"Elves as a playable race", how does it fit in New Britannia lore?

Tarsin, a good friend of mine designed her for me. She is an original digital painting.

 

This game and the movie have the same name too!

 

Diversity Doesn't Stop With Elves...






+1 for every ethnic diversity of Character representation and historical representations +2 for Ninjas
"Open Up The All Gateways That Lead to Freedom of Choice"
~Time Lord~
XX

 

Hmm, I'll think on these things and try to make scence of them.

Thank you, friend, for clearing this up for me.

Brother, you have a bizzare perspective on things sometimes...other times I think you have it right on the spot.

 

No purple people (and llamas)? Before You were cool!

 

Everyone Loves a Purple Lama
~Time Lord~

 

Really not possible. Elves are originally created from wizards experiments. They have no land to take as they didn't even exist until they were created after the cat.

 

Elves are the absolutely worst possible option for another race/diversity imo
Don't even care if it fits the lore, I was really disappointed when I saw the playable elves idea =(

 

Where will this end i wonder.

2 things really made this game potentially different to all the other fantasy MMO's

A) only 1 character
B) not using all the typical high fantasy stuff

in a matter of weeks both went out of the window. and while i dont care much about multiple slots ( as it is optional) plain old fantasy stuff being implemented will be forced upon people ( you cant just switch of other PCs playing elves)
and that's even aside from the obvious lore consequences.

I hope this doesnt become a totally different product than the one i initially funded on KS.

EDIT: reworded some things

 

You know, that might not really be a bad idea (or even a player mod, once the functionality for that is added); being able to just swap a human model for the "player elf" model. There are lots of those kinds of mods for Skyrim.

 

But again, there is no good reason for this other than your personal preference. Why are elves "absolutely the worst possible option"? I am guessing because you don't like them for some reason or another.

Personally (all story related things aside for this post), I think they would fit SotA perfectly. Ultima has a history of crossbows and ranged weapons and guess what race excels there? Not to mention, Elves are naturally gifted in the magical trades.

 

Racism,segrigation, and oppression, it is possible, friend.

 

and if you only see the worst in the world that's what you'll get. Plus this is a fantasy world.

 

In most generic fantasy, yes - elves are the woodland-loving, generally good-aligned archers of the world. (Except for Terry Pratchett's Discworld, where elves are among the nastiest creatures you could meet. There may be other writers who buck the Tolkien trend.) Not the case in this world, though, unless ranged combat was one of the things that was 'built in' when the creatures were designed. I don't recall any specific mention of that in the book, although the abundance of elven archers and casters in the actual game so far implies the generic fantasy route (disappointing).

The point is, to me anyway, that this game was not going to be ''generic fantasy" or so I thought. There are a ton of fantasy RPGs that let you play as elves, dwarves, lizard people, whatever - SotA was going to be different. It feels to me like a lot of people don't really want 'different', however much they may claim to... they want the same stuff they see in every other game because that's what they're used to.

They want more than one character slot because they're used to being able to try out every class in the game (not applicable here because of the classless system, but they want it anyway), and some don't like the idea of not being able to be self-sufficient in crafting. Many people bought more than one account just so that they could have extra characters - very good for funding!

They want to play elves: 1) because elves are always popular in other games, 2) because elves are often 'prettier' than humans, and 3) because they want to pretend they're Legolas (or maybe Drizz't). Some authors have a lot to answer for, but that's a personal gripe.

To answer a couple of the questions above... Although I wouldn't mind quite so much if elves were available as a 'non-Avatar' race, I don't see how that would fit into the game easily. They're a 'native' race to New Britannia and would need their own complete storyline and quests, separate from the quests we as Avatars are going to be asked to do, and that would be a heck of a lot of work. Perhaps for a later episode that could be added in, but I'd rather not see time spent on that for Episode 1.

With regard to the argument about "playing as yourself" and therefore having to look and act as you do on Earth, I know that's been discussed elsewhere in the past but I can't lay my hands on an example right now. That wasn't what I was referring to in my earlier post - what I meant was something that has been said by the devs before, which is that although your body may have changed in the process of transferring to New Britannia (hence why you can have a different gender and appearance if you wish), the expectation is that you will retain your earthly morals and ideals and that is what guides you in completing the quests in the game. That is the 'you' that you're playing.

