply look ugly. And that's not bad, a couple npcs having a more gaunt look because of being hardy and that is perfectly fine, but I don't think the entire race should have the most attractive individual just look rather bad, and the worst ones looking downright repugnant. The mentioned Morrowind features made them look unique, without making ALL OF them look, in my opinion, hideous.

There are a couple other things, such as the fact one could go at their stumpy looking ears or perhaps lip choices, but that's not as pressing as the things listed here.

In any event, after this, would you still call the Skyrim Elven apperance 'lore-friendly' and any mods that change the Elven appearance to a more 'human' looking one as contradicting to the lore?

I think the way elves look in Skyrim is Amazing. I dont want LOTR looking elves in TES.

I adressed that. I said I didn't want grey Galadriels. The Morrowind Elves look unique even compared to other Elves without looking inherently, once again- in my opinion, ugly like the Skyrim ones.

Why would you care about what others think of the mod you use? Almost every mod is inherently lore breaking because it changes the game, which is where we get the lore from. Just play how you want to.

Well I think your first mistake is applying your 21st century-influenced human idea of beauty on a fictional race of, for lack of a better term, non-humans.

Perhaps, perhaps not. But I have a defense for criticizing Skyrim Elf appearances, and that's using the appearance of Morrowind and Daggerfall Elves, which lacked the features of the Skyrim ones. This is more of a stepping stone for people who chide me on preferring Elves without the Skyrim features.

They look great to me.

That's good, glad to see some people have differing perceptions about these things. Tell me, do you think all Elves should be bound under their current appearances, or do you think it should be, for example, more limited to several NPCs in terms of faces, and other Elves to have more Morrowind and Daggerfall-esque appearances, with all Elves having more adorned hairs and such?

I think they should look however the game makers decide they should. The ones in Skyrim certainly all look good to me, they did great on the races this time IMO. I wish they would make the humans look more different though.

I don't find them hideous, but I wouldn't mind Beth returning the Dunmer to their Morrowindish look. It was a nice mix of cursed, ashen, and brutal without going over-the-top uglyish that some Dunmer in Skyrim suffer from.

Exactly. They were a lot more 'normalized' in a way, that their features were, in my opinion, easy on the eyes, while still maintaining a hardened survivalist as well as exotic and traditional look. With a lot of editing, as some said here, you could make a Dunmer that did indeed look half decent, but in the end, I found it more worth it to simply settle for a different race and to simple play Dunmer in earlier TES games until I found a mod that allowed you to change your race's head morph.

TBH the Dunmer didn't look ugly to me, I was pretty impressed. However that comes with a disclaimer since I've not played Morrowind or any of the earlier titles so I have nothing to compare them against other than OB Dunmer. OB, yes....

And i thought bethesda returned to the morrowind look with skyrim ...

Anyway i really like the design of the races and characters in skyrim. I guess they cant make everyone happy

Same, I thought the Skyrim elves looked like what they wanted to go for with Morrowind elves, but with amazing graphics. The long, narrow faces like in OP's screen of Indrele Rathyron. Though I suppose that doesn't have to be a race-wise genetic thing that every elf is subject to, as evident by the other NPC screen.

I like them the way they are (they're kinda nymph-like), but I think I understand where you're coming from.

IMO, while the faces in Skyrim are better detailed than its predecessors, they're still ugly and uncanny valley-ish. The thick eyeliner and stretched, shiny lips are present on all females regardless on race (The ape-like ones). Men have ridiculous mouth shapes. Most eyes on both humans and mer look like bad taxidermy jobs. On top of that, you can only go so far in terms of facial customization, which in my opinion contributed to the ugly, samey look.

I agree that there should be more variety in the facial features of both mer and men. There are common features in certain real-life ethnic groups that can easily be identified, but there are also some, ah, outliers. Maybe there are elves who don't have such defined brow ridges and chins. Maybe there are those that look like they can slice your hand off with their cheeks. There are also inter-species unions between the two, so there should be both men and mer with features of the other running around.

As for mods not being lore-friendly, I guess that depends on how much they change their appearance. Obviously, mods that turn all elves into smooth-skinned, pointy-eared humans will be lore-breaking. However, if there's one that does the above, I wouldn't complain much. (I'd also ask for a link.)

I thought it was sorta funny how skyrim dark elf males are so scowly that half the time their eyes are obscured by their massive angry brow ridges. I agree with you about the dark elves, but I do think the high elves in skyrim were done well. Their strange, angular features are unusual enough to make them clearly something other than human, but they are still attractive after a fashion.

I think they look fine in Skyrim, they were better in Morrowind, but I have no major objections. I would say that, although Oblivion had the worst looking NPC's of all, the one thing it was superior with was that the faces were far more customisable. In Oblivion you could micromanage and come up with anything you imagined, in Skyrim we're just choosing between pre-made shapes.