So Stellaris, the "4X" game by Paradox, is releasing various updates to some of its older, previously "cosmetic" DLCs which includes the Humanoid pack. In these updates are two new portrait options that are being described as "Elves".
Behold, "elves": https://i.ibb.co/1f3ZyxJ/elves2.jpg
Don't worry, they come in many colours, the fact the default option is brown is totally a coincidence.
https://i.ibb.co/wLrcCqQ/dfa5a33825065088193e525adb199e510ad02a7e.png
https://i.ibb.co/HGD7DJZ/eec8cf19bf79a5de08f7069acceb264e38cef117.png
Do note that so far that second image is still labelled as "Females", so wait and see how soon that changes to "Body Type 2" or something else.
The second set aren't much better: https://i.ibb.co/ZSDWdJ5/085749c6cadb73a8aeb68cf0be5b83dd18d47db2.png
The response has been somewhat cathartic with many players calling out the new designs as of a quality not befitting a game such as Stellaris which has been running for 7 years now.
There are also some very expected comments about how the portraits have certain slants towards actual human appearances. As well as bats.
Some of the nicknames for the portraits even include "Nubians" more so because they look less like Elves rather than more like certain Human groups.
Keep in mind Stellaris is the game which previously banned certain mods that would skew leader/population appearances in certain ways, in this case towards Caucasian, however as is known by many here it's acceptable when The Message is "correct.
Oh and a final point, these changes to the past DLCs are coming with a price hike. Those who have them won't be charged extra but a previously cheaper tier of DLCs that added in species content instead of "Story content" as the larger DLCs are referred to is now on par with the newer DLCs which brings the total DLC cost for Stellaris to something like $270.
Negrelves?
Though they also remind me of Ferengi.
Hey now! That is a direct violation of Rule of Acquisition #31: Never Make Fun of a Ferengi's Mother.
Really, they don't look like jews to me?
As an avid Stellaris addict, I couldn't help but notice that too.
But then I remembered they just redid the human portraits to make them look better, and suddenly there wasn't even an appearance option that looked remotely African. The blowback on that was fuckin hilarious! I honestly expected them to pull and redo the new humans on account of that, but instead they put the old portraits in alongside the new ones and looks like they went and made this instead.
The problem with that wasn't just the new models being criticised, it was that Paradox also removed the original human portraits as well. They backtracked and brought the original option back alongside the new one, but it's still a shitty practice to remove content from a game.
I have yet to use the new Human portraits, mostly because almost every mod that adds improved Human portraits does so to replace the default one, which is still more diverse than the newer one Paradox added recently!
I'd like to introduce you to my friends, The Blorg.
They will be your friends. OR ELSE!
Hold up, backtrack to the mod fiasco. How the hell are you able to ban mods for a game that can be single player and offline?
Steam banned it and possibly nexusmods IIRC. You can download and use any mod that exists but Steam is a simple subscribe click which then automates the implementation. For more "freelance" options you need to do that manually and tbh it's not complicated, but it might be enough to put off the more casual players.
Because paradox are racist cucks who hate Whites. This happened back in 2016 or 2017 a European portraits and names mod was banend while paradox promoted a black only human portrait mod. Moddb was the only one who didnt remove that European humans mod
Which is dumb when space travel will mean a trend towards being white! Darker skin tones happen because of greater solar radiation exposure. In spaceship, behind hulls and whatever other protective options like shields in many Sci-Fi settings, said solar radiation is no longer a thing, so a species has no reason to continue promoting melanin production.
Spacetravel may mean the use of artificial UV lighting to encourage Vitamin D synthesis since a single UV lamp is lighter and easier to use than shipping who knows how many VitD capsules. Lighter skin tones will facilitate greater uptake of UV from artificial sources and lower rates of depression and mood disorders from VitD deficiency.
I really want to make a "Pigs. In. SPAAACE!" pun here but I'm not sure just how far I want to take it as the original works almost too much.
Could also go for the simple letter swap of P to N 👀
Rigga, please.
