Why does the forgotten Altmer Hero not have Elven eyes?

ThePrinceOfBargains

Never understood this. Why give this elf human eyes, yet stick with the traditional Elder Scrolls elf eyes for the in-game models?

Menelaos

Oh god, I love her

VaranisArano

Much to the chagrin of the Veiled Heritance, their vaunted theories about the purity of their Altmer bloodlines turn out to be complete bunk when the forgotten Altmer hero turns out to have obvious human ancestry.



Practically speaking, human-like faces look better on advertisements that are aimed at a bigger audience than Elder Scrolls lore fans.

Although Naryu Virian gets the Dunmer red eyes in her trailer, she'd got pretty human-looking eyes as well.

ThePrinceOfBargains

VaranisArano wrote: »

Much to the chagrin of the Veiled Heritance, their vaunted theories about the purity of their Altmer bloodlines turn out to be complete bunk when the forgotten Altmer hero turns out to have obvious human ancestry.



Practically speaking, human-like faces look better on advertisements that are aimed at a bigger audience than Elder Scrolls lore fans.

Although Naryu Virian gets the Dunmer red eyes in her trailer, she'd got pretty human-looking eyes as well.

I didn’t even notice Naryu had Human eyes. Damn ZOS, with their Human-washing!

emilyhyoyeon

I always assumed it's just cheaper to not bother investing resources into making mer look perfectly like mer

red_emu

Even elf eyes got nerfed

logarifmik

VaranisArano wrote: »

Practically speaking, human-like faces look better on advertisements that are aimed at a bigger audience than Elder Scrolls lore fans.

A very questionable statement. Can you provide some social research on this subject, please?

Thogard

VaranisArano wrote: »

Much to the chagrin of the Veiled Heritance, their vaunted theories about the purity of their Altmer bloodlines turn out to be complete bunk when the forgotten Altmer hero turns out to have obvious human ancestry.



Practically speaking, human-like faces look better on advertisements that are aimed at a bigger audience than Elder Scrolls lore fans.

Although Naryu Virian gets the Dunmer red eyes in her trailer, she'd got pretty human-looking eyes as well.

I had no idea that was supposed to be naryu. I thought it was just a generic player character stand-in.

VaranisArano

Thogard wrote: »

VaranisArano wrote: »

Much to the chagrin of the Veiled Heritance, their vaunted theories about the purity of their Altmer bloodlines turn out to be complete bunk when the forgotten Altmer hero turns out to have obvious human ancestry.



Practically speaking, human-like faces look better on advertisements that are aimed at a bigger audience than Elder Scrolls lore fans.

Although Naryu Virian gets the Dunmer red eyes in her trailer, she'd got pretty human-looking eyes as well.

I had no idea that was supposed to be naryu. I thought it was just a generic player character stand-in.

Its Naryu. The trailer is the climax of the "Naryu's Journal" hat was published alongside the collector's edition for Morrowind: https://www.imperial-library.info/content/naryus-journal

VaranisArano

logarifmik wrote: »

VaranisArano wrote: »

Practically speaking, human-like faces look better on advertisements that are aimed at a bigger audience than Elder Scrolls lore fans.

A very questionable statement. Can you provide some social research on this subject, please?

What's your take on it?

The way I look at it, the Elder Scrolls doesn't have a visually definable "look" to their elves that screams "ELDER SCROLLS BRANDING!" the way that WOW or Warhammer does. And if you don't benefit from your elves looking visually distinct, why bother? Better to have the elves look like elves, but not weird and potentially off-putting. Hence, human-looking elves. edited to add: especially since you have to avoid the Uncanny Valley effect.

But I dislike arguing into a vacuum, so lets hear your reasoning.

Shardan4968

Yeah, I don't like making mers more like humans with pointy ears, it doesn't feel like elder scrolls universe (and ples don't bring oblivion screenshots here).

logarifmik

VaranisArano wrote: »

What's your take on it?

The way I look at it, the Elder Scrolls doesn't have a visually definable "look" to their elves that screams "ELDER SCROLLS BRANDING!" the way that WOW or Warhammer does. And if you don't benefit from your elves looking visually distinct, why bother? Better to have the elves look like elves, but not weird and potentially off-putting. Hence, human-looking elves. edited to add: especially since you have to avoid the Uncanny Valley effect.

But I dislike arguing into a vacuum, so lets hear your reasoning.

I just find it hard to agree with you at this matter. You see, Mer in TES have almost Men appearance. Regarding eyes, the only distinction is bigger iris. It's very unlikely, that such detail can lead to the Uncanny Valley effect. As a proof of my words, I can refer to the Na'vi from the Avatar movie. They have exactly Mer eyes, don't you agree? Damn, they look like blue Altmers!

Acrolas

VaranisArano wrote: »

Practically speaking, human-like faces look better on advertisements that are aimed at a bigger audience than Elder Scrolls lore fans.

Not so much that they look better, but when you're doing a realistic render, human styled eyes help generate more empathy for that character. We connect better. We interpret emotions more clearly. There are fewer degrees of 'fake' to wade through.

Something the creators of Alita: Battle Angel clearly don't understand. If a character requires a distortion so jarring that it eliminates all sense of realism, don't choose a realistic medium. Because the results can be financially devastating.

