Bosmer aren't Gnomes, ZOS

Faulgor

Rebirthment wrote: »

Soarora wrote: »

Faulgor wrote: »

NotaDaedraWorshipper wrote: »

I thought this was going to be about ZOS treating bosmer as either something that doesn't exist or comic relief.

I like their slightly shorter height. It adds some more height variety of the races.

Well, I don't like it.

I also don't think interracial variety should be a goal in itself here. You would expect enough variety within a race to at least allow more options for players, especially in TES. Otherwise we could also argue for more weight 'variety', designate Imperials as being the overweight ones, and adjust the sliders such that you can't make a slim Imperial anymore. Would people be happy with such a change?
I mean, some are still asking for dark-haired Altmer.

While more variety within a race is great, at the end of the day if Bosmer women were kept to be average height… we would have zero (0) options for short women to represent themselves in a way that makes them feel average, without turning themselves into a cat only seen within Elsweyr. Tall people can represent themselves as an average, obviously average people can, short men can, short women couldn’t. Shifting Bosmer sliders down so that the women are short too means that there’s a RACE of short women that can be identified with.

When I was newer to playing and everywhere felt fresh, Grahtwood felt like home and it was an amazing experience to be surrounded by so many NPCs that are short.

I hear ya though Breton females tend to be pretty short as well

Yeah this is Breton erasure

Honestly something that annoys me about this and could be an easy fix is the character selection screen.
The camera is positioned in such a way that it makes Bosmer look smaller than they actually are in game.



Same characters as in the op.
If you look at their feet, you can see that the Bosmer actually stands lower than the Dunmer, giving the impression that she's a full head shorter when it's really only about half a head.
Further, the mount in the background is positioned in such a way that it is partly obscured by the character. All my other characters have their mounts in the same position as the Dunmer, which makes it a bit jarring scrolling through.

There are more inconsistencies in char select, e.g. my Breton looks taller than my Nord and such. But in those cases you could argue that the camera is respositioned so the character fills the height of the screen, which is obviously not the case for the Bosmer.

Shivla

Bumping for a max height bump!

Really though, the character creation screen hasn't changed since launch. Shouldn't it deserve a ten-year facelift, a bit of an overhaul with new options?

TheNuminous1

I've actually seen old lore from the design phase where bosmwr were suppose to be gnomes, but the females had the power to glamor and the males didn't. It's a relic but it's also why males are shorter and "ugly"-er then the females.

Syldras

TheNuminous1 wrote: »

I've actually seen old lore from the design phase where bosmwr were suppose to be gnomes, but the females had the power to glamor and the males didn't. It's a relic but it's also why males are shorter and "ugly"-er then the females.

Yeah, these were comments on the character design drawings by Michael Kirkbride for Morrowind. Can be seen here:
https://en.uesp.net/wiki/File:MW-concept-Early_Bosmer.jpg

Faulgor

Holy necro.

But yeah, the different character select screen for Bosmer still annoys me!

TheNuminous1 wrote: »

I've actually seen old lore from the design phase where bosmwr were suppose to be gnomes, but the females had the power to glamor and the males didn't. It's a relic but it's also why males are shorter and "ugly"-er then the females.

Morrowind did have a bit of that concept art in the final game, in that "all women were gorgeous" and, as said in the OP, average Tamriel height, but the variety in male faces wasn't retained. Probably too difficult.