Elden Ring’s character creator fails Black players

I think most of you are playing Elden Ring because of the Lands Between, where you get your shit messed by that asshole on the horse. The question isn't what class to play that has me stuck, it's what class to play that has me stuck. The character creator is it. The bizarre system that allows for an unprecedented level of control of every minute detail of facial feature but only has one hair option is frustrating.

I didn't expect much from Elden Ring's character creator. FromSoftware games have a reputation for being bad at character creation and skin. The skin colors and texture in Bloodborne were not normal. My character was a mess of a human with no hair options.

Elden Ring is a step up. The skin colors and face shading look natural. I tinkered with it for an hour and a half, setting my sliders just right to make anavatar that I think looks as much like me as possible.

For the first time in a FromSoftware game, I can make a character who looks like a real person. Elden Ring's character creator is a step up because they have an afro and an ugly hair like in Bloodborne.

There will be a temptation to think that the omission doesn't matter. The Elden Ring subreddit has a lot of threads of players showing off their creations, excited by how good or funny they look, and aware that all that hard work is going to get covered by a helmet. There are communities dedicated to using character creators to make famous people or characters from other games. There are black Japanese people. It all matters.

I am a character creator. The obsession was born from the days of the dress-up flash games. Playing with a character creator is one of my favorite ways to express myself. I enjoy fiddling with them, using them as a blank canvas to experiment with new hair and makeup colors. I was testing a bald head with a Picrew game before I cut my hair. When I cut off my hair for real, I didn't feel worried about what I would look like or if I would like it.

I am made aware of my race by being a character creator. America loves to remind me that I am a Black woman and that the systems that spawned and continue to define it hate me and other marginalized people. The options its developers deem worthy of inclusion are what character creators contribute to that weird feeling of awareness. One of those options is hair. When a game doesn't include at least some hair styles, I feel different. Elden Ring has a game that has over 20 different styles of straight hair, accounting for different lengths, styles of curl, and even the complete absence of hair. Will it not include a type that everyone on the planet has? That math is not working.

Elden Ring's hair omission is glaring in its own system. How is it that I can create a Negro nose with a Jackson 5 nose, but I can't give her baby hairs to match?

This isn't just an Elden Ring problem, it's a video game problem. For a long time, players of color have had to change their hair and skin tones in order to have the same representation as white players. A white-passing avatar is almost always represented in games with a customization character. When a character creator wants to give the appearance of inclusivity while not actually being all that inclusive, the fade and afro are the go-to styles. Looking at you, Mass Effect.

The situation is getting better. Baldur's Gate 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 have a decent amount of diverse and accurate-looking hair. Even games that don't have a character creator make me excited. The Black characters in that game are some of the best I've ever seen, and I hope we get a character like Varl leading a franchise instead of playing second fiddle.

My experience with Elden Ring doesn't diminish because I don't have a diverse number of hair styles. The game is pretty damn great, and that is coming from someone who isn't a fan of FromSoftware. I don't understand how a game can fail to account for Black players after so many calls for greater diversity and developers acknowledging Black community members through Black Lives Matter posts and well wishes during Black History Month. It is a choice in the year 2022, one that unfortunately reinforces a culture of exclusion already endemic to video games.