You may not have been able to use magic on Earth, but now you're in a world where magic does exist and you can choose to learn it. You may not have killed anything on Earth, but now you're in a world where things will attack you if you venture into dangerous places and you'll need to defend yourself. There are various methods to do so in this new world, and you can learn them. You may never have forged a sword or made leather armour or built a table on Earth, but now you're in a world where, in most cases, your old way of making a living has been taken away from you - so if you don't want to be sleeping under a bridge and eating scraps you might want to learn a new trade. Throughout all of this, unless you choose to roleplay a completely different character (which some people will and that's perfectly fine with me - some have argued that playing yourself isn't 'roleplaying'), you'll still have your earthly morals and attitudes that will inform the decisions you make in this new world. You're still 'you' in spirit, even if the body looks different.

This is why I feel that elves as a playable race just don't fit. If you get changed when you come through the rift, you're most likely to get changed into a different-looking human. If you won't be swapped into the body of a kobold or satyr, why would you end up in the body of an elf? And given the fact that most NPCs already treat human Avatars as outsiders, and that the only elves we've seen so far have been violent antagonists who'll kill you as soon as look at you, how can we expect an elven PC to be treated? How will a player-elf ever be able to do the same things that a player-human can, when they ought to be treated far worse by the NPCs? The only way I see it working is if elves have their own separate story and quests.

These words from Arabella imply that the elves have found their own way in New Britannia, but that they're still not accepted by humans. Hopefully there will be times when we can encounter them and they won't try to kill us on sight, but I still think they will work best as an NPC race to encounter and not as a player race.

"The Vertas people that live in the Forsaken Vale, for example, a new race borne of the Cataclysm which we have grown to call "elves"; Lord British has told me this may be reference to a long-distant legend that the people of Novia have since forgotten. The Vertas elves for their part are like men, but different... different enough. They struggle to live alongside the rest of us, but where a man might burn with emotional fire, an elf will be cold, distant. They worship history, knowledge and truth, and those who wish to learn the wisdom they hold would do well to discover the ways of these people. It is certain you will encounter them on your way."

Finally, to Time Lord's comment about diversity - humans on Earth are indeed very diverse, and that should definitely be reflected in the choices available to us at character creation. And hopefully not by just changing the skintone without adjusting any other facial features to suit the race you're trying to portray! We're going to need an array of eye, nose and mouth/lip styles at the very least - but again that's a whole other discussion.

 

That is true about Amanda (and my personal belief is that she was 'more human' because she was a failed experiment), but it brings up the point I made earlier - how are elves a race that breeds true and creates more who look the same, when they were mutants at the start? For me it's not so much the fact that there were elves in the past, it's why are there still elves now?

 

And who would want to invest in the stretch goal, simply to be a servant?

Makes no sense. But you can only hope your idea works!

 

If we do get ninjas then we had better also get pirates. Just sayin'.



(Sorry for the rash of posts, had a few things I wanted to respond to! )

 

Wise words.

 

The mistake was calling them elves in the first place. If we just stuck with Vertas people, it would have gone over better.

I'd like the "kobold" race (which I assume is the same thing - avatars from earth using a high fantasy term from their world to describe a native population on this planet) to be playable as well, and bring on their models. I hope they're dragon/lizard like.

I'm imagining like Alias and Dragonbait from the Forgotten Realms or something ..

That would be fun as an alt / family account to Sir Trady here.

 

I've gotten over the fact that there are Elves in this game. They've explained that through story and I've enjoyed reading their history in BotA.

But they have not yet adequately explained how Avatars can now manifest themselves as Elves when walking through that lunar rift. I'm sure there's some backstory behind this but they simply haven't revealed it yet. And more critically what impact does that have on the story now that humans can indeed manifest themselves as Elves? Was that taken into account when they wrote the story or are they rewriting it now to accommodate?

And what happens when Satyrs become playable? How about Kobolds or Skeletons or Liches? It's pretty much guaranteed now that we'll see even more playable races (especially to re-use existing assets) and that's fine with me as long as they have a good story to go along with it so that the choice to be non-human is meaningful to the story arc of this game and simply not cosmetic.

As it stands, playing as Elves is purely cosmetic without any meaningful impact to the game and that seemingly breaks lore and story completely. We need a Story Megapost that explains this. Otherwise, I want to manifest myself as a Dragon since the physical form has no meaning in this world. Just a means to pass through that rift, right? And I'd bet the Dragon Stretch Goal would make a ton more money than Elves since you could breathe fire and fly