I had noticed that some NPCs have a lighter skin tone that is unavailable to us

Rebirthment

This is something i have noticed throughout interacting with other NPCs and i've always wondered why. Here is an example.



Here you can see that some Wood Elves have a lighter skin tone that is not available in the character creation.

This can also be seen among Bretons, Imperials, and even Altmer as shown below



I know that some NPCs can also have Hair colors not available to other races, like Black hair on an Altmer for example, but this is something i wanted to bring up and am wondering why this is the way it is?

isadoraisacat

Im Italian / Iranian and Irish
My mothers mothers side is Italian from marche and they are much lighter all with red hair and green eyes.
My dads fathers fathers side are from calabritto which is a small commune in southern Italy and they look very dark olive with black hair. And that’s just the Italian sides. Same ethnic group but different regions and different skin complexions.

Edit :
Maybe it’s not included in character creation to make these npcs stand out more ?

phaneub17_ESO

Purely speculation. They probably created a whole slew of color variations for all the races, but could only fit a maximum of 20 selections for skin, hair, and eye color to be the standard across the board they have to pick out the ones they felt best fit the game at the time. This was before we had "skins" added to the game, and those are universal across all race bodies.

tomofhyrule

There are loads of examples of NPCs using unavailable cosmetics. NPCs can often wear skin/eye/hair colors that are not available to other members of their race. It's especially confusing in circumstances where the cosmetic was made for the race in mind, but just not made available, e.g. the correct iris/pupil shape for the race.

There are examples like Trynhild Earth-Turner, whose shade of red hair is unavailable for Nords;

Erwurlde, whose shade of blue eyes is unavailable for Altmer;

Brulak, whose shade of green skin is unavailable for Orcs.

I wish they'd dispense with the 10x2 grid. I believe console UI has a slider instead, and then they could put in the other colors so playable characters could use them. I'd kill for my main to get the green skin he's supposed to have - playable Orcs can only get greys or brownish tones, but Mighty Mordra, Captain Graalug, and others show me that there's a whole palette of green shades we could have had...

Rebirthment

tomofhyrule wrote: »

There are loads of examples of NPCs using unavailable cosmetics. NPCs can often wear skin/eye/hair colors that are not available to other members of their race. It's especially confusing in circumstances where the cosmetic was made for the race in mind, but just not made available, e.g. the correct iris/pupil shape for the race.

There are examples like Trynhild Earth-Turner, whose shade of red hair is unavailable for Nords;

Erwurlde, whose shade of blue eyes is unavailable for Altmer;

Brulak, whose shade of green skin is unavailable for Orcs.

I wish they'd dispense with the 10x2 grid. I believe console UI has a slider instead, and then they could put in the other colors so playable characters could use them. I'd kill for my main to get the green skin he's supposed to have - playable Orcs can only get greys or brownish tones, but Mighty Mordra, Captain Graalug, and others show me that there's a whole palette of green shades we could have had...

Oh! i didn't think of the Console UI being a reason for that! As for me personally i wish i could have that lighter skin tone that some Bosmer have like the NPC i had posted in the picture above for my character as it's more similar to mine IRL