Take it all the way
Holy crap. Those are more ugly than most of the necroid and toxoid pack. I'll certainly be modding them out.
Only thing I like from the Necroid pack is the robot option.
https://stellaris.paradoxwikis.com/File:Necroids_machine_portrait_red.png
I have yet to get Toxoids because I'm not really that motivated to get the newer things until they are on sale. By a lot.
Reject flesh, upgrade to crab 🦀🤖
Elves 1.0
We already got elves in stellaris, came with the base pack. These new abominations look more like a cross breed between avians and insects
Also known as the "Totally not Vulcans, please don't sue us, Star Trek!" portrait.
Goes well with the "Totally not Klingons, please don't sue us, Star Trek!" portrait >.>
https://stellaris.paradoxwikis.com/File:Humanoid_02.png
Stellaris does lean hard on various Sci-fi references throughout the game, like with Babylon 5 and the Fallen Empires. The awakening notification even has "Giants in the playground" as the confirmation button, a line said by Sheridan when discussing the opposing Vorlon and Shadow forces, as well as the neutral option to the War in Heaven forming/leading The League of Non-Aligned Worlds, also from B5.
The actual crisis events also match up with other themes like the Prethoryn and Tyranids as invading extragalactic fleets of organic ships whose only goal is to consume the galaxy.
They really hate brown people don't they. Every 'diversity initiative' they do makes them appear really ugly or at best, slightly above average while white or white enough, even though they'll put them as villains 90% of the time are more attractive.
Just look at the latest 'Snow White', I'd much rather get with the evil stepmother than 'the fair maiden'
Have you seen the average brown person? Not the ones carefully selected for TV and movies, but average ordinary brown people. They're not easy on the eyes.
Maybe I've been lucky as sure I've run into some more.....primitive looking black people but I've met more attractive or above average black women on the street along with Asians, Indians, Eastern Europeans, Mediterranean, Middle East can't tell etc
Across the board anyway media especially gaming from western companies is presenting women as more ugly than what you see on average in your regular service industry.
Probably just a mix. Being in the US, for every hideous black person I see I can see a troglodytic white, an insectoid Asian, a mongrelized Latin American, etc. US residents are generally unhealthy, unkempt, and unattractive.
How do they hate blacks when they worship blacks and latinos? Diversity, equity, die, crt is used to demonize Whites while worshipping blacks and latinos. Whites are called racist for everything including not hating themsleves while democrats give blacks and lstinos special priveldges like affirmative action. Best buy and Nascar most recently demobized Whites and gave special privledges to blacka and latinos. Democrats celebrate black criminals and let them burn loot murder.
Yet after all that you think they dont worship blacks?
Beauty usually is hand in hand with civility, when you think of beautiful women, you usually think of grace, seductive attitude or way of speaking. Even the more tomboy pretty women have these qualities.
The left DON'T praise these qualities in their minorities, they want them primitive, subject to their base desires as they're easier to control but at the same time this produces an ugliness so the left is trying to promote this ugliness as 'the new beautiful' and with minorities they hide behind racism if people reject it.
I really want Stellaris to be good but it just fundamentally can't ever be good. The basic mechanics just aren't fun.
It's not a great game, but it is one of the best random space opera story generators around. And an absolutely ludicrous platform for mods. My favorite way to unwind after the kids are in bed, apparently already north of 5000 hours according to steam.
That's why I really want it to be an actual good game, it feels like it should be great and there's nothing else trying to do what Stellaris does, but it just turns into brainless spreadsheet monitoring against the most braindead, pointless AI in the history of video games.
Yup, spreadsheets, awful stuff! shoves EvE online farther under the rug
I will say that the AI has gotten markedly better in more recent patches. It doesn't fill worlds with pointless law enforcement, no longer intentionally suicides fleets into losing battles for no gain, and on the highest difficulties it is able to use its massive resource advantage to actually win. Meta on highest difficulties is now to aggressively attack and vassalize an AI empire right away in order to extract resources from it, because they also made it so subject empires only lose part of their AI difficulty bonuses. It is... extremely hard to win on the highest difficulty without that cheese.