VaranisArano

logarifmik wrote: »

VaranisArano wrote: »

What's your take on it?

The way I look at it, the Elder Scrolls doesn't have a visually definable "look" to their elves that screams "ELDER SCROLLS BRANDING!" the way that WOW or Warhammer does. And if you don't benefit from your elves looking visually distinct, why bother? Better to have the elves look like elves, but not weird and potentially off-putting. Hence, human-looking elves. edited to add: especially since you have to avoid the Uncanny Valley effect.

But I dislike arguing into a vacuum, so lets hear your reasoning.

I just find it hard to agree with you at this matter. You see, Mer in TES have almost Men appearance. Regarding eyes, the only distinction is bigger iris. It's very unlikely, that such detail can lead to the Uncanny Valley effect. As a proof of my words, I can refer to the Na'vi from the Avatar movie. They have exactly Mer eyes, don't you agree? Damn, they look like blue Altmers!

Okay. So if I understand you correctly, your argument is that Altmer look almost like humans, so slightly altering the eyes to have a bigger iris shouldn't be a problem. Which if that were the only changes to the Altmer vs human appearance, you'd have a point.

Except that's not really the case.The Altmer in the trailer is distinctly human-looking (basically a human with ears) compared to the actual Altmer. Now, ESO elves are pretty human looking with the exception of the large irises, brow ridges, and generally angular faces. That's much more a product of ESO design than it is the other Elder Scrolls games.
Altmer in Skyrim: http://elderscrolls.wikia.com/wiki/Altmer_(Skyrim)

So when it comes down to your advertisements, you can have a generic human-looking elf who's not too far off from something you can make in game even though she's totally generic but she looks cool, or you can have a 6.5 ft tall, golden-skinned, large-eyed, sharply-angled faced female elf throwing magic whips around. ESO went with generic elf lady because A) She's a lot easier to make look cool. B ) She's obviously a elf to anyone who doesn't know anything about the lore. C) No one is going to be all "why do your elves look weird?" if they make her look generic. D) Only the lore people are going "why does an Altmer look like a human wearing elf ears?"

You can compare how advertisement-Naryu looks compared to in-game-Naryu to see a similar design process. Advertisement Naryu is considerably more humanized.

Waffennacht

Because it would freak out the majority of the people whom watch the commercial?

Doctordarkspawn

...Define 'elven eyes'.

VaranisArano

Doctordarkspawn wrote: »

...Define 'elven eyes'.

Presumably ones like these, with the large irises.

You can see the large irises in Skyrim as well.


Edited to add: and just from those two pictures you can see the major differences between ESO's elven designs and Skyrim's designs for the Altmer.

runagate

Presumably they didn't offer the actress sufficient remuneration to have life-destroying elective surgery for a short promo shot.

VaranisArano

runagate wrote: »

Presumably they didn't offer the actress sufficient remuneration to have life-destroying elective surgery for a short promo shot.

Those are CGI.
https://baldasseroni.deviantart.com/art/Breton-Knight-Full-body-production-render-404824858

TheUndeadAmulet

Maybe it's because they are human actors.

Just a theory.

Betsararie

She does look pretty human

ArchMikem

VaranisArano wrote: »

Much to the chagrin of the Veiled Heritance, their vaunted theories about the purity of their Altmer bloodlines turn out to be complete bunk when the forgotten Altmer hero turns out to have obvious human ancestry.



Practically speaking, human-like faces look better on advertisements that are aimed at a bigger audience than Elder Scrolls lore fans.

Although Naryu Virian gets the Dunmer red eyes in her trailer, she'd got pretty human-looking eyes as well.

Tragically in-game Naryu looks absolutely NOTHING like her Cinematic counterpart. It'd be nice if ZOS would take all their Crown Crate money to invest in a better Engine.

16BitForestCat

VaranisArano wrote: »

Practically speaking, human-like faces look better on advertisements that are aimed at a bigger audience than Elder Scrolls lore fans.

THIS. One of the things that irritated me about the version of the Morrowind announcement trailer that played during the U.S. Super Bowl last year was how it "subtly" cropped out all the non-human bits. You very clearly see the Redguard man's human face over and over again and up close. But Naryu's face is either not shown at all (you see her from behind), shown from a distance where the "elfy-ness" wouldn't be apparent to the average viewer, or shown so quickly that you wouldn't be able to see said "elfy-ness" without doing a freeze-frame at just the right moment--and even then it's often blurry or partially obscured. The Dunmer that Naryu was targeting and the extremely non-human Argonians in the full version of the trailer? Nowhere to be found.

It annoyed me because the advert was obviously intended to be appealing to the stereotypical "meatheads" watching the Super Bowl (stereotypes are bad, mmkay, and I say this as someone who doesn't watch sportsballs)...but those "meatheads" aren't the core audience of Elder Scrolls. To someone who knows the series, the ad looked like it was dumbed down to be as generic fantasy as possible, while to someone who doesn't know Elder Scrolls, it still just looked like generic fantasy with generic clockwork fantasy bits tossed in.

I'm sure making wider-audience Elder Scrolls ads to be as generic fantasy as possible makes sense from a marketing perspective, but to people who are actually into the series, it can be a little frustrating seeing the things that make Elder Scrolls...well, Elder Scrolls...dumbed down or cut out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZVFlq57UuI