There are four steps beyond the level playing field setting of Ensign, and I usually play on the second of those, which usually makes for a tense early game and a more even later game. On the third step I win less than half without doing cheesy stuff.
Currently playing around with the Stellaris Evolved mods and its associated side packs. It adds quite a lot of interesting civics, to make new columns in my spreadsheets.
With that kind of artificial difficulty, there really is no "cheese" in my mind. War is a dirty business, especially galactic ones!
Stellaris gets worse with every update
It's a trend with many games. I still miss the earlier versions of SWTOR when planets didn't force [heh] you to scale down to the appropriate level. No more soloing World Bosses, no more boosting lowbies through the lower instances in 10 minutes, now you have to slog through E.V.E.R.Y.T.H.I.N.G. every time you run something.
I miss 10 minute Black Talon runs. Was great for getting slottable weapons and armour for companions back when that was kind of needed.
The change to the companion system was one of the few good things the updates brought, no more needing to bring comps you actively despised or wanted to space because it was your only healer option. Looking at you Malavai Quinn!
For the Steam version of the game at least, the 'betas' tab has every single major patch available to select. So even when somebody finds the new changes to be for the worse, they can just hop off Mr. Paradox's Wild Ride and enjoy the version they thought was best.
Definitely want to archive your workshop mods if you do that though. A tool called Irony Mod Manager can take a bunch of your mods and smosh them together into a single mod, and you can then archive that so that you can enjoy both the mods and version that struck you as best.
Really wish more games were so liberal with their patch rollbacks.
The thing is, elves are actually based on real people. The various traveling people had a specific Germanic group that fit all the original descriptions. The legends change based on lactose intolerant areas into vampires. When the English got it, the people descended from many of these same groups, but lost the idea because they all started farms or fiefdoms. The French interpretation and English folklore combined to make a completely different group. Let's not forget the Scandinavians had just as many weird ideas. Tolkien knew about this because he studied languages and history. He had plenty to work with when he made the elves, and chose the language based on the English ideas of the Welsh.
Today the entire idea has changed so much that no one realizes those traveling families still exist. The elves still wander. Saying they're black is an insult to them and the legend they made.
company was infected with the DEI/ESG bug a few years back
I will check this game out. The default option of course is purely coincidence lol
Would recommend buying the game and DLCs when they are on offer. As OP mentions it's almost $300 for everything atm and tbh even though I've been playing myself for about 5 years I still don't have some of the most recent big story DLCs. In part because I always wait for them to go on offer, but also because most when released are buggy messes and break the game. The most recent being Paragons that revamped the leader system and currently significantly lowers the number of leaders players can use.
While a major reason for this may be to put a soft cap on performance by imposing penalties if you recruit too many leaders, the problem is with four categories you will hit the caps very quickly and then end up in a situation where you have a potentially galaxy spanning empire that can only support a dozen named leaders across your fleets, planets, science facilities, and armies. Effectively having one Sci-fi show worth of main characters in charge of everything in the galaxy with no minor or supporting characters at all.
Edit: this does of course get modded by a lot of players to simply raise the new cap.
Recommend buying it? The DLC's alone clearly state that you should pirate it. Add in the fact that they banned mods and they don't deserve your money.
Not what I was intending with my post. If someone is buying it I would only recommend they do so when the various parts are on offer in some way. The base game is frequently free in some deals/bundles and the actual DLCs can be as much as 75% off, especially on Xmas.
Honestly haven't got past 1.9 in terms of updates just because I want the free patching of jump drives instead of the highway retardation
RIP James Caan from last year who played Shithead/the human in the original movie.
I bought Stellaris and Endless Space 2 at the same time as both were going dirt cheap for what content existed at the time. Ironically I went with Stellaris as I didn't really like how ES2 felt and since then Stellaris has slowly been creeping towards playing like ES2 🙃